Prime Minister’s Stephen Harper’s latest appointment to the Supreme Court was a prolific blogger who regularly offered opinions on Senate reform, the federal government’s role in health care, elections law, the Omar Khadr case and other matters that could now come before him in his new role on the bench.Russell Brown, appointed to the top court last week, was an active contributor to a blog shared by faculty members at the University of Alberta law school.
The posts and comments were made under the name “Russ Brown” between 2007 and 2008. Brown’s political orientation and Libertarian perspective are clearly in evidence in many of them.
In one 2008 post, he says he hopes Harper wins a majority government and that he hopes Harper does, in fact, hold a “hidden agenda,” as some critics speculated.
In another post regarding successors to outgoing Liberal leader Stéphane Dion, Brown disses potential contender Justin Trudeau.
“As someone who hopes the Grits just fade away by the next election, I’m cheering for Justin Trudeau or Joe Volpe. Or have I missed a possible candidate who is as unspeakably awful?”
Brown, now 49, wrote the posts when he was an assistant professor with the Faculty of Law. The Conservative government first named him to the Alberta bench in 2013 and last year elevated him to the Alberta Court of Appeal and the appeal courts for the Northwest Territories and Nunavut.
In less than three years, he has risen from a job teaching law to a seat on the highest court in the land.
Brown could not be reached for comment Friday.
There is nothing wrong with future judges holding personal views on politics and other matters of national importance. But it is unusual – and perhaps a symptom of the digital age – for an incoming Supreme Court judge to have left such a verbose record of opinion, which could cause some to question his neutrality on cases that come before him on the court.
Consider, for example, federal jurisdiction in health care, an issue that has arisen in past Supreme Court cases. In a blog post, Brown called the Canada Health Act “an inappropriate (federal) intrusion into sacrosanct provincial swimming pools.”
He added that he the Supreme Court decision in the Chaoulli case — allowing for private health coverage when the government fails to deliver care in a timely manner — left him “delighted” by the court “striking at the heart of exclusive state-provided health care.”
On Senate reform, a topic on which the Supreme Court last year handed down guidance to the federal government, Brown wrote, in 2008: “My own preference would be to democratize the Senate (thus presumably throwing out the deadwood and injecting new life into the place) and give it more work to do (i.e. vetting SCC nominations). Still, abolition is better than the status quo.”
He also weighs in on third-party spending limits on election campaigns, an issue that Harper, when he was head of the National Citizens Coalition, challenged unsuccessfully at the Supreme Court.
“I do hope Harper gets a majority and reforms the Canada Elections Act, starting with those odious third party spending limits,” Brown wrote on Sept. 29, 2008.
In comments on the blog, Brown also suggests that the Canadian Bar Association called for the U.S. to release Khadr from prison because it didn’t like the Conservative government. He says that CBA position on Khadr (who, after being held for a decade at Guantanamo Bay, pleaded guilty to war crimes and was later transferred to Canada to finish his sentence) was at odds with other cases involving Canadians detained abroad, including Zahra Kazemi in Iran and William Sampson in Saudi Arabia.
Nevertheless, he commented, “… his case shows how woolly terms like ‘unlawful enemy combatants’ pose practical problems for judicial and quasi-judicial tribunals when asked to make concrete determinations about someone’s status …”
When he takes his place on the Supreme Court bench, Brown may be called to sit in judgment of Khadr’s case, which has already come before the court three times.
A strong Libertarian perspective is found in many of the blog posts and comments posted by Brown. He posted on issues including climate change, banking deregulation, and U.S. vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
Of the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, Brown wrote, “The Dalai Lama is (despite his physical resemblance to Phil Silvers) not a nice man. His spiritual sycophants in the West overlook his positions which don’t conform so nicely to the image of an avuncular bespectacled monk-en-chef.”
He called the assassinated prime minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, a kleptocrat and “a thoroughly venal character” and asked if her death wasn’t in part the result of “her own Cynical Minuet with Jihadists?”
And in a post about the Anglican church, he writes that it “seems to have morphed into some deeply weird post-Christian eco-pagan group run by a flakey fringe of the greying Godspell crowd.”
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Other opinions Russell Brown expressed:
— On a colleague’s opposition to a new federal agency for mental health: “Let me (albeit predictably) chime in: for what it’s worth, you are correct, those of us who see the Canada Health Act as an inappropriate (federal) intrusion into sacrosanct provincial swimming pools don’t find that argument convincing.” (Sept. 1, 2007)
— On public health care and personal liberty: “Where, however, health care is furnished within an involuntary, non-alternative state-imposed context, reconciliation must be achieved of the supposed primacy of the patient’s negative liberty – his or her private self – with a publicly funded health care system, instantiating the state’s imposition of a public self.” (Aug. 26, 2008)
–– On a reference to the Supreme Court on Quebec secession: “Parliament conferred upon the Court powers to interpret the rules of the game, not to determine how and when someone can quit the game. If there ever was a question for legislatures and parliaments to sort out for themselves, subscription to and disassociation from a federal structure is surely it, no?” (June 22, 2007)
–– On Harper’s elimination of the per-vote subsidy for political parties: “… it’s only the cash-per-vote scheme that’s going, but it’s a step in the right direction. That said, none of the party subsidization schemes are as objectionable as the restriction on private expenditure during elections.” (Nov. 28, 2008)
–– On whether Canadians want a majority Conservative government: “As to whether the Conservatives are ‘scary’, I don’t see it. Admittedly, I harbour some hope for a hidden agenda, but I doubt it’s going to happen.” (Sept. 8, 2008)
–– On the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and Supreme Court appointments: “No matter who is appointed, we should – for the sake of good lawmaking – hope that the prime minister will focus on something other than (or at least in addition to) the Charter when considering a person’s potential contribution to the Court.” (March 10, 2008)
— On the Canadian Bar Association calling for the U.S. to release a Canadian prisoner from Guantanamo Bay: “The case of Omar Khadr: Does the CBA speak for all of us?… Aside from the possibility of a “conversion on the road to (ahem) Damascus”, two obvious possibilities present themselves (both of which I’m sure the CBA would want to disavow): (1) it’s all about which offshore party is interning Canadians at the relevant time. Or (2) it’s all about which onshore party is governing Canadians at the relevant time. Personally, I subscribe to the second option as the likely motivation.”
— On then-Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty and climate change: “Hot Air on Climate Change … No surprise, then, that Ontario’s selectively-green-Premier-who-subsidizes-muscle-cars also opposes emissions limits or higher tailpipe emission standards. But cap-and-trade schemes? He’s all over them, of course.” (Dec. 10, 2007)
— On a possible coalition government: “I agree that the proposed coalition would be legal, constitutional, yadda, yadda, yadda. There is, however, one non-legal, non-constitutional aspect in which the ‘undemocratic’ rap sticks … Rather, I think the serious political problem for the proposed coalition is that it is propelling Stephane Dion into the office of PM.” (Dec. 4, 2008)
— On free speech and human rights commissions: “Like any other right, freedom of expression is not absolute, but I would rather see any limits considered by courts of law and not by puritanical functionaries.” (Aug. 21, 2008)
— On Liberal MP Bob Rae welcoming new leader Michael Ignatieff with a kiss: “Maybe Iggy should make a Sexual Harassment in the Workplace Complaint?” (April 1, 2008)
— On a Liberal senator’s bill to deem suicide bombings acts of terror: “I guess this is one of those ‘just-in-case-the-obvious-wasn’t-obvious-enough’ amendments. One can only hope that the courts will follow Parliament’s lead and impose the severest possible sanctions on people who kill themselves.” (May 01, 2008)
— On Tibet and its Buddhist religious leaders: “I hope (the West) makes the case for democracy in Tibet and concomitantly for freezing the mediaeval nutcases from power … Otherwise, we simply replace a distinctly modern totalitarianism with a Himalayan version of the ayatollahs.”
— On war criminals who came to Canada after WWII: “… fuelled by the anti-Semitism of federal immigration bureaucrats and of Canada’s Liberal prime minister of the time (in the far left of the photo, next to some unidentified travelling companions)” (post includes a photo Prime Minister Mackenzie King next to uniformed Nazis saluting, Sept. 2, 2007)
— On the death penalty for child rapists in the U.S.: “My own view on this case is that there is no obvious reason for the death penalty to be confined to cases of homicide, unless we presuppose that a victim’s death is the worst of all possible outcomes (which is not, at least to me, obviously true, when compared to, say, a lingering, vegetative existence). In other words, the punishment of death may in fact be proportionate to the offence of raping a child.”
Original Article
Source: ottawacitizen.com/
Author: GLEN MCGREGOR
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