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Often accused by small “c” conservatives of lacking ideological commitment, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has just filled two more senior judgeships with law professors who boast strong conservative credentials.

Named to Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice was Bradley Miller, a constitutional expert, and to the same province’s Court of Appeal will go Grant Huscroft. Both men are from the Western University Law School in London and both are also  “originalists” opposed to the Supreme Court of Canada’s penchant for making new law through novel interpretations of the Constitution.

In addition, the Globe and Mail reported with thinly veiled disapproval, Miller once complained in a conservative American publication that the advance of homosexual “rights,” which he termed “the new orthodoxy,” had “harmed religious freedom and free speech” in Canada.

The Globe doesn’t know the half of it: Miller has been published several times in LifeSiteNews, including one recently on the Trinity Western University controversy deploring how several Canadian law societies have rejected in advance graduates of the law school proposed by the private Christian university based in Langley, B.C.

The pair of appointments brought to 550 the number of judges appointed by the Conservatives since they took power in 2006, out of 840 available federal judicial positions.

Speaking anonymously, another recent Harper appointment to the bench told LifeSiteNews that while there were only a tiny minority of conservative legalists surviving on most law school faculties across Canada, Harper was picking them for the bench when he could as part of his long-term plan of moving the country in a conservative direction.

This is exactly what has worried the Globe since 2007 when Harper announced in the House of Commons his intention to appoint judges who supported his legislative agenda. The Globe called this “an overt makeover of the courts,” though the Liberal Party had been filling positions with a mixture of Liberal partisans and radical ideologues for decades.

Marci McDonald, a left-wing journalist who has found a second career raising the alarm over Harper’s plans to make Canada more conservative, reported in her book The Armageddon Factor how a Harper appointee to the judicial advisory committee (which helps the government select judges) named John Weissenberger gave the game away. He frankly admitted, “Look, my job is to get conservative judges. There’s nothing wrong with that. We’ll get back to where the courts rule in a very limited area and the legislature will be left to make the laws.”

This thinking fits in exactly with Huscroft’s and Miller’s, who co-edited a book called The Challenge of Originalism in 2011. “Originalism” is the term for the conservative legal belief that judges should interpret the constitutions and laws of Canada and the United States as their drafters originally intended. Courts in both countries, however, have lately preferred to interpret their constitutions as they imagine the majority of citizens would want, and overturn laws that offend against that interpretation.

Miller said the “new orthodoxy” about homosexuality in Canada led to the stigmatization of anyone who spoke publicly against same-sex “marriage” or the normalization of homosexuality in the public schools.

The Globe’s focus on how Miller and other Harper appointments to the bench have argued in court against same-sex “marriage” seems to reflect this new orthodoxy. The newspaper notes that Miller argued against same-sex “marriage” before the Supreme Court of Canada and an Ontario court (for a coalition of churches), and how an earlier Harper appointment to the bench, David Brown, also argued against same-sex “marriage.”

Miller also warned, in the American conservative journal Public Discourse, that the public school curriculum in Ontario was “permeated by positive references to same-sex marriage, not just in one discipline but in all. Faced with this strategy of diffusion, the only parental defence is to remove one's children from the public school system entirely.”

Tolerance is one thing, and a good one, Miller admitted. But “the deliberate indoctrination of children (over the objections of their parents) into a conception of marriage that is fundamentally hostile to what the parents understand to be in their children's best interests,” is quite another.

Some legal experts hail both men as serious legal scholars who belong on the bench whatever their private opinions—as long as they keep them private.  Dennis Baker, a political scientist at the University of Guelph, said Miller is a “thoughtful, rigorous and serious scholar.”

But Bruce Ryder, a law professor at Osgoode Hall, called Miller's appointment “troubling, as they express an exaggerated concern about the impact of same-sex marriage on civil liberties while disregarding the importance of protecting the equality rights of gays and lesbians.”

The Globe and Mail is not alone in worrying about the ideological slant to Harper’s judicial appointments. As Marci McDonald noted fretfully in her book, “The first alarm bells went off in the country’s gay-rights community” when Harper named David Moseley Brown to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in 2006.

No academic, Brown is a devoutly Catholic trial lawyer who represented many conservative Christian organizations before his appointment on issues such as same-sex “marriage” and even spanking. What is most alarming to the new orthodoxy is that Harper’s judges might not park their values at the courtroom door. As Brown told a group of Christian law students in 2006, “As a Christian lawyer, you are called to practice your trade and conduct your life in accordance with your faith.”

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