We saw something being slowed down unnecessarily. I don't know whether it's mismanagement that led to that in that particular case or in the case of the current legislation, or in the case of.... Professionally I'm not talking about the decision, I'm talking about the appointment process for the Chief Electoral Officer or for any other appointment processes, which are also held up for an inordinate amount of time. I don't know whether it's a process issue or whether it's an execution issue.
I would like to know because this is a pattern. We have a right to know. Saying it's all private information is just a way of saying, “We're not going to show you what goes on, and you just have to trust us that there's a secret that we are obliged to keep as a government as opposed to a secret that we in practice are obliged to share but we choose not to share for reasons that have to do with the fact that we're a little embarrassed by the fact that we're kind of incompetent at this sort of thing.”
I don't ascribe nefarious motives to the government for doing what it did in this matter. I don't know who said this, but I've always thought it was profound, that one ought never to ascribe to machiavellianism that which can be explained by ineptitude. I'm fully prepared to believe that the government was just inept in this matter. I can only speculate as to what the reasons for that ineptitude might be: too many chefs? Alternatively, in the case of this government, the problem is one chef who has to decide on everything, no sous-chefs, and it is difficult to play to the entire dinner for many people. I used to work in a kitchen, by the way.
Without the assistance of people other than the head chef, I think that's the problem here. Everything's got to wait until Justin Trudeau says yes or no personally, and that does not speed up processes very much, not in my experience.
I think that explains what happened during last year's filibusters. It took a month to finally get the issue all the way to the top echelon. In the interim, we'd all come away more enlightened than we currently are. We developed an entirely new set of procedures, allowing us to have a back-and-forth conversation in the middle of the filibuster, the key principle of which was named after my esteemed colleague Mr. Simms. While that speaks well to the people on this committee and their ability to work together, it doesn't speak well to the nature of highly centralized decision-making, which I think may be the problem here. If so, we could learn that without revealing any secrets about Ms. Sahota, Mr. Parent, or any other person other than the secret of what's going on behind that curtain in the middle of the emerald city, where I think one wizard has too many levers to twiddle with and just can't keep up with all the decisions that these highly centralized decision-making structures have caused. That's my theory.
I don't know that is the problem, but it's a problem which occurs to me, and if I'm wrong, I could be disabused of my mistaken notion by having the minister come here for an hour and explain what was going on. We might very well leave impressed.
I do think I'm right in saying that the minister, on the whole, is a very intelligent person who is able to express herself eloquently, when she is given liberty to do so, to defend her government's practices and to show there is genuine goodwill to improve the practices in the future. I think that on the whole, she has been able to juggle a very difficult portfolio and certain personal challenges, of which we're all aware, with a capacity that I think very few other people could manage, so I think she could handle an hour-long meeting. I really do. I think she could do it with ease. We'd all come away more enlightened than we currently are.
That is why I say this whole secrecy argument doesn't really hold up very well. It's too broad. It's too inclusive. It is too much the use of a term that has a fungible meaning—an expandable, contractible meaning. It's the use of what is known as a motte and bailey argument. Secrecy can mean something very specific, like in the Official Secrets Act, or it can mean something very broad, some information that would make somebody feel uncomfortable, and good taste forbids us from going in that direction.
I will mention, now that I've raised the Official Secrets Act, a very strong counter-argument to what Mr. Bittle is putting forward. Let's say, for the sake of argument, it is the case there is something that actually would qualify as an official secret, a cabinet confidence that really cannot be shared with the members of this committee and the public. There is a way around this. We know this because the government has actually actively offered exactly this way of handling things.
Do you remember when our Conservative leader, Honourable Andrew Scheer, was raising the issue of Daniel Jean, the national security adviser, and his commentary relating to the actions of the Indian government and the conspiracy theory that Mr. Jean put forward? The Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness stood up in the House of Commons and said, well, they were happy.