I can hear you and I can see a general view of the room.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I'm grateful for the opportunity to appear before your committee. If I may, as you indicated, I would like to take maybe five or ten minutes to offer a brief opening statement.
I understand that the objective of your committee is to assess my qualifications and competence. I would like to focus on that, if I may.
As you have indicated, this meeting is being held to assess the contribution I can make to the work of the Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments based on a review of my career and qualifications. I know you have my resumé in hand, but I would first like to take a moment to describe my career path to date.
I completed my studies in law at the University of Montreal and graduate studies in constitutional law at Harvard University in the mid-1980s. I have been a lawyer and member of the Quebec bar since 1984. I have also been a professor at McGill University's faculty of law for nearly 32 years.
My field of expertise is civil procedure, private law, and comparative law, but as you have also seen on reading my resumé, I have a long-standing interest in constitutional law. I was able to pursue this interest most recently when the Supreme Court of Canada appointed me to serve as amicus curiae, a friend of the court, in the context of the Senate reference and the constitutional amendment process.
In addition, from 2002 to 2005, I took leave from McGill University to act as Executive Legal Officer to the Supreme Court of Canada in the office of Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin. My task was to assist her in all her duties as justice and chief justice, except, of course, judgment drafting, which was her responsibility.
For example, outside the court, I was responsible for relations with the Canadian Judicial Council and the National Judicial Institute, which is the training body for federally appointed judges. Within the court, my responsibilities related to communications, media relations, management of the Law Clerk Program, for clerks appointed as research assistants to the court, and relations between the court, judges, and the various operational services of the court.
If you like, I'd be happy to answer questions on all of the elements of my CV which you have before you. I would like, before handing the floor back to you, to take a moment to try to connect my profile qualifications and competence to what I think might be helpful to the advisory board, and identify what I think those qualities might be.
It seems to me that key qualities to contribute to the work of the committee begin with a strong reputation of personal integrity, a reputation of sound judgment, and a reputation of absolute discretion. I want to underline that much of the work, in fact all of the work, I did with Chief Justice McLachlin and her colleagues at the Supreme Court of Canada, and within the Canadian Judicial Council as well, involved extraordinary confidentiality, significant confidentiality, and required a demonstration of sound judgment. And I don't think I would have been appointed to this position without a very strong reputation for personal integrity.
I point out that I think I have the respect of my peers and colleagues. I currently am the dean of the faculty of law at McGill and I'm also chair of the Council of Canadian Law Deans, and recently received the distinction of Advocatus Emeritus, which is awarded by the Quebec bar to distinguished members of the profession.
The second, I would say, and important qualification is independence and non-partisanship. I am not a member of any political party, nor am I a militant and haven't been.
Third, I think it's really critical to the work of the advisory board that its members have some experience with the evaluation of files, the ability to read CVs and letters of recommendation, to do so in both languages, to work effectively in a group in a collaborative manner, and I have to say this is pretty much my daily bread as dean. The work of the dean requires extensive participation and evaluation of confidential application files and candidacies, as well as work in groups and those kinds of assessments.
Finally, I would say it's useful to the work of the committee that some of its members, and ideally many of its members, have some understanding of the constitutional architecture of Canada, the role of the Senate, the legislative process at the federal level. The work I did in the Senate reference before the Supreme Court as amicus curiae obviously focused primarily on the amendment procedures, but in preparation for my oral argument and written briefs, I read just about everything that has been written in law and in political science about the Senate.
So even though the Senate was not my field of expertise at the time, and I think, to be fair, is not yet my field of expertise, I can fairly say that I have a significant interest in the Senate and parliamentary proceedings, and a good enough knowledge, I hope, to contribute significantly to the work of the advisory board.
With this, Mr. Chair, I'd be happy to answer questions, and I hand the floor back to you.
