First of all, Minister, I'm going to start with a compliment. How's that? When the debate started, you were there and you stayed throughout the whole thing. Not every minister does that. I wanted to say thank you for doing that. You put up your argument as best you could.
I want to go directly to the point of what the commissioner as well as the Chief Electoral Officer asked for prior to this bill, which is the ability to apply to a judge to compel testimony. We know that this exists in section 11 of the Competition Act, so it exists on paper. It also exists in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta, and Yukon, for their election officials to be able to compel their testimony. To me that seems to be the one key tool they were looking for.
You keep talking about independence. You wanted the independence for the commissioner to do his job, but if he doesn't have the very tool that he asked for, it can't be done. Even though you're taking that person from Elections Canada and putting him into the public prosecutions office, without that key tool, this is an exercise not in independence, but an exercise in isolation. At least when he was with Elections Canada, he could go down the hall and talk to the auditors, he could talk to deputy returning officers all across the country. That was the only way, really, he could find out what's going on. Then they could raise flags, but when the flags were raised, he was within that building, that construct of Elections Canada.
Now, if you want to take that person and put him over into public prosecutions with the very tool to be able to do this, I think that would have been probably the best thing to do. It's not a question of ordering the referee off the ice—you certainly took his whistle from him, which made him ineffective, or you never really gave him a whistle in the first place—but now he is off the ice. Don't you think this is more isolation than anything else?