‘An embarrassment to the administration of justice’: Trudeau government blamed as Toronto child sex assault cases fall apart

I previously scraped all the data that the feds provide on [“demographic statistics on diversity in the judiciary”](https://www.fja.gc.ca/appointments-nominations/StatisticsCandidate-StatistiquesCandidat-2023-eng.html) into an excel sheet, and it’s hard to come to a different conclusion than that the Liberals simply are deliberately not appointing some male (and presumably white) judges. “Highly recommended” male applicants have been appointed at a far lower rate than other groups: 74% compared to 98% of “highly recommended” women. In a given year there are typically several dozen very qualified men who are not appointed, and I would wonder if this has an affect on discouraging applications as well (though it’s harder to tease out anything among the statistical noise year-to-year).

The various Justice ministers during the course of the Trudeau government have all publicly expounded on the need to increase the diversity of the Bench, and this instruction is in the available mandate letters as well. It’s not exactly secret that this is a stated goal. It just certainly looks like that based on the demographic profile of judicial applicants this means refusing to appoint qualified judges beyond simply giving preference to female/non-European candidates. When this in practice results in rapists and child abusers and murderers going free, that is an absurd dereliction of duty to the Canadian people.