I appreciate your raising this.
To the best of my knowledge, she's an officer of Parliament, an agent of Parliament. When we went through the process of hiring the new Auditor General—there were so many fires going on at the time that we could only spend so much time on it—I was not very pleased with the process.
It is Parliament that decides who is hired for these positions, and it's only Parliament that can remove those people from their positions. Yet the government of the day completely owned the process; the opposition was not engaged. There was maybe a little bit of perfunctory consultation about what sorts of things we were looking for, but it didn't amount to a real consultation. By comparison, when we hired the Sergeant-at-Arms when I was at Queen's Park, because that person was hired by the provincial parliament, there was an all-party committee struck, and it was totally non-partisan all the way through.
What we do here federally, at least with the last big appointment.... The government did all of it. They did the consultation, they did the interviews, they did the selection, and then they offered up to Parliament a name, and it was vote yes, vote no. The process just didn't seem to me to be consistent with the notion that the person is an agent of Parliament. It's deliberately structured that way so that the government of the day can't order these particular people around, people such as our Privacy Commissioner, our Auditor General.... We have a number of them; I think there are 10 or 11, actually.
The process should support the notion that Parliament is doing the hiring, and yet the other process was not that way at all. It was rather like: “Oh, by the way, do you mind giving your thumbs up, yes or no?” If this process is going to kick in again, I would very much like us to engage, in some fashion. I don't even know where we'd begin, Mr. Chair. I just lay this in front of you. The new government seems to be interested in doing things differently. This is one opportunity by which we could right-side Parliament by giving Parliament back control of the whole process of hiring these agents and officers, which is then consistent with the notion that it's Parliament doing the hiring and that Parliament is the only one that can fire someone. The reason is that if the prime minister of the day, no matter who, is upset with an Auditor General's report, he can't fire them. It takes Parliament to do that.
I would ask that we engage early in this and look at doing things differently, consistent with the government's indication that they want to do it differently.
Thanks.