FEDERAL JUDICIAL APPOINTMENTS: A LOOK AT PATRONAGE IN FEDERAL APPOINTMENTS SINCE 1988
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article investigates whether the new screening system introduced by the federal government in 1988 for appointing judges (below the Supreme Court level) has reduced the influence of patronage in the federal judicial appointment process. To analyse this question, we examined whether judicial appointees from 1989 through 2003 donated to a political party, particularly the party that appointed them, up to five years prior to their appointment. We found that almost one-third of appointees had donated to the party in power and that these numbers were relatively consistent between the Mulroney and Chrétien governments. The number of party donors and the fact that so few appointees had donated to parties other than the one in power suggest that the screening-committee system has done little to curtail patronage in the appointment process. In addition to reporting on political donations by candidates, the article summarizes their gender and legal background characteristics. The article places the discussion of patronage and judicial appointments in the larger context of the role of courts in Canada's system of governance and, in doing so, discusses the relationship between judicial appointments and judicial independence. Our findings and the more general discussion are placed in a comparative context.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".