Supreme Court of Canada Nominees will have to jump through the hoop of a public questioning prior to being appointed to the bench. This will please some of the electorate, annoy others and most will not know that it happened. The complaint being addressed is the political nature of the appointments. For reasons difficult to decipher, the solution will be to subject the nominees to the most political of processes. The questions for the nominees will be designed only to promote the political success of the questioner. In short it will be a populist sham. Good judges need the courage to do that which it is most difficult to do. The easy thing for a judge to do is to make a politically popular decision. It will be wrong legally, bring uncertainty into the system and increase the power of the police or the state. It will destroy the certainty of contract and lessen individual responsibility for individual actions, but the masses will cheer. Take the worst case example, the police collect evidence on a serial rapist in a manner that violates the rights of said rapist. The easy thing for a judge to do is to allow that evidence to be used at trial to get a conviction. The result will be popular. The masses will cheer. The downside is that the methods used by the police will now be permissible in any investigation. By diminishing the rights of the rapist, the rights of all are diminished. The tough thing to do, that which will be the most unpopular, is to protect the rights of the accused, throw out the evidence and in the end protect the rights of all individuals from police illegality. The masses will go nuts and the judge and the system will be vilified, but the result will be the correct one and the one that best ensures freedom from the state. The court is the protector of the individual from the state. The independent court system is what separates Canada, the USA, Britain and those handful of other democracies from a tyranny of the majority. Politicizing the process will not get us better judges, it will get us more popular judges and we will be a lesser society for that.