Thank you for the question. We did the report because this commission is coming to the end of its seven-year mandate, and at the same time we have a statutory review of the Public Service Employment Act, so we thought it was important that this commission put forward its views on the totality of the act.
The act has two parts. It has a staffing part, but it also has the obligation to protect non-partisanship. A lot of our focus has been on the staffing and a lot of the conversations I've had with this committee have been about the staffing portions, but we felt it was important to raise the issues of non-partisanship.
The approach we have taken is an approach based on principle. We have looked at our experience, and I'll raise the specific instance that we looked at. We looked at the investigations we have, the complaints we get, the principles behind the act, and what we have developed over time.
The principles in the legislation are that appointments to the public service—and I'm talking about the core public service—should be merit-based, non-partisan, and independently overseen. The comments I'm making about senior appointments relate to the fact that these are the leaders of the public service. Our argument is that those same principles should apply to the leadership in the public service.
Your question was about specific examples in terms of interference by ministerial staff. We had a particular case that we discussed in one of our annual reports, and we've had a number of instances in which issues have been raised in relation to communications. The case was from the Department of Justice, where there had been an instruction to post something on the web; it was corrected in turn, because it was a fairly political statement that was on the Department of Justice website. When we did the investigation on that—and we follow a quasi-judicial process in doing these investigations—it was clear that the public servant didn't do anything that was partisan in the sense of a partisan activity, but it was also clear to us that there was a real lack of understanding of the two areas we're responsible for.
At what point is it appropriate for a political staffer to instruct a public servant, and at what point should the public servant say that this is not appropriate? Hence, we come to the conclusion that there should be a code of conduct, and that the code of conduct should articulate what those roles are. Everybody would have a better understanding.