Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, witnesses, and thank you for your testimony today. I have just a few questions.
The thing that strikes me is what are we here to try to solve? What's the problem that's before us? Well, there's a glaring problem before us, a glaring crisis that wasn't before us 15 months ago, when we first took our seats here. When we first sat down here 15 months ago, there were five vacancies—five vacancies—on the IRB. Now there are 54 vacancies, soon to go to 57 vacancies.
That tells me that—and we've had two ministers, first Minister Solberg and now Minister Finley, in the last 15 months. Both of them have been unable or unwilling to do their job. Clearly they're not doing their job if they can't reappoint judges, can't reappoint people to the board, to deal with this major backlog.
For my first question, then, why is the minister not doing her job right now?
Second, why is the minister, and why is this Conservative government, trying to change the system and re-politicize—I'll agree with my colleague, it is re-politicizing—the entire system of appointments? To take us from a merit-based system that we've gradually moved into—I'll grant them that, but in 2004 we had a merit-based system that was working, and was working well. Now it's trying to roll back the clock to the prior era of Mulroney, to re-politicize the process.