Mr. Speaker, I will attempt to keep my eye on you while I am asking this question. It may look like I am following a tennis match.
I had two points to raise with my hon. colleague. First, as he noted, there are three recognized parties, and therefore we have a three-person subcommittee looking at the appointments. I am assuming that this system works because there are at least three recognized parties. It would be a problem, perhaps, in an environment in which we had only two recognized parties. We recently had four recognized parties, and I wonder if it would be an issue when we faced a tie vote in the subcommittee. I will leave that thought.
Second, with regard to Madam Meilleur in particular, I have the sense that the hon. member is respectful of Madam Meilleur and her expertise, as I am as well. I wonder if the problem is not necessarily Madam Meilleur herself but the way she was appointed. It meant that any attempt to determine whether she could function according to her job description had to have the effect of an Easter egg hunt or an episode of CSI. They had to dig in, and she became effectively the opposition to that and a witness under hostile interrogation, and that whole thing wound up poisoning the well.
In other words, had she been presented in a genuine consultation that involved the Prime Minister speaking to the leaders of the two other recognized parties, at an informal level initially, saying that this was a suggestion and he would be interested in knowing what they thought, it might have been possible to find a way of causing that candidate to go through a process that in the end might have found her acceptable. I would be interested in his thoughts.