There are just a couple of things that I think are relevant.
Mr. Graham indicated that he had given us reasons earlier why he would be voting against this motion. I'm hoping to persuade him to reconsider voting against it on the following basis. He, along with Arnold Chan, indicated that we didn't need to get the members of the advisory panel back. Notwithstanding the fact that members of the advisory panel were prohibited from answering some questions, or in some cases I was prohibited from asking questions on the basis of the mandate we'd had at the earlier set of meetings, he said that we didn't need to get them back because those questions would be answered by the minister when the minister was here.
We got the minister here on March 10 and asked her a number of questions. In answer to some of the questions, she said, “I don't know. That's not what I was in charge of. It's a panel that has set up certain processes and acted independently of my control.”
Therefore, these are questions that I believe Mr. Graham may well have believed, in good faith, would be answered by the minister when she was here on March 10. She indicated that she could not answer them at that time. It was not a matter of her withholding information from us. She simply did not possess that information. The members of the panel were the only ones who could answer these questions.
There are some additional questions that seem logical to ask at this time, given the nature of the appointments. In fact we have literally no information at all—at all—on the reasons for this new information or these unexpected changes, the most obvious one being the appointment of seven people to the Senate when we were promised five. Something happened that was a deviation from the initial announcement and from, I have to assume, the initial plan as well. It does seem unlikely to me that the Prime Minister would have announced appointing five people, all the while thinking—I could do my Montgomery Burns imitation here—that he was really going to appoint seven people to the Senate. Even if he did have that kind of Mephistophelean inclination, I just don't think he'd use it for this purpose. And I'm not accusing him of being Montgomery Burns, just to be clear about that. But something happened that made us go to seven instead of five.
Here's my question. It's not the only question I want to ask, but it's a question I would want to ask. We are told that the way the process is set up, the panel makes five recommendations for each vacancy. The Prime Minister has the discretion to take from the list or to not take from the list. Now, when it comes to someone like Chantal Petitclerc, I find it hard to believe that her name was not on the list. But when it comes to the former head of the transition team for the Prime Minister, I mean, was he actually nominated through that process or was it simply an old-fashioned kind of nomination, where the Prime Minister says he needs somebody who he thinks will be a good representative of the government in the Senate? It's not, incidentally, an unreasonable position to take; it's just unreasonable to take it while pretending you're taking a different approach.
That could be what happened. Mr. Harder may or may not have been appointed through the regular process. I would want to ask that question. Was he one of the people who was on the list, or was he someone who was appointed from outside? If we say this is a transparent system—and the word “transparent” is used, not “quasi-transparent”, or “opaque”, or “frosted glass”, but “transparent”—then that's a reasonable question to get an answer to. The government gave no indication. They didn't say that, yes, they got.... The Prime Minister could say this, by the way. He's under no obligation not to indicate that, yes, he took him from outside the list. Likewise, the head of Premier Wynne's transition team was appointed. Was she from outside the list or not?
It's possible that both these people were recommended by independent nominations that came from the charitable sector, or a union, or something like that. It's possible that wasn't the case. But these seem like reasonable things to be asking. There would be a limit to what we can ask because of the “Protected B” status of information contained on those nomination forms, but we can comply with those rules and still ask some of the questions I'm outlining here.
It seems reasonable to bring them before us to answer those questions, which do not put them in a position of disclosing information that it's inappropriate for them to disclose, given the formal agreement, or vow, or oath, or whatever it is that they undertook when they first came here. I'll conclude with that.
Finally, in the spirit of precision that my friend Mr. Graham likes so much—he pointed out, of course, on a previous occasion, that I had talked for 1,200 seconds in elaborating my points—I just want to point out that because we didn't deal with this at that meeting as I had requested, this has been delayed now since February 25, through March 8, March 10, March 22, which is today, which means that thanks to the unwillingness of the government to take a vote until a month had passed and the process was completed, we have been delayed by 139,968,000 seconds. I would like to bring that delay to a conclusion, although I'm in no position to stop others from speaking. Perhaps, if people are willing, we could try having our vote now.