Thank you for the question.
I mentioned that I had personal experience with how the currently proposed process wouldn't work. That was in the late seventies when Statistics Canada—and this is forgotten now—was in deep trouble and was a public scandal-ridden organization. All the tremendous reputation that it has acquired since was quite in ruin at that time. It was essential to find a chief statistician who could turn the agency around.
The government did appoint a search committee, but it couldn't find anybody it could recommend for the task. In the end, it undertook an active courtship of the vice-president of AT&T at the time, who agreed to take an enormous salary cut for the public service that he was intrigued to provide to Canada. That was Martin Wilk, my predecessor, who actually did turn the agency around. The government would not have been able to find anybody like him through the passive application process, and in fact it didn't find anybody like him until a formal search committee was created. The search committee engaged in an almost courtship with the most promising candidate. That's the kind of person one needs to attract to the extremely complex position that the chief statistician is. It's a manager, a professional, a public spokesperson for the agency, and ultimately the defender of its independence.