Or am I missing the point here?

Mandatory bilingualism is also a neat way to discourage immigrants from being judges: “You speak Hindi and Punjabi? That’s great, but we need you to learn French now.”

I think you raise a fair point in terms of the argument that mandatory bilingualism would place a premium on francophone judges. That said, I suspect that even in the most anglophone provinces, the portion of the population from whom Supreme Court Judges are drawn (i.e. the most educated and established members of the legal community) is more bilingual then you think.

Remember that what would be required of SCC Judges under both the Liberal and NDP bills which recently received second reading is not full bilingualism, but rather the ability to read and understand both languages.

If I am wrong, and there are in fact a paucity of bilingual judges from certain anglophone provinces, then, I think the proper course of action would be to work harder to promote bilingualism in anglophone legal communities. A bilingual judiciary is essential for prudent statutory interpretation, (see my post), and, (as per Mr. Cyr’s comments) to ensure that Judges on the SCC understand all the case materials in front of them.

The requirement for three of the nine seats to be filled by Quebecois judges is a legal one, not a conventional one.

Section 6 of the Supreme Court Act, R.S., 1985, c. S-26, reads as follows: “At least three of the judges shall be appointed from among the judges of the Court of Appeal or of the Superior Court of the Province of Quebec or from among the advocates of that Province.”

Since the legal norm is not to be found in only one of the two official linguistic version of a bilingual statute (e.g. all federal statutes…) but is rather located in the overlapping of the two versions, it is odd to claim that not being able to read half of the statute is not a relevant legal skill to be mastered by the highest court of the land. And as I mentioned in my earlier post on judicial biligualism (see comment on Matthew Shogilev’s post), what is even more troubling is that nothing in the court file gets translated by the Supreme Court staff - apart from the oral arguments and the Supreme Court judgment itself. That means that monolingual judges do not have access to their content apart from what they hear from other judges or they read from their clerks’ memos.

In his conclusion, Mr. Bird tells us that “[w]e need not sacrifice practicality on the altar of idealism”. Unfortunately, I think that Mr. Bird confused one for the other: we should not sacrifice the practicality of having judges capable of reading the materials upon which they are called to decide on the altar of idealism, be it the hope for perfect regional representation or the hope of finding the oxymoronic “monolingual dworkinian Hercules”…

The question of judicial biliguilism at the Supreme Court has nothing to do with political correctness or some feel good policy in favour of francophones; it is simply a LEGAL skill requirement.