Thanks, Chair.
I was listening very carefully to Mr. Young and his concerns.
Lynching is not Sheila Fraser's style, for starters, and it's never been the style of the committee. I understand what you're concerned about, but I don't think there's anything to this.
As for “founded” and “well founded”, that could be as simple as the Auditor General saying, “I could have put 'well' in, but didn't know it mattered to you.”
Again, I want to emphasize that I don't think the government needs to be as defensive as it would normally have to be.
Here's one of the concerns about waiting. If you look at her conclusion in paragraph 37 on page 13, it says that the commissioner's “actions were inconsistent with the spirit of the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act”, and, further, the values and ethics code for the public service. Then it goes on to state, “In our view, the Commissioner’s behaviour and actions do not pass the test of public scrutiny....”
But the further issue for us as parliamentarians is that she's looking at this, determining there's a problem here, and dealing with it on the one hand; on the other, there's a governance problem. Therefore, the longer we take to start to come to grips with this, the more we may be allowing other people, other officers of Parliament, to go on about....
Apparently the lobby registrar, for instance, has been around for 20-some years, and what's the review? Where are the mechanisms?
That's what she gets at in terms of analyzing this case, but she's extrapolating from that the need to have a better check and balance, even up to and including the departmental audits.
Mr. Kramp will know that for years we've put a lot of emphasis on the departmental internal audits as the first line of defence. But it turns out that the commissioner, in the case of officers of Parliament, gets to appoint all those people, even the outside scrutineers, if you will.
So it seems to me that we could be accused of not dealing with this in a timely fashion, allowing a mechanism that needs to be in place to be delayed, and thereby allowing other infractions to go on that we wouldn't know about because there's no check and balance.
Further, on the first go-around, unless the committee has changed since I've been here, if it turns out that there needs to be more meetings, that there needs to be a different process because of what's coming forward, then we'll act accordingly.
I feel even stronger now, after we've discussed it, that it's in all our interests, government included, to at least take an initial look at this on Tuesday.