I had not given much thought to judicial independence until I did a study for the Canadian Judicial Council in the mid-1990s on the subject. My report, A Place Apart: Judicial Independence and Accountability in Canada, examined a wide range of issues relating to judicial independence and accountability, including security of tenure, financial security, discipline, codes of conduct, administering the court system and appointments. Those topics were approached from a historical and comparative perspective. I will, of course, be drawing on that study, as well as several later articles, for this chapter on two important aspects of judicial independence: judicial selection and judicial conduct in Canada. First, some background.

What is the Canadian Judicial Council? The Council is composed of all the federally appointed chief justices and associate chief justices in Canada – at present thirty-nine in total – and was chaired at the time of my study by Chief Justice Antonio Lamer. The Council, which had been established by legislation in 1971 by the then Minister of Justice, John Turner, grew out of the annual conference of federal chief justices that John Edwards of the University of Toronto’s Centre of Criminology had established in 1964. The Council would, as was stated on second reading of the legislation, ‘provide a national forum for the judiciary in Canada, and . . . strive to bring about greater efficiency and uniformity in judicial services and to improve their quality’. It would also provide a new and better forum to investigate complaints against the federal judiciary, at the time handled by the Department of Justice, which could be followed by an ad hoc commission, such as the much criticized single-judge inquiry several years earlier into the conduct of Justice Leo Landreville.