Commissioner Dion has been hit-and-miss. His ruling on SNC-Lavalin, as I mentioned, was good in that he reversed a very bad decision made by Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson, very early in her mandate, that private interests in the Conflict of Interest Act did not include political, social or any interests other than financial interests. She just created a huge loophole that essentially gutted the law even more than it was gutted before. It already didn't apply to 99% of decisions, and now it didn't apply to 99% of interests. It really should be called the “almost impossible to be in a conflict of interest act”. He closed one of those loopholes with his reinterpretation.
But, in that ruling, he let eight other people off the hook who did exactly the same thing that the Prime Minister did, which was pressure the Attorney General to stop the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin. He said they can't be found guilty because they're not the Prime Minister and they can't influence the Attorney General. That was a very bad ruling that Democracy Watch is currently challenging in the Federal Court of Appeal.