Thank you, Chair.
To build on your question to our witness, I think your examples of people calling judges and interfering with the process is exactly why we need something at the front end and some oversight.
Going back to the purpose of the PAC, it's to prevent those kinds of things from happening and make sure that appointments indeed are merit based. The adage is that it's who you know in the PMO that determines whether or not you get an appointment. The way it works in our process now, there's not really that much hindering that process and procedure from continuing--in other words, not looking at merit and what experience this person has in any given area. The refugee file was riddled with problems. There was a report in January 2007 that talked about that.
So when you look at the public appointments commission, we pushed to have it in the Accountability Act because unless you deal with merit-based appointments and have some oversight other than the Prime Minister's office, with all due respect to Parliament, its hands are tied if all of the powers are given to one level of government. That's what we saw before. Then when a scandal breaks out--witness Gomery--they say, “Okay, we'll try to do better”.
My frustration and our party's frustration is that we worked hard to put in a preventive policy tool here called the public appointments commission. The chair just gave us examples, and we've seen in the past where interference.... And they weren't people who I believe were up to mischief in the cases she referred to. They thought, “It's fine, I'll help out”. They didn't understand the boundaries.
If you look at the legislation, it talks about having not only merit-based appointments. Any Canadian could look at the appointment and say, “You know what? I should be able to apply for that”. That's not how it's going now with the way this government is operating, because there's no oversight. If it does, it's only because they put ads out.
So I come back to you on the issue of the public appointments commission. Do you agree it should be put in place? Do you agree it would actually prevent the concerns we've had about withdrawing people, because at the front end you would put people in place based on merit, and you would have some oversight other than just the political oversight that exists presently?