Codes of conduct are relatively new in this world of administrative law. That's part of the reason they've caused a bit of concern. Another thing is that they have been implemented.... For example, in Ontario, there has been a statute that requires implementation of codes of conduct, but there's no guidance as to what should be included in them and there's also no guidance about a complaints process about them. In fact, if you look at codes of conduct across the country, the ones that do exist, there are very few that have an actual complaints process. In a sense, the IRB should be commended for having set itself into a new field of creating a complaints process. The one exception, quite a large exception, is in Quebec, where there is a council that's been around for 20 or so years and there's quite an elaborate process. It could be used as a model.
Some of the things I said in terms of best practices were that we need to have an investigatory panel and that the ideal process would end with an independent decision-maker, so not the chair but someone else. The reason I said this is twofold. One is that having an independent chair avoids the kinds of issues we see with the IRB. The IRB is just a microcosm of what will happen, which is that the public will generally think that the chair of a tribunal is trying to protect the tribunal. We can avoid that by having an independent final decision-maker. The other thing is that we need to prevent chairs from having any kind of influence on the decision-maker itself. This goes back into deep and long jurisprudence in administrative law, in which it's seen as a violation of the independence of a decision-maker to have the chair or anyone have an inappropriate influence on the decisions being made.