The big headline over CBC yesterday was that five of the six most recent federal judicial appointments in the province of New Brunswick all had some kind of ties to Dominic LeBlanc – never mind how tenuous those ties were. This of course led a bunch of Conservative apologists to compare this with the Dean French/Doug Ford situation in Ontario, which is absurd given that judicial appointments have a more rigorous merit-based system around them (more rigorous than it was under the Conservative era), and many of the French/Ford appointments had to do with whether someone was connected to French by family or lacrosse, many with no obvious competences in the roles they were appointed to. The Conservatives also declared that this was somehow related to both Loblaws winning a competition around fridge refits (no, seriously), and that this was reminiscent of the Arctic surf clam contract that LeBlanc was involved in wherein the definition of “family” used by the Ethics Commissioner differed from that in other statutes. (Not mentioned was the time when the Conservatives appointed most of Peter MacKay’s wedding party to the bench in Nova Scotia).

Reading deeper into this story, I found that some of the connections that were being highlighted were a bit dubious. The most dubious was the fact that one of the judges named was not actually someone that was recently named, but rather promoted to the Chief Justice of province’s Court of Appeal by Trudeau, though she was originally a Conservative donor and had been first named to the Bench by Harper. The fact that she bought a property from LeBlanc next to his summer cottage was deemed to be curious in this. Likewise the fact that two of them were part of a group that paid off LeBlanc’s leadership campaign debts a decade ago (each would have donated a few hundred dollars) is a pretty dubious link between them. The only one that might raise eyebrows is the fact that one of the five is married to LeBlanc’s brother-in-law…but even then, at what point do we start disqualifying someone whose relation is by marriage twice-removed?

The other bit of nuance that we can’t forget here is that New Brunswick is a very small province with a very small population, and legal circles in a province like that would be very tight – especially when you consider that the provincial political culture is far more nepotistic than the federal culture is. While the CBC piece cites a paper that says that people with political connections get judicial appointments at a rate double that in other parts of the country, but one has to remember that it can be harder to avoid, which is why fighting nepotism in those places can be much harder. And this is the point where people will bring up the fact that Jody Wilson-Raybould objected to the fact that names that were short-listed needed to be sent to PMO for vetting by the Liberals’ database, but again, it needs to be stressed that they need to go through all sources to check for red flags because the prime minister is politically accountable for those appointments. It’s called Responsible Government. Does that mean that these five appointments didn’t have some influence from LeBlanc tapping the justice minister and saying he wanted them appointed? Anything is possible, but it’s unlikely given the vetting process and the fact that most of these connections are tenuous at best. But it’s also regrettable that this kind of journalism strives for sensationalism and an attempt at being gotcha than it is with nuance.

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