In early September, when Stephen Harper nominated Tom Cromwell to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court of Canada, he brought the first part of a promised and formal selection process to a sudden and premature end. Cromwell was still supposed to be publicly interviewed by a parliamentary committee before his appointment was confirmed, but the Nova Scotia judge was left twisting in the wind while an election was fought and Parliament prorogued. Then, without any public interview, Harper made his choice final, burying this important announcement the same day he announced a long list of Senate appointments. The whole process took almost four months, ignored procedures that Harper himself had earlier approved, involved neither Parliament nor the public, and left a bad taste in many mouths.

The botched selection process was a pity because it tainted an otherwise sound appointment. Almost everyone agrees that Cromwell, 56, was a good choice. His resumé is impeccable, if a little dull—he’s from what political scientist Peter Russell calls the “grey middle.” Cromwell has been a full-time law teacher and a judge. He’s a graduate, in music and law, of Queen’s University in Kingston. He went to Oxford University and graduated with the notoriously difficult bachelor of civil law degree. From 1982 until 1997, Cromwell taught at Dalhousie Law School, taking a three-year leave of absence to be executive legal officer for then-Supreme Court chief justice Antonio Lamer. He was appointed to the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal in 1997. He’s bilingual.

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