On your question about public servants going into political jobs, I have no comment. My experience was the other way, and my comments really were limited to that. Without commenting on whether it's a good or a bad thing, it raises different issues.
When a political person goes into the public service, it raises an issue different from when a non-partisan person goes into a partisan situation. There may be issues if that civil servant goes back, but that's beyond the scope of this bill, as I understand it.
Concerning the composition of the tribunal, I told you about the Competition Tribunal. The Competition Tribunal is made up of Federal Court judges and lay people with expertise, so that's the tribunal I'm most familiar with. They sit as a quorum of three. There must be one judge; one lay person, who is generally an economist; and then one other person, who is either a judge or an economist. There are either two judges and one economist or one judge and two lay people.
That would be another way, certainly, to go here--people with expertise in government and judges forming a heterogeneous panel.
In terms of court as an option, my view is it would not be a good option. In fact, my comments were actually the opposite. My comments were that the difficulty with a court is it takes a very long time, it's public, and in many situations you can do terrible damage to an innocent person's reputation--either the whistle-blower or the person upon whom the so-called whistle was blown. It would be very unfair to that person to have that made public over a long process. These things have to be dealt with expeditiously.
So I would not have court as an option.
In terms of the recommendation that there be a hard and fast rule that deputy ministers be changed, again I don't see that as being part of the Federal Accountability Act. I think it really would work on a case-by-case basis, though.
It's always the issue of experience versus the need for change. Sometimes you want experience and you wouldn't want to be forced to rotate it out; sometimes you want change, and there you are.