Thank you.
Welcome, Ms. Dantzer, and congratulations on your new role and what you're already laying out for a new approach.
On page 4 of your slides, under “Leadership Development”, we have at the bottom of the first box, “Values and Ethics”. It may just be because this is a simple diagram, but I would think that it would be valuable to have values and ethics in the far left-hand box as well, under “Public Service Foundations”. It may be that it's contemplated in there, but I think there should be a major promotion of ethics and values right up front.
I would suggest that there's really one cardinal rule to direct public servants and politicians in how they relate to each other and, therefore, how the public administration can work with integrity and within ethics and values, and that is to understand the dividing line between them.
Our system is a political system. We have partisanship in elections, in platforms, in legislation, and in appropriation of money, and all of that goes on in Parliament. But as soon as you get to that point where the policy or legislation or whatever has been decided and the money appropriated, you cross a line and you go from what is inherently partisan to a duty of fairness. If there's one thing that I think every public servant should have burned into his or her mind, it's the concept of the duty of fairness.
That means, of course, that objective criteria, transparency, competitive processes, and results evaluation, all of those issues of the public administration, really should be divided from the political side. It's when people from the political side, frankly, whether they're ministers or ministerial assistants, cross that line that we get into trouble with the public administration and the public's faith in it. I think if we all keep clearly in our minds that dividing line, realizing the requisites and different roles of each, we'll all achieve a lot more together as we go through this act and look for guidance and reinforcement for that principle.