Mr. Wild, there's a circular problem here. To say that commissioners who don't have quasi-judicial functions don't have that requirement because they're not performing quasi-judicial functions would suggest that any appointment to any quasi-judicial tribunal would have to have that experience beforehand, but as we all know, the appointments come to any number of boards, commissions, and tribunals without even legal experience, let alone judicial experience. The way you've explained that suggests that to do a quasi-judicial function, you must have had quasi-judicial experience, and you don't.
Let me just say a couple of other things on this whole section. As part of this act, we're going to be creating, we hope, an appointments commission. It is going to deal with all order in council appointments and is going to set out criteria of merit, transparency, and fairness. The concern that not having such qualifications here will simply open it up to patronage, I think, avoids one of our main intentions, which is to create an appointments process that eliminates the possibility of that type of patronage.
I'm very much in favour of this amendment.
I think it's almost meaningless in many ways.... Lots of commissions don't perform quasi-judicial functions. They simply don't. You've got human rights commissions and you've got human rights tribunals, and one does the quasi-judicial and one deals much more broadly. For an ethics and conflict of interest commissioner, perhaps the person most skilled in this country in ethical issues, Dr. Margaret Somerville, would not qualify for this. I think we have to put real faith in the appointments process that we also hope to set up through this act; it would obviate the need for this type of section.
It seems to me from all this discussion that it creates more confusion and harm and restriction than perhaps we are wanting to achieve. I will be voting in favour of the--