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BY PHILIP SLAYTON TOP COURT TALES Don't drift off Discontent over the method of the latest Supreme Court of Canada appointments should lead to changes in the process. Court watchers can now go back to sleep, particularly those who only wake up when there are appointments in the off- ing. But only a nap is advisable, not a deep sleep: before the next federal election, both justices Morris Fish and Louis LeBel will reach the mandatory retirement age of 75, and so there will be at least two further Harper appointments fairly soon (bringing the total by the current prime minister to six). Appointing a new Supreme Court A judge is generally a pretty routine affair. The prime minister figures out who he wants, picking someone from a predict- able shortlist put together by the minister of Justice. The appointment is announced and everyone falls all over themselves singing the praises of the new judge in the most extravagant way. The only wrinkle in recent times, before the Karakatsanis/ Moldaver appointments, was Justice Marshall Rothstein's appearance before an ad hoc parliamentary committee in 2006, an event generally regarded as inconse- quential if not the stuff of farce. There was no committee hearing for Justice Thomas Cromwell, a 2008 appointment, and no one much noticed or cared. But with Karakatsanis and Moldaver, things were a bit different. Longtime back- ground rumblings of discontent about the selection process grew louder. At the end of the process, just about all com- ndromache Karakatsanis and Michael Moldaver, the two new Supreme Court of Canada judges, have taken their seats. mentators agreed that it had been a poor one. It had taken far too long, they said. There had been no room for non-partisan, public interest expertise. The parliamen- tary committee hearings were held a mere two days after the names of the new judges were made public, denying every- one any real chance to study the candi- 16 JAN UARY 2012 www. CANADIAN Lawyermag.com dates and their records. One commentator described the delay in filling vacancies as "unconscionable" and argued that there should be a statutory procedure "free of the whims, caprices, and delays that has dogged the procedure far too often up to now." Another wrote that the overall process was "deeply flawed" and that the dushaN Milic