Thank you, Mr. Chairman, ladies, gentlemen, members of the committee.
First I would like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to meet with you so soon after taking this job.
Let me tell you a few things about myself. I am 66 years old, a retired judge of the Federal Court of Appeal and, since June 18 of this year, Communications Security Establishment Commissioner. I am a jurist by training but my more recent experience is as an appeal judge for some 20 years. I am a Montrealer by birth, London educated and now adopted by Gatineau.
I have devoted a good part of my life to public service. For two years I served as an assistant to the Honourable Mitchell Sharp, who was at the time Secretary of State for External Affairs. Incidentally, it was with some emotion that I crossed the threshold of the East Block. Forty years ago this December, I took up my new duties with Mr. Sharp, and my office was on the first floor of the East Block. So there is a little emotion involved in my appearance here today. I haven't been back here for 38 years.
Then, for one year, I served as executive assistant to Yvon Beaulne, Under-Secretary of State of Cultural Affairs. I practised law with a firm in Montreal and returned to Ottawa as assistant director of research with the Task Force on Canadian Unity, the Pépin-Robarts Commission. I returned to private practice at an office in Hull and combined that with a career as a legal and political columnist on the editorial pages of Le Devoir and La Presse as well as on numerous public affairs programs on Radio-Canada and TVA. I have authored several books and magazine articles.
Thanks to my law practice in Hull, I appeared more often than any other Quebec lawyer at the time before the Supreme Court of Canada, serving for more than 10 years as an agent of the Attorney General of Quebec and some 30 law firms.
In March 1990 the Honourable Kim Campbell, Minister of Justice at the time, appointed me to the Federal Court of Appeal, the second highest court in Canada. I heard some 2,060 cases and drafted reasons in over 700 of them. I sat in every Canadian province and the Northwest Territories, from St. John's to Vancouver, with many appearances in Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto.
There are few areas of federal law that have escaped my attention. Other than my daily bread and butter, consisting of immigration, employment insurance, and income tax issues, I had the privilege, in particular, of being the first appeal judge to rule on the status of the Official Languages Act, on the constitutional validity of the Anti-terrorism Act, and on the scope of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.
I retired in July 2009, my sole plan at the time being to volunteer at the Olympic Games in Vancouver. I was assigned the pleasant task of being the assistant to Canadian dignitaries, which enabled me to serve as a guide to Premier Jean Charest and Premier Danny Williams.
Don't worry, luckily for me, I was not asked to guide them at the same time.