Danielle Smith says court 'skewed' to Liberal donors, but UCP picks have political ties just as often

Premier Danielle Smith wielded a striking figure earlier this month to make her case for giving her province more say in how the federal government picks upper court judges for Alberta.

“Especially since 80 per cent of the judges or so have been demonstrated to have Liberal party donations, I don’t know why anyone would think that the process we have right now is free of politics,” she told reporters.

Eighty per cent? Four in five?

If that were true, it would paint a picture of a judicial appointment system rife with partisanship, at levels previously unseen in other analyses of judges’ donation records, either academic or journalistic.

It is not true. The single media source Smith got that fact from has since corrected it.

Nor does it correspond with CBC News’ own analysis of a decade of Ottawa’s picks for the Court of King’s Bench in Alberta and the province’s Court of Appeal.

Among 89 Alberta judges the federal government named or promoted since the Liberals took office in 2015, the names of 20 match up with Liberal party donors in the Elections Canada database. That amounts to 22 per cent of appointees who, before they got appointed, gave to the party that chose them.

That’s nearly identical to results from the analysis of 89 provincial court judges and justices of the peace named by the Alberta government since the UCP took office in 2019, cross-referenced with Elections Alberta’s records of donors to that party and its predecessors, the Wildrose and Progressive Conservative parties.

Of those, the names of 19 provincial judges match up with donors who gave to the UCP or its previous incarnations before their appointments.

Provincially and federally, it’s been a long-standing practice for governments in power to show some favouritism toward supporters of the ruling party, said Erin Crandall, an Acadia University political scientist who has studied partisanship and court appointments.

And it happens, whether a Conservative or Liberal party is in charge. “You see these flips when you see changes in the governing party,” Crandall said.

However, the provincial Justice Minister Mickey Amery insinuated last week that Alberta is more immune from such political connections, when he made the same incorrect statement as the premier had.

“We know from the statistics that came out in recent years, and the reporting that came out in recent years that a vast majority of those federal appointees did have political contributions,” he told reporters on Friday. “We try to avoid that in this province.”

Alberta’s premier began targeting federal court appointments in a January letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney. In it, Smith threatened to withhold support funding for new King’s Bench and Court of Appeal appointees unless Ottawa changed its selection committee and process to give the province more influence over choices.