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In another post regarding successors to outgoing Liberal leader Stéphane Dion, Brown disses potential contender Justin Trudeau.

“As someone who hopes the Grits just fade away by the next election, I’m cheering for Justin Trudeau or Joe Volpe. Or have I missed a possible candidate who is as unspeakably awful?”

Brown wrote the posts when he was an assistant professor with the Faculty of Law. The Conservative government first named him to the Alberta bench in 2013 and last year elevated him to the Alberta Court of Appeal and the appeal courts for the Northwest Territories and Nunavut.

In less than three years, he has risen from a job teaching law to a seat on the highest court in the land.

Brown could not be reached for comment on Friday.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with future judges holding personal views on politics and other matters of national importance. But it is unusual — and perhaps a symptom of the digital age — for an incoming Supreme Court judge to have left such a verbose record of opinion that could be used to question his neutrality on cases that come before him on the court.

Consider, for example, the federal jurisdiction in health care, an issue that has arisen in past Supreme Court cases. In a blog post, Brown called the Canada Health Act “an inappropriate [federal] intrusion into sacrosanct provincial swimming pools.”

Or Senate reform, a topic on which the Supremes last year handed down guidance, Brown wrote in 2008: “My own preference would be to democratize the Senate (thus presumably throwing out the deadwood and injecting new life into the place) and give it more work to do (i.e. vetting SCC nominations). Still, abolition is better than the status quo.”