Yes, it sounds as if the parliamentary secretary certainly has a number of questions that he wants to have responses to there, so I'm happy to provide those and I think that's precisely the point. Their government doesn't seem to want to provide answers to questions, and I'm happy to do that.
The bottom line here is that under Standing Orders 110 and 111, this committee has the duty and the ability to have a nominee come before us so that we can examine their qualifications and assess whether they are able to perform the duties of the post they have been appointed to.
In order to be able to assess those qualifications and determine their ability to perform those duties, we must have a good sense of what those are. Because the government has been very secretive in terms of what the process would look like—sure, there has been some detail provided—there is a lot of detail lacking in terms of the consultation process with a variety of different groups, as one example. There are a number of examples.
The problem here is that we have a government that has created this process to appoint senators, which they claim is some kind of a reform to the Senate, but it's a very secretive process. Canadians won't even have any idea at the end of that process whether any of the people who have been selected by this board would even be appointed by the Prime Minister. There will be no way to ever know whether the committee was actually able to perform its duty.
To be able to properly assess this, we have to have a better sense as to what that process is, what those consultations would look like, and what the outcomes would be, because when you look at the permanent phase of the program, you see that it's the board that would be providing recommendations on what that permanent process would look like, and we have no idea what that would look like now.
If we aren't able to assess the board, we really have no way of knowing whether those changes that are being recommended by the board are going to be based on any kind of logic, so we have to actually have a sense as to what this process is and what the process will look like.
If you listened to the questions I had for the chair who was before us today, you'd know I was trying to get some sense as to what that process would look like so that I could assess the ability for the board and the members to be able to do the job, but we weren't able to get any answers because we were told that she couldn't answer that part of the questioning.
There were other members who had questions. Mr. Reid had some very significant and serious questions. If it isn't the job of a committee like ours to be able to have a sense as to whether the Constitution of Canada is being followed in a process the government is trying to set up, I think that's a pretty sad statement about this government. If they are not interested in knowing whether the Constitution is being followed in a process, that's a pretty sad statement. For us to be able to properly assess this, we must have a far better sense of the process, which the government is trying to keep secret.
The question I have for the parliamentary secretary is this: is it the position of this government that this minister shouldn't be responsible for this process to ensure that Canadians have confidence in it? How can they possibly have confidence in the work that's being done if we have no sense as to what the work is supposed to be, and what it will look like, and if it's going to be held secret from Canadians? That's exactly what the government is doing .
To bring the minister here and properly assess the process so we can lay that against the qualifications of the people who are charged with doing that process is the only way we can properly discharge our duties under these two standing orders. That's why it's so vitally important that the Minister of Democratic Institutions appear before this committee. It's so we can properly do our job.
If the government is going to try to prevent us from doing our job as a committee, that's also a pretty sad start on what they would call “real change”.