Federal Conservatives and Canadian Judicial Appointments

The January 22, 2010 issue of The Lawyers Weekly takes a look at judicial appointments under the federal Conservatives.

Highlights:

• the Conservatives will have appointed one-third of the country’s federal judges by the time they celebrate their fourth anniversary in office this month
• in 2009 alone the Conservatives made 116 judicial appointments
• only 460 lawyers applied for the federal Bench across Canada in 2008-2009 compared to 552 lawyers the year before — a decline of 17 percent
• more than half of the country’s 17 Judicial Advisory Committees that vet candidates were defunct because the government has yet to appoint new members