"Last summer, at its annual convention in Winnipeg, the Canadian Bar Association (CBA) scrapped at the last moment a resolution that appeared to call on the federal government to reserve one of the nine seats on the Supreme Court permanently for an aboriginal justice and to more aggressively seek aboriginal judges for the appeals courts in every province.

Amid controversy over whether race should be a determining factor -- for or against -- any appointee to the country's highest court, the resolution's authors withdrew it rather than see it fail. But this year, they were back with another version, which, while watered down, still smacks of racial gerrymandering on the bench. At its assembly in Vancouver this weekend, the organization representing Canada's nearly 40,000 lawyers and judges voted overwhelmingly to urge that the government 'give particular focus' to the appointment of qualified aboriginal judges to federal appeals courts in the provinces and to the Supreme Court, but without the overt quotas contained in last year's abandoned motion."

Get the Story:
Quotas have no place on our high court (The National Post 8/15)

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