The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, Richard Wagner, is counting on the media to counter misinformation about the courts, particularly after a motion from the National Assembly condemned a judgment that used the expression “person having a vagina.”
“This is a clear example of disinformation,” lamented Judge Richard Wagner to journalists on Monday about the criticism of a judgment conveyed in the media and which made its way to the National Assembly.
On March 14, elected officials in Quebec unanimously adopted a motion presented by the Minister responsible for the Status of Women, Martine Biron, condemning “the choice of words used in a recent Supreme Court judgment.” This judgment used, once, the expression “person with a vagina”, and several times the word “woman”.
“Someone, an elected official, read an article, perhaps without checking the origin, and he commented on one of our Supreme Court judgments, and gave it an erroneous meaning. […] If the person had read correctly, they would have noticed that under no circumstances did the Supreme Court want to devalue the notion of women in Canada, on the contrary,” denounced the country’s highest magistrate.
“I find it dangerous,” he said, because this misinformation was relayed by “people in authority” and people who have not read the decision can give credence to what they said.
Attacks on institutions
According to his vision, disinformation has become one of the main challenges facing the justice system. Before the parliamentary press in Ottawa on Monday, Judge Wagner said he was counting on journalists from traditional media to reestablish the facts and maintain public confidence in the neutrality of justice.
“Today we are witnessing attacks against our judges and our institutions, something that we previously only saw abroad,” he notes.
Last March 8 appeared in a criminal law judgment, R. c. Kruk, on one occasion the series of words “person with a vagina”. The expression was immediately seized – and denounced – by the daily The National Postthen taken up in Quebec by columnists who condemned the Court for its attempt to “invisibilize” women, in addition to criticizing the judge appointed by Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
It was enough for elected officials in Quebec to take up the matter and adopt a motion condemning “the choice of words used in a recent Supreme Court judgment” and reiterating “the importance of retaining the word “ female” “.
In fact, the word “woman” was used around sixty times by Judge Sheilah Martin, compared to only once for “person with a vagina”, to clearly understand a legal argument at the origin of the appeal before the highest court in the country.
When questioned on this subject, the Minister responsible for the Status of Women, Martine Biron, assured that she had read the judgment criticized by her motion. Shortly after, some elected officials admitted to not having read the decision, and others recognized that everything had happened much too quickly, and that they had not had enough time to study the Supreme Court’s decision.
Furthermore, Richard Wagner was encouraged on Monday by the improvement in the speed with which the federal government appoints judges, while the number of vacant positions in the country fell from 90 to 57 in one year. Canada’s Minister of Justice, Arif Virani, boasted last week of appointing judges at a rate never seen before in Canadian history.
Judge Wagner categorically refused to rule on the initiative of Judge Dennis Galiatsatos to suspend a provision of the Charter of the French language in criminal matters, and did not give his opinion on the merits of preventive use of the derogation clause. However, he went so far as to say that the issue of abortion is “settled” in Canada.