I'm glad you asked that question. When I say the public knows, what I mean is the distinction between a private interest and a legitimate public authority is pretty clear to people. For example, it may be the spouse, the sibling, or a whole bunch of proxies where we would assume you're going to be affected by your child's interest.
But we know in particular situations it can be the good friend you've known since grade school. It can be the person you have a crush on and are trying to impress by wielding your authority. Why would we care about the family relationship and not the situational context in which it may be quite a distant relative? In that context it's clear, based on the information and evidence provided, that it had a material bearing on the exercise of a public authority. That to me is the issue. The act cares about conflicts.
To reduce it to this idea, that as long as I'm only biased in favour of my nephew or I'm only interested in the private relationship of a former roommate, somehow it's legitimate. To think that somehow it's okay to compromise the integrity of a public authority, as long as it's this private interest and not that one, creates cynicism and a sense of rule-bound seeking of loopholes. It just doesn't resonate with anyone's lived experience, right?
Everyone in their own life knows when they have been affected by a personal relationship. It's not usually mysterious. What it needs to be is evidence-based—it can't just be the allegation or the fact of prior association. That's what the commissioner's for: providing an objective, non-partisan, evidence-based review that's much more reliable than we would get by confining ourselves to categories.
In the City of Mississauga inquiry, you had a child of the mayor affected. At first glance, that seems to be a no-brainer. But leaving aside the specifics of that case, which we had a whole public inquiry about, we have to ask: when your child's in his fifties and you're in your eighties or nineties, at what point does it stop having the same impact as when your child is 15 or 21? So context matters much more than status, and that's the point I was trying to convey.