Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my colleague's comments regarding patronage and our mutual interest in putting an end to patronage but how does he explain the fact that we do not have a public appointments commission in place and up and running at this point in time after the good work we all did on the Federal Accountability Act which was given royal assent on December 12?
We have now learned, from the budgets that were just circulated, that the Public Appointments Commission Secretariat has been up and running since April 21 of last year with an executive director, salaries, a budget, administration officers and a physical infrastructure. However, it has been doing everything but vetting patronage appointments. In fact, officials have been running off to Europe. They have only written one report. With a budget of $2 million, the Public Appointments Commission Secretariat has only produced one report. It actually gave advice to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration to not use merit as the appointment consideration for the IRB but to appoint whoever the government wanted. The leadership of the IRB was so offended that they tendered their resignation.
If we are concerned about the Public Appointments Commission and appointing based on merit, how does he explain that we have no commissioner and no board of commissioners but we do have the Public Appointments Commission Secretariat burning up public money and doing nothing but generating one nuisance report that has caused us all embarrassment?