Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for York West.
The motion calls upon the government to refer most appointments to Commons committees for detailed scrutiny. At first glance the proposal does seem attractive. After all, which of us does not want to remove even the slightest hint of patronage or cronyism in the appointment process? Which of us would not support the extension of greater democracy or expanding the powers of MPs in committees?
However, as they say, the devil is in the details, and so it is with this motion.
The motion that originally was brought forward would actually weaken our standing orders concerning government appointments. Our standing orders require that all non-judicial order in council appointments be tabled in the House so that committees can review the person's qualifications and competencies if they choose to do so. This applies to all deputy ministers, ambassadors, consul generals and the heads of crown corporations and most regulatory boards such as the CRTC.
By the way, we have for the first time in the history of the CRTC an aboriginal person by the name of Ron Williams sitting on the board. He is a Métis and a former entrepreneur who owned a cable company. He has all the competencies needed and required to be totally qualified to sit on the CRTC. That created a balance that was needed on that regulatory board. We have tried to achieve that with all of the others. I highly recommend the process.
Appointments to the National Energy Board, the Canadian Transportation Agency and even some quasi-judicial appointments are tabled in the House on the basis of House precedent, such as the appointments to the Immigration and Refugee Board.
I want to talk about the regulatory boards. I come from an area steeped in resource development. We have great need for the work of these regulatory boards. We need those appointments to be made efficiently and quickly because industry does not wait for the government system or machinery to come into place or the bodies to fall into place in order to do what they have to do. I will give an example.
On the land and water boards and the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board we have the capacity to do what is needed for many of the industry partners that want to move ahead with development. One example is the huge move in the diamond resource development area. Two mines went through an environmental process and they needed to do that in concert with those regulatory boards. The land and water boards issue water licences. They cannot wait for us to go through a machinery of government process here to appoint people to do the work they need to do. They also issue land permits. They cannot wait for that purpose either.
We have been able to achieve a certain balance in gender and regional appointments, including those target groups that would never otherwise get a chance: aboriginal people, minorities, and women. We also have to create a balance so that we do not have a board totally full of lawyers or scientists. This is the way in which we see the process bear out the facts of what is needed.
The standing orders are more comprehensive than what the Bloc proposed in its motion yesterday. The Bloc motion does not include the appointments of deputy ministers or any quasi-judicial bodies. The Bloc motion put on notice yesterday did not go as far as others on the opposition's side might wish. For example, it did not recommend requiring parliamentary review of judicial appointments nor did it require parliamentary approval of appointments.
I have concerns with such proposals as they could result in an American-style approach to reviewing appointments; basically a witch hunt, a muckraking process mired in irrelevant, unnecessary details, and investigations of those unnecessary details.
I want to ask members of the House if this is what they want, especially having spent any time at all watching the nomination hearings in the United States that often are used simply to score political points. It is very politically driven.
Sadly, such hearings send important messages to ordinary citizens, but not the ones legislators might wish. The main message is this: Let a person's name stand for an important appointment and the person and his or her family may suffer public humiliation and embarrassment in front of millions of fellow citizens for wanting to do a public service, for wanting to contribute to one's country and its citizens. These are well-intended motives. As a result, many highly qualified candidates are discouraged from letting their names stand for consideration. What a terrible loss of potential talent.
I ask the House, is this what we want in our country? Of course I am not the first to ask this question, It was studied in some detail by the McGrath committee, which investigated ways of increasing the involvement of MPs in the appointment process.
At the time, the committee took a long, hard look at the American experience and found problems with it. There was considerable variation from committee to committee in the intensity and thoroughness of the review that existed. It was very arbitrary. There were almost no written standards. There was a wide variation in the documentation required for a nomination and the staff resources available to study it. The committee found that while a large number of appointments potentially could be subjected to public hearings and scrutiny, the reality was that committees often devoted most of their time to those nominations most likely to garner the greatest publicity.
We must think of that. That is abhorrent. In effect, the system was weighted in favour of media circuses, high profile media circuses that can take on a life of their own and where we lose the essence of what the process is all about in the first place.
For these reasons and many more, the committee recommended that we not follow the U.S. example. We are a country. We have our own ways.
Instead, smaller steps were recommended, some of which have found their way into our Standing Orders. As a result, MPs and committees now have wider powers to examine appointments and nominations of interest to them. For example, Standing Order 110 requires that all non-judicial order in council appointments be tabled within five sitting days following their appearance in the Canada Gazette , and appointments are deemed to have been referred to the appropriate standing committee for review. Standing Order 111 gives committees up to 30 sitting days to review the “qualifications and competence” of appointees or nominees and requires ministers to provide to committee members the curriculum vitae, that is, the CVs or resumés, of the appointees should they be requested.
As members can see, the House of Commons already has many procedures in place allowing MPs to undertake detailed scrutiny of appointments.
Finally, we need to ask ourselves why we should fix a system that is not broken: “it ain't broke, don't fix it”. After all, the reality is that Canada's system for making appointments has worked admirably, by anyone's standards. In this regard we would do well to note the comments of Transparency International, the world's leading international organization dedicated to rooting out corruption in government and business.
Since issuing its first report in 1995, it has ranked Canada as the G-8 nation with the lowest level of perceived corruption, and among the seven best in the world. Clearly we are doing something right, so we need to ask ourselves if this is the time to take an entirely new and unnecessary approach. I think not. This is particularly true of judicial appointments, which would run the risk of degenerating into fiascos if we followed the U.S. approach.
What would this do to our system of justice and the respect it is held in by Canadians for its impartiality? Would it improve the already high quality of persons serving on our highest court? Would it expose nominees to cheap political shots that would discourage those well-qualified individuals unable to stomach the thought of a public inquisition, which is so unnecessary? Of course, we could probably make some improvements to our current procedure. After all, democracy is a work in progress. Members should work with the government so that we can make existing procedures work even better.