Well, if the scenario you're describing were to emerge in public meetings, it would represent a profound failure on the part of the board members to discharge their public duty in the public interest.
Having said that, yes, the partisan atmosphere is the air that members of Parliament breathe; it's all around them. I'm suggesting that the partisanship could be handled at the subcommittee level, sorted out there. Then, when you got to the meeting of the board, there'd be no need for that sort of thing. Those issues might have been resolved.
If I may borrow from what my friend Mr. Thomas has said regarding the Alberta disclosure regime, where having made all this disclosure becomes a non-issue, I would suggest to you that once you got into a public practice with board meetings...frankly, who'd want to see them? They'd be boring as hell. So the interest would shrink. But because they're behind closed doors all the time, the media is just breathless with questions because they think there are all kinds of things going on that they'd be terribly interested in. Frankly, I don't think that's true, but they do want to know what happens, and they want to know what the decisions of the board are, and those should be made public.
I don't have the fears you're expressing, but I understand where they're coming from. I do think there's a place for partisan differences to be expressed, but in my regime I'm trying to allow for that at a subcommittee level, while allowing for public disclosure by having the actions of the board made public.