Mr. Chairman, through you, I was afraid that this would be a question, because I fear that I have what is, I suppose, easily characterized as a Luddite approach to this.
I'm going to be very candid with you, at the risk of going beyond my remit as the Clerk. I don't think, if the meetings of the board were to be held in public, this would improve the situation. It might improve the perception of the board. It is invariably characterized as very secretive, highly secretive, which seems to suggest that fascinating secrets are being dealt with there, when in fact the work there—I see Mr. Preston smiling seraphically—is of such mind-numbing ordinariness that I think people would be quite surprised. I mean, we're not dealing with issues of national security.
Again, I'm going to be foolhardy and go out on a limb here—and hand you a saw—and say that I think, just as an observer of the situation, that the current climate that exists in political debate is so ferocious that it seems to force people into rigid partisan positions that are really not helpful when you're trying to come to a consensus over a particular issue.
I have found with the board a willingness for members, because of the fact that they're private meetings.... I don't consider them secret, because the minutes are published, the decisions are published and people find out what those decisions are, and in talking to their representatives on the board, the representatives can explain why they're going along with the strategic review, what they're contributing to this environment, and so on and so forth.
I think if the meetings were public, to tell you the God's honest truth, what worries me that it would drive the actual discussion underground. It means that the real bargaining goes on in corridor discussions, in private meetings that are not in any way minuted, where there's no presence of a secretary. I worry that this would lead to perhaps a situation where decisions are not perhaps as sound as the decisions that I think the board has been taking over these many years.
I understand the wish of the public to see the board work, to see how decisions are made and that kind of thing. It is certainly the case, perhaps, that what seemed to be a veil of secrecy in which the whole operation was cloaked initially has kind of stayed with it well beyond any kind of useful life. But I do think that the private discussions are useful.
Now, how do you regain credibility if credibility is not there and trust is not there? I think perhaps there are other ways. For instance, the board might be able to meet—this is just totally, absolutely off the top of my head—and field questions as to why certain things are done in a particular way, and this kind of thing.
I'm taking up way too much time, so I'll leave it there. I would prefer to see the meetings kept private. We could look at putting minutes that are less terse, shall we say; they're virtually haiku at the moment. We could conceivably have a bit more information in the minutes.