I agree that it's not necessary. If someone wanted to put it there, it would not bother me, but it would be very inelegant as legislative drafting. The improvements that are necessary are procedural and administrative in nature. They would give the commission more of a gatekeeper function. They would allow it to dismiss, without investigation, complaints that are clearly frivolous and without merit. This would liberate the commission from a large portion of its workload and would allow it to concentrate on cases of true merit. It would liberate respondents, both emotionally and financially, from the burden of having to deal with frivolous complaints. I believe there is room for specialization. A specialist tribunal could be created to deal with section 13 complaints within the human rights tribunal, just as in the Federal Court they have created specialist tribunals to deal with matters of national security. This would be helpful. Encouraging staff at the commission level, both investigators and counsel, to stay in their job for a while rather than to rotate out would be extremely helpful, because of the sensitivity to task and the amount of training that is necessary. Those are the kinds of improvements that I had in mind.
On October 26th, 2009. See this statement in context.