PRIVATE MEMBER’S BILL WON’T FIX JUSTICE SYSTEM.

Just as Interim Conservative Leader Rona Ambrose didn’t mention his name in the interviews she did, nor does her private member’s bill, C-337, the short title of which is the Judicial Accountability through Sexual Assault Law Training Act.

But rest assured, the Robin Camp fix is what this purports to be, except it isn’t.

He’s the notorious “knees-together” judge now fighting for his $ 314,000- a- year job on the Federal Court of Canada, seeking to stop the Canadian Judicial Council from deliberating his fate. An inquiry committee of the CJC last fall recommended Camp be fired.

At the heart of the effort to dump the 64-year-old are the remarks he made when presiding over a sexual assault trial in 2014 as a then- Alberta Provincial Court judge.

There, he asked the teenage complainant why she couldn’t have kept her knees together or skewed her pelvis so as to avoid the alleged assault by Alexander Scott Wagar.

( Camp acquitted Wagar, as indeed did another judge in a retrial recently.)

Those comments, coupled with an unfortunate tendency to refer to the complainant as the accused, and disdain for the merits of rape- shield laws, led to Camp’s decision being over- turned at the Alberta Court of Appeal and then to complaints at the CJC.

The rationale for the Ambrose bill, which got first reading in the House of Commons Thursday, is found in its preamble, which hits every fashionable hot button in the zeitgeist.

It begi ns wit h t hi s : “Whereas survivors of sexual violence in Canada must have faith in the criminal justice system …”. Well, says who?

The l anguage i tself is problematic: The word “survivors” has come to be interchangeable with, nay more acceptable than, “victims” or “complainants.” It’s routinely used to describe those who self- identify as “survivors” even after their alleged assailants are acquitted or in the absence of a complaint. The word has no place in the criminal justice system or in any bill that claims to reform it.

(As for why anyone “must” have faith in this system or any other is beyond me.)

Then this: “Whereas sexual assault proceedings have a profound effect on the reputations and lives of those affected and present a high possibility of re-victimizing survivors of sexual violence …”

First, the sentence makes it clear that “the reputations and l i ves” to be worried about aren’t those of the alleged assailants, rather those of complainants, though since the names of the former are always made public, and the names of the latter always kept secret unless they say otherwise, it means that it’s the accused person whose life may be smashed.

And every single process in the criminal courts has precisely the described effect: These are the roughand-tumble courts.

As Don Bayne, who so a bl y defended Senator Mike Duffy, used to say almost daily, whirling about and pointing at Duffy as he did, “This man is on criminal trial for his liberty!” The stakes couldn’t be higher; elbows are necessarily up and out.

Does anyone i magine that the people who loved Kathy and Alvin Liknes and their little grandson Nathan O’Brien, all murdered by Douglas Garland, were not stricken in just this way by his just-ended trial?

And then the Ambrose bill says this: “Whereas problematic interpretations of the law may arise in sexual assault trials …”

It goes on to note that lawyers applying to the bench “are not required to have completed sexual assault law training.”

The bill would rectify that by allowing only lawyers who have “completed recent and comprehensive education in sexual assault law” to even apply to the bench.

But that training — administered t hrough t he National Judicial Institute, working with the CJC — is almost mandatory already as part of what is colloquially known as “new judges school” that every rookie federally appointed judge has to attend.

( Provincial court judges may and do attend, but far fewer of them.) The seminar includes a section on sexual assault ( including rape myths and stereotypes, factfinding and victim- impact statements at sentencing), and the CJC, executive director Norman Sabourin says, is considering making it mandatory.

But the real scandal is that lawyers who want to be judges don’t have to have any training or experience in the criminal law.

Robin Camp is one who didn’t: He was a civil litigator, with a specialty in oil and gas law, yet when he was first appointed to the Alberta Provincial Court it was to the “criminal division.” He’s hardly alone. In the most recent spate of Superior Court appointments announced by the federal justice minister last fall were the usual civil litigators, personal injury specialists, commercial and administrative lawyers.

When defence l awyers and prosecutors are appointed judges, they usually do criminal trials, not complex class action or detailed commercial cases.

But when civil litigators are named to the bench, they often do criminal trials.

If Canadians want judges who viscerally get the issues because they’ve lived them in courtrooms, the fix is more criminal defence lawyers and prosecutors on the bench, and fewer civil litigators.

As a wise lawyer friend notes: “I don’t know how to fly a 747 and so I have never applied to be a pilot. I’ve always wanted to, because I love 747s. For everyone else’s sake, I hope that if I did apply, they wouldn’t let me sit in that chair.”

THESE ARE THE ROUGH-AND-TUMBLE COURTS.