A retired lawyer who made an official complaint against the Chief Justice of Supreme Court of Canada says his comments on the trucker convoy showed more public bias than she has ever heard from a judge..Karen Selick was among 13 authors who complained to the Canadian Judicial Council about SCC Chief Justice Richard Wagner in a seven-page letter sent May 16..The letter quoted a April 9 Le Devoir article in which Wagner called the Ottawa protests “the beginning of anarchy where some people have decided to take other citizens hostage, to take the law into their own hands, not to respect the mechanism.… That, I find that worrying. It doesn’t inspire good feelings in me. I find that disturbing.”.Selick, who was called to the Ontario bar in 1978, says Wagner’s comments have no precedent in her memory..“Forty-four years of watching the court, and I've never seen any judge speak out in such a biased manner about a contentious issue that is likely to be heard by the court,” Selick said..“There were lots of people on the opposite side of the opinion that he was expressing. For him to express an opinion was just completely out of line with everything the court has done over all the years that I've been involved in law,” Selick said in an interview..Wagner said the convoy had some people of “good faith” and others who were “remotely guided” with “misunderstanding” and “a certain ignorance” of the rule of law, creating a “circumstance that could undermine our principles such as judicial independence, the rule of law, institutions.”.Selick, who was a lawyer for a major bank, then a family lawyer, and spent her last years with the Canadian Constitution Foundation, thinks Wagner mischaracterized the protests..“Is there really any credible reason to believe that the trucker convoy threatened democracy and the rule of law?” Selick asked..“The only people that can really threaten democracy and the rule of law are not a bunch of grassroots individuals. It's really only the state can that can threaten democracy and the rule of law in any credible way. Every once in a while a revolution does come along, promulgated by individuals like Vladimir Lenin, that does succeed in overthrowing the government. But the truckers never even expressed that sentiment. That's not what they were about.”.Selick, who has written columns for the Western Standard, said Wagner was not the only one to disappoint her with his perspective during the pandemic..“This whole last two years, it was very strange to see who fell on which side of the issue and who believed most of the propaganda, who believed the mainstream media and who took a different view. It was quite unexpected. I mean, I've lost friends over this because they just could not or refused to see anything other than what the mainstream narrative was.”.The CJC, formed in 1971, is composed of Canada’s 41 chief justices and associate chief justices. It was created in 1971, partly in response to the case of a judge who was charged with a criminal offence, but the charges were later dismissed..In 2009, the CJC ruled that Justice Paul Cosgrove should be removed from the Superior Court of Ontario. However, he resigned before Parliament could vote to do so. Selick said that was the right call based on her dealings with him as a circuit judge at her local courthouse in Belleville, ON..“He often seemed to in his decisions be pulling stuff out of his own head rather than having listened to the arguments of counsel on both sides, and decide it on that basis,” Selick recalled..Selick said she hopes Justice Wagner will recuse himself from judging the complaint against him and any case the SCC hears on the convoy. The problem is that Wagner is the chair of the CJC to whom the complaint was made..“It will be very interesting to see what he actually does,” Selick said.
