At the federal level, there is no selection or recruitment process for the members of administrative tribunals. No reform has been conducted in this area within the federal government. There is one in Quebec, under the Act respecting administrative justice, which was passed in 1996. For 15 years now, there has been a member selection and recruitment process in Quebec for the four major administrative tribunals, the TAQ, the Régie du logement, the Commission des relations du travail and the Commission des lésions professionnelles. None of those tribunals is as big in terms of the number of board members appointed as the number of cases heard by these agencies.
What is important to consider is that administrative justice is now as important as, if not more than, civil justice and criminal justice in terms of the number of cases settled every year. The Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada very definitely falls into this class of administrative tribunals, which are purely jurisdictional. In this class of genuine administrative tribunals, the Supreme Court of Canada has evolved in its case law, which concerns the guarantee of independence of those organizations. One of the points on which the court insists, particularly in the Ell and Bell cases, is precisely the recruitment and selection of members. The court has not yet rendered a clear decision on the subject, but there are trends, and the federal government will eventually have to take note of them, in particular because, in the Bell affair, it was a federal administrative tribunal that was at issue.
The procedure we are proposing is essentially the one that exists under the Act respecting administrative justice.
There should therefore first be a public notice of call for applications to state the qualifications and skills required of candidates.
Second, a committee should be formed—including one member of government, the chair of the IRB and a lawyer from the bar association, preferably that of the province in which the candidate is appointed—which would be responsible for examining the files of candidates and selecting files for interview.
Following the interview process, the committee would be asked to prepare a list of names of individuals suitable to be appointed as IRB board members, and the cabinet would have to select individuals to be appointed board members from that list. Candidates would no longer be stricken from the list; they would have to stay there.
Lastly, terms should be fixed. Terms would stop being limited in federal law to a renewable five-year term. If a member's term is not renewed at the end of the five-year period, that member would have to be told why, and would have to be given a chance to state his or her point of view on the reasons why the term was not renewed.
That, in a nutshell, is the procedure we are proposing.
I'm going to hand over the floor.