Hydro companies say they are ready, for the most part, for many more plugged-in vehicles
The new Tesla Model 3, which the company is hoping to roll out in late 2017, already has 320,000 pre-orders, and is just one of dozens of electric cars that will hit the market. Hydro companies have been crunching the numbers to make sure the electricity system can handle the added strain of all those vehicles. (Tesla Motors/Associated Press)
By Zach Dubinsky, reposted from CBCNews, Apr 10, 2016
By day, Alec Tsang works as a senior technology analyst at B.C. Hydro, where he’s the public utility’s point person on electric cars.
Most nights, you can find his family’s all-electric Nissan Leaf plugged in and charging up.
And they are far from alone: Canada has nearly 20,000 plug-in vehicles on its roads and counting. If provinces achieve their targets, as part of the broader effort to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, there will be more than 500,000 electric passenger cars on the road come 2020.
It raises the question: Can the country’s electricity systems handle the added load?
“We started looking at this quite early on, as far back as 2007,” Tsang said of BC Hydro’s efforts.
One study by the University of Victoria’s Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions found that even in winter, when electricity demand is highest, B.C. had the unused capacity on its grid to charge nearly 2.4 million light-duty vehicles — almost all the 2.8 million registered vehicles in the province.
“Even the most optimistic projections of electric vehicle adoption still represent a really gradual load growth on utilities’ grids,” Tsang said. “So in terms of generation and transmission, that large perspective, most utilities wouldn’t have any problem meeting that demand.”
Hydro-Québec calculated that an electric car would use about the same amount of energy in an average year as a hot-water heater, and is just as confident about its ability to meet overall electricity needs.
“We did our homework and we could easily, in Quebec, welcome a million electric vehicles without having to make any major investments in our infrastructure or systems,” spokesman Louis-Olivier Batty said.
“It would be two to three per cent of electricity sales in the province.”
A million electric vehicles would also be 10 times Quebec’s already ambitious goal of having 100,000 such cars on its roads by 2020 — in other words, from a generating and transmission standpoint, the province has nothing to fret over.
Risk of local overload
It gets trickier, though, if the added demand all comes from one neighbourhood, or at the same time of day.
Electricity demand is low late at night, and often dips around noon on weekdays. But the power grid tends to heave a bit in the evening as people arrive home from work and turn on lights, ovens and TVs.
And what if an entire street of residents bought electric cars and plugged them in to charge at the same time?
Hydro-Québec is overseeing construction of a vast network of electric-car charging stations in the province, but has no worries about its capacity to meet the demand for power.
The scenario isn’t as unlikely as it might sound. Hybrid-electric cars already tend to cluster within certain neighbourhoods. Plug-in electric cars are expected to do the same as neighbours see each other getting new cars, talk about the benefits of not having to fill up at the pumps, and sell each other on the idea of electric transport.
The problem is that the neighbourhood transformers that convert electricity to the right voltage before it enters people’s homes aren’t designed for the kind of load created by a number of cars all drawing large amounts of power from the grid at the same time, and they may fail, causing neighbourhood power outages.
Already, areas like downtown Toronto have trouble meeting local demand for electricity, according to the Toronto Atmospheric Fund, the city government’s climate agency.
“The system will have problems if everyone starts plugging in electric vehicles,” said Julia Langer, the organization’s CEO.
“We don’t have any spare electricity, and … for a bunch of reasons that has to do with transformer capacity. They’re really ancient.”
Conservation, time of use
Langer’s group and others, including electricity companies, are advocating a number of possible solutions.
Conservation is key: If household electricity use can be pared through more efficient water heaters and fridges, better home insulation and higher-quality light bulbs, that will free up capacity to charge cars.
Another solution is to modify people’s overall electricity use through time-of-day pricing, where it costs more to draw power at times of peak demand, and significantly less to run the washing machine or charge up a Chevy Volt, say, overnight.
Even if Ontario and Quebec each had a million electric vehicles on the road, the increase in power needed for their grids would be around 2.5 per cent. (Redmond Shannon/CBC)
Already the newest electric cars, and the latest charging-station technology, let drivers plug in and set a time for charging to begin. In the future, cars will be able to interface with so-called smart electric grids that convey the price of electricity moment-by-moment, so that charging can be automatically engaged only during periods of low overall demand.
“There are technologies to spread out the electricity use so it doesn’t hit the system all at once,” said Chantal Guimont, CEO of Electric Mobility Canada, a non-profit that advocates for electricity-powered transportation.
But among the three provinces with by far the largest number of electric cars — Quebec, Ontario and B.C. — only Ontario has time-of-use electricity rates.
Equipment upgrades needed
Ultimately, electricity providers will almost certainly have to upgrade their local equipment in some cases, said Chuck Farmer, director of conservation and demand planning for Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator, which operates the province’s electricity market.
“There are going to be new transformers needed. Most local utilities we talk to are cognizant of this trend,” Farmer said.
But BC Hydro’s Tsang and Hydro-Québec’s Batty are confident their companies can predict and manage the added load.
“We’re generally able to detect that with our vast metering infrastructure,” Tsang said. “We anticipate some overloading, but these transformers are very robust. They’ll be able to withstand that, and we’ll be able to go in and upgrade.”
Farmer said the big picture is still rosy.
“In general, what we say about the system is we’re in a good place in terms of our availability to meet the demands of customers. So we don’t have a great concern.”
Clinton’s conviction that she can get the fossil fuel companies on board is mistaken: this can’t be solved by convincing the ultra-rich to do the right thing
‘Clinton’s campaign platform does include some very good climate policies that surely do not please these donors … still, the whole funding mess stinks.’ Photograph: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
by Naomi Klein, reposted from TheGuardian, Apr 7, 2016
There aren’t a lot of certainties left in the US presidential race, but here’s one thing about which we can be absolutely sure: the Clinton camp really doesn’t like talking about fossil-fuel money. Last week, when a young Greenpeace campaigner challenged Hillary Clinton about taking money from fossil-fuel companies, the candidate accused the Bernie Sanders campaign of “lying” and declared herself “so sick” of it. As the exchange went viral, a succession of high-powered Clinton supporters pronounced that there was nothing to see here and that everyone should move along.
The very suggestion that taking this money could impact Clinton’s actions is “baseless and should stop,” according to California senator Barbara Boxer. It’s “flat-out false,” “inappropriate,” and doesn’t “hold water,” declared New York mayor Bill de Blasio. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman went so far as to issue “guidelines for good and bad behaviour” for the Sanders camp. The first guideline? Cut out the “innuendo suggesting, without evidence, that Clinton is corrupt.”
That’s a whole lot of firepower to slap down a non-issue. So is it an issue or not? First, some facts. Clinton’s campaign, including her Super Pac, has received a lot of money from the employees and registered lobbyists of fossil-fuel companies. There’s the much-cited $4.5m that Greenpeace calculated, which includes bundling by lobbyists.
But that’s not all. There is also a lot more money from sources not included in those calculations. For instance, one of Clinton’s most prominent and active financial backers is Warren Buffett. While he owns a large mix of assets, Buffett is up to his eyeballs in coal, including coal transportation and some of the dirtiest coal-fired power plants in the country.
Then there’s all the cash that fossil-fuel companies have directly pumped into the Clinton Foundation. In recent years,Exxon, Shell, ConocoPhillips and Chevron have all contributed to the foundation. An investigation in the International Business Times just revealed that at least two of these oil companies were part of an effort to lobby Clinton’s State Department about the Alberta tar sands, a massive deposit of extra-dirty oil. Leading climate scientists like James Hansen have explained that if we don’t keep the vast majority of that carbon in the ground, we will unleash catastrophic levels of warming.
Did these donations have anything to do with the investigation found, Clinton’s State Department approving the Alberta Clipper, a controversial pipeline carrying large amounts of tar-sands bitumen from Alberta to Wisconsin? “According to federal lobbying records reviewed by the IBT,” write David Sirota and Ned Resnikoff, “Chevron and ConocoPhillips both lobbied the State Department specifically on the issue of ‘oil sands’ in the immediate months prior to the department’s approval, as did a trade association funded by ExxonMobil.”
Did they make Hillary Clinton more disposed to seeing tar-sands pipelines as environmentally benign, as early State Department reviews of Keystone XL seemed to conclude, despite the many scientific warnings? There is no proof – no smoking gun, as Clinton defenders like to say. Just as there is no proof that the money her campaign took from gas lobbyists and fracking financiers has shaped Clinton’s current (and dangerous) view that fracking can be made safe.
It’s important to recognise that Clinton’s campaign platform includes some very good climate policies that surely do not please these donors – which is why the fossil-fuel sector gives so much more to climate change-denying Republicans. Still, the whole funding mess stinks, and it seems to get worse by the day. So it’s very good that the Sanders camp isn’t abiding by Krugman’s “guidelines for good behaviour” and shutting up about the money in a year when climate change has contributed to the hottest temperatures since records began. This primary isn’t over, and Democratic voters need and deserve to know all they can before they make a choice we will all have to live with for a very long time.
Eva Resnick-Day, the 26-year-old Greenpeace activist who elicited the “so sick” response from Clinton last week, has a very lucid and moving perspective on just how fateful this election is, how much hangs in the balance. Responding to Clinton’s claim that young people “don’t do their own research,” Resnick-Day told Democracy Now!:
As a youth movement, we have done our own research, and that is why we are so terrified for the future…. Scientists are saying that we have half the amount of time that we thought we did to tackle climate change before we go over the tipping point. And because of that, youth—the people that are going to have to inherit and deal with this problem—are incredibly worried. What happens in the next four or eight years could determine the future of our planet and the human species. And that’s why we’re out there…asking the tough questions to all candidates: to make sure that whoever is in office isn’t going to continue things as they’ve been, but take a real stand to tackle climate change in a meaningful and deep way for the future of our planet.
Resnick-Day’s words cut to the heart of why this is not just another election cycle, and why Clinton’s web of corporate entanglements is deeply alarming with or without a “smoking gun.” Whoever wins in November, the next president will come into office with their back up against the climate wall. Put simply, we are just plain out of time. Everything is moving faster than the scientific modelling has prepared us for. The ice is melting faster. The oceans are rising faster. And that means that governments must move much faster too. The latest peer-reviewed science tells us that if we want a good shot at protecting coastal cities this century – including New York, the place where Bernie and Hillary are currently having it out – then we need to get off fossil fuels with superhuman speed. A new paper from Oxford University, published in the journal Applied Energy, concludes that for humanity to have a 50-50 chance of meeting the temperature targets set in Paris, every new power plant has to be zero-carbon, starting next year.
That is hard. Really hard. At a bare minimum, it requires a willingness to go head-to-head with the two most powerful industries on the planet – fossil-fuel companies and the banks that finance them. Hillary Clinton is uniquely unsuited to this epic task.
While Clinton is great at warring with Republicans, taking on powerful corporations goes against her entire worldview, against everything she’s built, and everything she stands for. The real issue, in other words, isn’t Clinton’s corporate cash, it’s her deeply pro-corporate ideology: one that makes taking money from lobbyists and accepting exorbitant speech fees from banks seem so natural that the candidate is openly struggling to see why any of this has blown up at all.
To understand this worldview, one need look no further than the foundation where Hillary Clinton works and that bears her family name. Its mission can be distilled as follows: There is so much private wealth sloshing around our planet (thanks in very large part to the deregulation and privatisation frenzy that Bill Clinton unleashed on the world while president) that every single problem on earth, no matter how large, can be solved by convincing the ultra-rich to do the right things with their loose change. Naturally, the people to convince them to do these fine things are the Clintons, the ultimate relationship brokers and dealmakers, with the help of an entourage of A-list celebrities.
The problem with Clinton World is structural. It’s the way in which these profoundly enmeshed relationships – lubricated by the exchange of money, favours, status and media attention – shape what gets proposed as policy in the first place.
For instance, under the Clintons’ guidance, drug companies work with the foundation to knock down their prices in Africa (conveniently avoiding the real solution: changing the system of patenting that allows them to charge such grotesque prices to the poor in the first place). The Dow Chemical Company finances water projects in India. (Just don’t mention their connection to theongoing human health disaster in Bhopal, for which the company still refuses to take responsibility.). And it was at the Clinton Global Initiative that the airline mogul Richard Branson made his flashy pledge to spend billions solving climate change (almost a decade later, we’re still waiting, while Virgin Airlines keeps expanding).
In Clinton World it’s always win-win-win: the governments look effective, the corporations look righteous, and the celebrities look serious. Oh, and another win too: the Clintons grow ever more powerful.
At the centre of it all is the canonical belief that change comes not by confronting the wealthy and powerful but by partnering with them. Viewed from within the logic of what Thomas Frank recently termed “the land of money”, all of Hillary Clinton’s most controversial actions make sense. Why not take money from fossil-fuel lobbyists? Why not get paid hundreds of thousands for speeches to Goldman Sachs? It’s not a conflict of interest; it’s a mutually beneficial partnership – part of a never-ending merry-go-round of corporate-political give and take.
Books have been filled with the failures of Clinton-style philanthrocapitalism. When it comes to climate change, we have all the evidence we need to know that this model is a disaster on a planetary scale. This is the logic that gave the world fraud-infested carbon markets and dodgy carbon offsets instead of tough regulation of polluters – because, we were told, emission reductions needed to be “win-win” and “market-friendly.”
If the next president wastes any more time with these schemes, the climate clock will run out, plain and simple. If we’re to have any hope of avoiding catastrophe, action needs to be unprecedented in its speed and scope. If designed properly, the transition to a post-carbon economy can deliver a great many “wins”: not just a safer future, but huge numbers of well-paying jobs; improved and affordable public transit; more liveable cities; as well as racial and environmental justice for the communities on the frontlines of dirty extraction.
Bernie Sanders’ campaign is built around precisely this logic: not the rich being stroked for a little more noblesse oblige, but ordinary citizens banding together to challenge them, winning tough regulations, and creating a much fairer system as a result.
Sanders and his supporters understand something critical: it won’t all be win-win. For any of this to happen, fossil-fuel companies, which have made obscene profits for decades, will have to start losing. And losing more than just the tax breaks and subsidies that Clinton is promising to cut. They will also have to lose the new drilling and mining leases they want; they’ll have to be denied permits for the pipelines and export terminals they very much want to build. They will have to leave trillions of dollars’ worth of proven fossil-fuel reserves in the ground.
Meanwhile, if solar panels proliferate on rooftops, big power utilities will lose a significant portion of their profits, since their former customers will be in the energy-generation business. This would create opportunities for a more level economy and, ultimately, for lower utility bills – but once again, some powerful interests will have to lose (which is why Warren Buffett’s coal-fired utility in Nevada has gone to war against solar).
A president willing to inflict these losses on fossil-fuel companies and their allies needs to be more than just not actively corrupt. That president needs to be up for the fight of the century – and absolutely clear about which side must win. Looking at the Democratic primary, there can be no doubt about who is best suited to rise to this historic moment. The good news? He just won Wisconsin. And he isn’t following anyone’s guidelines for good behaviour.
On Friday, April 8, U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Coffin of the federal District Court in Eugene, Oregon ruled that Juliana vs. United States, a suit brought by 21 young people ranging in ages from 8 to 19, may proceed. The suit, which is supported by Our Children’s Trust, claims the federal government is violating their rights as guaranteed by the Constitution to life. liberty, and property by permitting, encouraging, and otherwise enabling continued exploitation, production, and combustion of fossil fuels.
Dr. James Hansen, a staunch advocate for climate change action, is also a plaintiff in the case. Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein call the legal action, “most important lawsuit on the planet right now.” McKibben was recently arrested along with 56 other people protesting a plan to store natural gas beneath Seneca Lake in upstate New York.
Plaintiffs’ attorney Philip Gregory with the law firm of Cotchett, Pitre, & McCarthy of Burlingame, CA, tells the press, “This decision is one of the most significant in our nation’s history. The Court upheld our claims that the federal government intensified the danger to our plaintiffs’ lives, liberty and property. Judge Coffin decided our Complaint will move forward and put climate science squarely in front of the federal courts. The next step is for the Court to order our government to cease jeopardizing the climate system for present and future generations. The Court gave America’s youth a fair opportunity to be heard.”
Judge Coffin characterized the case as an “unprecedented lawsuit” addressing “government action and inaction” resulting “in carbon pollution of the atmosphere, climate destabilization, and ocean acidification.” In deciding the case can proceed, Judge Coffin wrote: “The debate about climate change and its impact has been before various political bodies for some time now. Plaintiffs give this debate justiciability by asserting harms that befall or will befall them personally and to a greater extent than older segments of society.
“It may be that eventually the alleged harms, assuming the correctness of plaintiffs’ analysis of the impacts of global climate change, will befall all of us. But the intractability of the debates before Congress and state legislatures and the alleged valuing of short term economic interest despite the cost to human life, necessitates a need for the courts to evaluate the constitutional parameters of the action or inaction taken by the government. This is especially true when such harms have an alleged disparate impact on a discrete class of society.”
This is only a preliminary step in what could be a long and torturous legal process. Eventually, it could wind up before the US Supreme Court. Rest assured that conservative groups funded by fossil fuel interests will marshal their enormous resources to fight the case every step of the way.
Much of the impetus for the suit can be traced to implacable opposition to addressing the climate change issue from political stooges like Senate president Mitch McConnell, who is a bought and paid for mouthpiece for Big Coal. He is the one who declared that President Obama’s Clean Transportation Plan, which included a very modest $10 per barrel fee on oil, was “dead on arrival” in the Senate even before the President submitted it to Congress.
It is an illustration of how dysfunctional America has become when people like Bill McKibben get arrested for opposing an outrageous scheme that will put millions of people at risk of environmental harm but malefactors like McConnell get to keep their powerful jobs, all of which come with lavish benefits at public expense.
Perhaps America needs to spend more time listening to its children and less time listening to doddering old fools who are willing to sell out their constituents for 30 pieces of silver. If you want to know more about this issue, please read Naomi Klein’s excellent book This Changes Everything, Capitalism Vs. Climate for a documented, fully footnoted look at who is behind the drive to continue to burning fossil fuels despite the evidence that it endangers every person on earth as well as those yet to come.
They have backgrounds in school administration, social work, and translation — and they have the power to send you to jail.
Of the 14 justices of the peace recently appointed by the provincial government, only five have law degrees.
With so few lawyers serving in the position, the JP system in Ontario is still considered a “lay bench,” yet the justices are able to deny bail and detain individuals pending trial as well as to incarcerate them for certain offences.
Ontario, unlike some provinces, does not require JPs to have a formal legal education or experience. They simply need a university or college degree and 10 years of full-time work or volunteer experience.
That’s something a growing number of criminal defence lawyers say needs to change. Even as the role of justice of the peace has evolved to become more powerful and complex, they point out, the job requirements have remained the same.
Lorenzo Berardinetti, parliamentary assistant to Attorney General Madeleine Meilleur, is reviewing the current roles and responsibilities of JPs as well as the qualifications for the job, at Meilleur’s request. A spokeswoman for Meilleur said the review continues.
“They’re dealing with complicated legal issues and they’re dealing with human liberty, and the law is changing and complicated,” said Criminal Lawyers’ Association president Anthony Moustacalis.
“And so to ensure fairness you need to know the ground rules, which are constantly changing, and lawyers are in the best position to know what the ground rules are and to stay up-to-date with them.”
JPs, who wear black robes and green sashes and earn $127,000 a year, are often the first point of contact for individuals entering the criminal justice system.
“There are high standards for Ontario’s justices of the peace. The ministry has full confidence in the ability of justices of the peace to carry out their responsibilities,” said attorney general spokeswoman Christine Burke.
They receive training and mentoring before assuming their duties, which includes presiding over the vast majority of bail hearings and provincial offences matters (such as traffic violations) and authorizing search warrants.
“To make assumptions that these things can be quickly learned through courses is dangerous,” said lawyer Sean Robichaud.
For example, he highlighted that a lawyer would be better equipped to understand the impact a jail sentence can have on a person when weighing that option against others as a justice of the peace, versus someone with no legal training.
“Quite recently there’s been a lot of comment about the level of pre-trial detention in Ontario and, in my view, much of that is from JPs with no or little prior knowledge of the judicial system,” said lawyer Peter Zaduk.
“It seems their default position is to do whatever the Crown suggests, which is detention or sort of this mindless imposition of unduly restrictive and unjustified bail conditions.”
Justices of the peace also have the power to impose discretionary publication bans on certain information, such as on the identity of murder or attempted-murder victims. (JPs also order publication bans on evidence given during bail hearings, but those are mandatory under the law if requested.)
In two recent high-profile stabbings in Toronto, the same justice of the peace immediately imposed discretionary publication bans on the identities of the victims at the request of the Crown, without hearing evidence on why the bans were necessary, as is required in rules set out by the Supreme Court of Canada.
As a result, media had to challenge the bans after the fact. Both bans were eventually lifted.
“Publication bans that are discretionary should never be rubber stamped,” said lawyer Iris Fischer, who has represented the Star.
“We have the Supreme Court test for when publication bans can be ordered, and it’s a very high threshold … Justices of the peace are often dealing with these matters in bail court and other high-volume courts, which is very busy, but the same test still needs to be applied.”
Some provinces, including Alberta, Quebec and Nova Scotia, have a two-tiered JP system, entrusting only lawyers with legal experience to preside over trials. The other class of JPs, which does not require legal training, deals with more administrative matters such as performing marriages and administering oaths.
There has been some minor legislative push in the past to modify Ontario’s JP system. Liberal MPP David Orazietti, then a backbencher and now minister of Government and Consumer Services, tabled a private member’s bill in 2012 that would have created two classes of JPs similar to other provinces.
The class that could preside over bail hearings would be known as “presiding justices of the peace” and would require five years’ experience as a lawyer before appointment, compared with the minimum 10 years of experience needed to become a judge.
The bill did not go beyond first reading in the legislature. Orazietti’s office did not respond to requests for comment this week.
Having a predominantly non-lawyer bench of justices of the peace can be beneficial, as they bring a commonsense, practical approach to cases, said lawyer James Morton, who previously served as counsel to the Association of Justices of the Peace of Ontario.
“I’m actually very comfortable with a non-lawyer looking at someone in a bail hearing, providing they’re trained, and saying: ‘Do I think this person poses a risk? Should they be on release?’” he said.
While agreeing there is a need for bail reform and to deal with over incarceration, Morton said the problem isn’t so much the justices of the peace but the law itself.
“I don’t see it as justices of the peace over-incarcerating. I think the whole system is set up in such a way that if you had a bench of 300 lawyers, all of whom were fully up to speed on the law, they would be doing roughly the same thing,” he said.
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MEMORABLE JUSTICES OF THE PEACE
There have been several memorable cases of justices of the peace coming under fire for their conduct, both in and out of the courtroom.
Errol M. Massiah
Looking goooood: Errol Massiah
Massiah was fired last year after a discipline panel found he had sexually harassed a number of women at the Whitby courthouse, including telling a female prosecutor she was “looking goooood.” Appointed in 2007, he had previously been reprimanded for making similar remarks to women at the Oshawa courthouse. He is currently challenging in Divisional Court his termination and the decision not to pay his $616,000 legal bill for the discipline hearing.
Questionable remarks: Robert Whittaker
The Toronto JP retired last year before a discipline hearing could hear allegations that he had made insensitive remarks to defendants. According to transcripts, he told a Somali man that he did not appear to be “integrating … into the Canadian lifestyle,” questioned whether a woman with colitis should be allowed to drive a car and made comments about mental illness that one lawyer in the courtroom said were “profoundly” disrespectful.
Former justice of the peace Solange Guberman.
Sleeping on the job: Solange Guberman
The Ottawa JP resigned before a discipline panel could rule on the allegations against her, including her “pervasive” lack of understanding of basic law, falling asleep in court, screaming at staff and relying on police officers and prosecutors for advice. She also allegedly spoke French when she was aware not all parties could understand.
Justice delayed: Adele Romagnoli
The Newmarket JP was upbraided earlier this year by Superior Court Justice Mark Edwards for wanting to take nearly 11 months to decide whether to accept guilty pleas and impose fines on several speeding offences. Edwards also noted that rulings by Romagnoli have been overturned in at least three other cases where she did not follow joint submissions on sentencing.
TODD COYNE
Alfred “Budd” Johnston, leaving a 2014 hearing into complaints of misconduct against him.
Punctuality is everything: Alfred “Budd” Johnston
In a memorable decision, Johnston threw out more than 60 cases — many of them traffic offences — in 2012 because the prosecutor was 71 seconds late. The move was described as “draconian” and “intemperate” by Ontario Court Justice Ramez Khawly, who accepted the City of Toronto’s appeal of the mass dismissal.
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SO YOU WANT TO BE A JUSTICE OF THE PEACE?
Here are some of the requirements to become a JP:
Qualifications:
At least 10 years of full-time work experience, paid or volunteer
University degree or college equivalent in any field
How to apply:
An individual can submit an application form to the Justices of the Peace Appointments Advisory Committee only when a JP vacancy is advertised.
What do you need to do to become a JP? Here are some requirements
Qualifications:
At least 10 years of full-time work experience, paid or volunteer
University degree or college equivalent in any field
How to apply:
An individual can submit an application form to the Justices of the Peace Appointments Advisory Committee only when a JP vacancy is advertised.
The process:
The committee is made up of a judge, a justice of the peace, a justice of the peace familiar with aboriginal issues and four other members appointed by the Attorney General.
Aside from the necessary qualifications, the committee also looks for diversity among applicants, and to see if they possess skills and abilities including “a high level of achievement” in employment and/or community service and “demonstrated good judgment in the face of real or perceived conflict of interest.”
The committee then classifies candidates as “Not Qualified,” “Qualified” or “Highly Qualified.” They may or may not interview an individual before assigning a classification.
The classifications are then passed on to the Attorney General, who recommends candidates to cabinet for appointment.
