Mr. Speaker, I will make just a few comments on what the House has before it today, this motion to appoint Mr. George Radwanski as the new privacy commissioner.
At the outset, I want to say that everything I have to say today should not be taken as a reflection in any way upon the integrity of Mr. Radwanski or his competence as an individual, an administrator or, for that matter, potentially as a privacy commissioner. However, there are a number of concerns that should be registered at this time.
If we have a recorded vote on this, it may well be that we might choose to vote against the motion, not so much as an expression of opposition to Mr. Radwanski, but more as our expression of opposition to the process which has been followed and the fact that the government has missed an opportunity to really do the right thing and break new ground with respect to the appointments being made to these kinds of positions.
One can understand, to a certain degree, what we normally call patronage when the government appoints people to carry out its policies. It is understandable even though this can be done to excess and improperly with people without merit sometimes getting appointed. Nevertheless, governments have a right to appoint people to carry out policy whom they trust share their world view and can carry out their policy thrusts in any particular area.
However, there are a number of other positions that are not positions in which people are entrusted with the carrying out of government policy. What they are entrusted with is the scrutiny of government policy. Their job is to criticize, if necessary, government policy. For instance, there is no possibility that part of the job of an ambassador is to criticize government policy. He is an extension of government policy. However, a privacy commissioner, an information commissioner, an official languages commissioner and a number of other of those kinds of appointments that may exist either as officers of the House or out in the broader realm of the public service are quite different in that respect. Certainly the Office of the privacy commissioner falls within that realm.
I go back, at the risk of sounding repetitive, as I know I do to some people in the House, to the McGrath report. We suggested in that report that real power be given to committees of the House when it comes to these kinds of appointments and, for that matter, when it comes to a variety of other critical appointments, like the appointment of the head of the CRTC, at that time called the CTC, and those to a number of other government boards and commissions. This was not just to have informal consultations but to give committees real power to hear from potential candidates, not just candidates that the government had already selected, or if it was fixed on only one candidate, to hear from that candidate and make a recommendation. For that matter, we even suggested that the committee have some measure of veto power over whether or not an appointment was to be made.
That long standing recommendation goes back some 15 years. The government had an opportunity here to implement that recommendation in one way or another through having a much more meaningful process than it did, instead of asking us what we thought of a candidate and then appointing him as an interim privacy commissioner.
This is putting the rest of us on the spot now. The government tells us that a candidate is going to come before the committee and at committee we then find out that it is a hybrid event. It is not really a committee meeting but an informal discussion. There may or may not be a record of the conversation. I raised this matter with the chairman at the time and I understood from what he said that there would be a record, but now I understand that there is not. The record is not available. As far as I am concerned, I was misled at the time with respect to the nature of the meeting.
There is a lot to be unhappy about. There is the failure of the government to implement a long standing recommendation when it had an opportunity to do so with respect to these kinds of appointments. We are unhappy with the inadequacy of the government's process, by its own standards.
Mr. Radwanski is capable of impartiality. Even though he was an active Liberal, he has a history of being critical of the Liberal government and the Liberal Party from time to time. That is beside the point. The point is that when it comes to this kind of position the government should have chosen someone who was beyond reproach at the level of perception. I am sure that there are many capable Canadians who have no particular political party association and who would make great privacy commissioners. They would not necessarily come from the public service because, as we know, sometimes bureaucrats have a tendency to secrecy. I do not mean secrecy in the privacy sense, but secrecy in the secrecy sense. They might not fit the bill either.
I am sure that there are Canadians who would have been great nominees. Parliament could have had some role in short listing them and suggesting to the government that it select from half a dozen people. This would have been a much more meaningful process and would have helped, in the public's mind, to reduce the cynicism about parliament being a rubber stamp for things that are decided elsewhere. Let us not kid ourselves. This was clearly decided elsewhere.
We could, for the sake of Mr. Radwanski and for the sake of public perception, have a nice touchy feely debate in the House and pretend that parliament is doing something. That is not what is happening. Parliament has been presented with a fait accompli and an inadequate process. This is another missed opportunity. As far as I am concerned, this is another demonstration of the fact that the government and the Liberal Party are a hopeless case when it comes to democratic reform or doing anything that would really enhance the perception and the power of parliament.