Justin Trudeau announced the appointment of the Honourable Mary Moreau to the Supreme Court of Canada on November 6, 2023
The Honourable Mary T. Moreau is a French-speaking judge who has served as the Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench of Alberta since 2017. Moreau’s appointment was announced on Thursday, October 26 2023. Her appointment maintains the tradition that two out of nine of the seats on the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) be filled by judges from Western Canada, and fulfills the commitment by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to appoint only bilingual judges to the highest court in the country. Moreau now fills the seat previously occupied by Justice Russell Brown.
Brown resigned from the SCC in June after a claim of misconduct concerning a fight at a resort in the United States. According to CBC News, veteran Jon Crump alleged that Brown drunkenly engaged him in a fight. CBC News also reported that Brown denied the accusations and instead claimed that he was inexplicably punched in the head by Crump. After Brown’s resignation, the SCC took its annual summer break, and the assumption was that the seat would be filled before the SCC was next in session.
In a process first introduced in 2016, a non-partisan independent Advisory Board sought to identify suitable candidates. The Advisory Board was tasked with finding three to five qualified and functionally bilingual judges from Western and Northern Canada. Controversially, the board was only able to come up with two candidates who met all the mandatory criteria before ultimately selecting Moreau.
Moreau was born in Edmonton, Alberta. She received her Bachelor of Laws from the University of Alberta in 1979 while participating in a common law and civil law exchange program at the Université de Sherbrooke. She was called to the Alberta Bar in 1980. As a lawyer, Moreau practiced criminal, constitutional, and civil law. She became notorious for litigating cases on minority language rights and cases concerning the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Between 1994 and 2017, she has been appointed as a judge on the Court of King’s Bench of Alberta, deputy judge on the Supreme Court of Yukon, deputy justice on the Supreme Court of the Northwest Territories, and Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench Alberta. She has also been granted an honorary Doctorate from the University of Alberta and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Woman in Law Leadership.
The appointment of Justice Moreau marks the first time in Canadian history that the majority of SCC justices are women. Trudeau has made several historically significant SCC appointments during his time as Prime Minister, including the appointment of the first Indigenous Supreme Court Justice, the Honourable Michelle O’Bonsawin, and the first racialized minority Supreme Court Justice, the Honourable Mahmud Jamal. These historic appointments by Justin Trudeau echo the actions of his father Pierre Trudeau, who appointed the first woman to the Supreme Court in 1982, the Honourable Bertha Wilson.
