No, no, I'm not suggesting we do this; I'm just saying that theoretically you don't need a pool of 30 million people to draw from.
I think this is one of the issues we need to address as a government. We need to not only make it the reality but also to create the public perception that all Canadians have an equal opportunity to pursue a position in this sort of a tribunal and that there's no one at the front end who says that to get on the list to be considered you need to come through some gatekeeper. I think that's a legitimate point. That's not to say that the people who got past the gatekeepers were incompetent; that's just to say that if that starts to colour the perception of how the organization works.... I think this is the point you were making about eight years ago, that if the public perception is that who you know is critically important to whether you get on or not, that is a problem.
That's why, quite frankly, I think the decision to advertise publicly was a good one. I know you agree with that.
I was interested in your suggestion that reappointment should be at the decision of the chair rather than the minister of the government, because it makes it a competency in terms of doing your job, as opposed to a political issue again. On that basis, I guess there are other organizations that function in that way. One way you can determine if the reappointment process is working is whether people have ever failed to be reappointed, which suggests there actually is due diligence.
So when the competency test was applied to the sitting members--kind of after the fact--did any of them fail that test?