Advocates call for more minority judges
HALIFAX • A study showing a dearth of minority judges in Canada has advocates suggesting the country must seize a unique opportunity to increase racial diversity in a “judiciary of whiteness.”
“After many years of saying this is an important issue, it’s very disappointing to see how low the numbers are,” said Naiomi Metallic, a 35-year-old Mi’kmaq woman who is the chair of aboriginal law and policy at Dalhousie University.
A May report in the online version of Policy Options magazine estimates just one per cent of Canada’s 2,160 judges in the provincial superior and lower courts are aboriginal, while three per cent are racial minorities.
Andrew Griffith, a former director general of Citizenship and Multiculturalism and author of the article, says he’s hopeful the Liberal government will follow up on promises of reforms, but he adds, “at the current level, there’s an obvious gap.”
“It’s a judiciary of whiteness,” said Metallic, who is also a member of a Nova Scotia Bar Society committee trying to address racial issues in the profession. “Powerful institutions ought to reflect the societies they serve.”
Last month, the Trudeau government included an aboriginal judge and an Asian Canadian among 15 federal appointments, and Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould has made a general commitment to increase diversity in the judiciary.
But Metallic said she and other advocates will be watching carefully over the next year, with more than 41 vacancies among federally appointed positions, and about 40 provincial positions open. There are also openings in the Federal Court and the Supreme Court.
Several provinces declined to provide estimates on the number of vacant judgeships.
Marilyn Poitras, a lawyer in Saskatoon who is Métis and a professor at the College of Law at the University of Saskatchewan, said having only two indigenous judges out of 101 judges in a province where 16 per cent of the population is aboriginal is unacceptable.
“When you start to incorporate indigenous thinking into the justice model, you start talking a lot more about preventative measures and that’s where we should be taking things,” she said in an interview.
Both Poitras and Metallic point to a growing pool of minority graduates to draw from. For example, Dalhousie has graduated 175 black and aboriginal lawyers through a specialized program over the two decades — creating a pool of potential applicants for Nova Scotia’s five upcoming positions.
Griffith found that in the lower courts — where the bulk of the child welfare and criminal justice cases are heard — there were only 52 visible minorities and 19 indigenous people among the 1,132 judges.
In Ontario, there were 24 visible minority judges out of 334 judges, even though one quarter of the province’s overall population identifies as a visible minority.