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After Question Period on Monday, Government House Leader Bardish Chagger tabled the nomination certificate for Mario Dion in the role of Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, the first name put forward after a process that has lasted almost 18 months and has forced outgoing Commissioner Mary Dawson to have her term extended three times.  But given Dion's checkered past, one has to wonder if he was in fact the only name that was put forward.

It's been a question as to whether the government was going to be able to find a new commissioner, given that the list of criteria is so stringent as to eliminate nearly everyone after all, they're looking for a fully bilingual former judge or federal tribunal chair.  Dion, the former Public Sector Integrity Commissioner, was appointed as the head of the Immigration and Refugee Board by the previous government in 2015, but it's his time as the former PSIC that has given people pause, especially given that the Auditor General issued a pair of scathing reports about his conduct while in that office.

In a scrum after QP, Chagger said that she was aware of the AG's report and was sure that Dion had undertaken to improve himself in the time since, which raises my suspicions again as to whether he was the only name they could find.  To refresh your memories, in 2014, the Auditor General cited that two cases out of hundreds, and labelled them mishandled to the point of "gross negligence."  Dion accepted the factual basis of those events, but not without some exception.  In the response to one of the two cases identified, he noted that it would be nearly impossible for that set of circumstances to reoccur, and that the AG did not take a number of factors into consideration or put them into the context of the situation, where Dion had inherited a deeply broken office after the first PSIC, Christiane Ouimet, resigned in disgrace after a previous Auditor General's report showing massive dysfunction in her office.  Ferguson not taking all factors or context into account, you may also recall, was a problem identified when his audit of the Senate was given a legal review by outside counsel, raising a lot of questions as to its reliability.

"Given the recent history of PSIC and the enormous transition within the organization while it was dealing with this file, we did not expect that 100 percent of its files would have been managed without error," AG Michael Ferguson wrote in the second of the two reports, noting that that particular file had been opened by the previous Commissioner.  So perhaps there's room for benefit of the doubt for Dion in the full context of what was demanded of him when he took over the PSIC job and had to rebuild the office.

It is, nevertheless, a line of attack that the opposition has immediately preyed upon, with the Conservatives sending their talking heads out to the politics shows to talk about how this somehow "pre-hobbles" Dion as a Commissioner who may very well have to complete the investigation into the Prime Minister's vacation with the Aga Khan last year, or the possible (but unlikely) investigations into Bill Morneau's activities around tabling Bill C-27.  The NDP, meanwhile, say that Dion's nomination raises red flags, but they continue to be more put out by the nomination process and have kept their objections to that which is also one of the reasons why Chagger was able to say that when she consulted with the other parties by telling him the one name that was advanced to her that they didn't raise any objections.

But the fact that Chagger only floated one name also raises questions, and I asked her directly about this in that scrum after QP.  When I asked how many people applied for the position, she couldn't say, and when I asked how big the short-list was, she stated that in order to keep the process as non-partisan as possible, she stayed away from it until the interviews had been completed and a single name was brought to her, at which point she reviewed it, and deeming it acceptable, brought it to the House of Commons.  (Remember that the PM and several top PMO staff recused themselves from this process because of the investigations into that vacation that they were all part of).  This means that we have no idea as to how many people applied to the position, and whether Dion was the only qualified candidate at all, given both how stringent the criteria are, and the fact that it took nearly 18 months to reach this point.

Added to this, one should also point out that during the testimony of the nominee for Lobbying Commissioner, Nancy Bélanger, last week at committee, she noted that she hadn't applied for that position initially, but for the post of Information Commissioner (where she currently serves as the deputy commissioner) but was encouraged to also apply for the Lobbying Commissioner position at the time, for which she was the eventual nominee.  It does make me wonder whether Dion had applied for a different position and was asked, at the time, to also apply for the Ethics Commissioner post, and was found to be qualified at the time, giving them a name that fit the criteria.  But that remains supposition, given that we haven't been given any context as to the process or candidates.

Regardless, even though Dion has been given the nomination, it's unlikely that we'll see much of a sea change in how the Ethics Commissioner doles out advice or handles investigations, because part of the real problem is the enabling legislation.  While Dawson has been pleading for it to be updated for years, MPs have been consistently reluctant to do so, making only the minor of tweaks whenever the subject comes up.  And until MPs are looking to get serious on reforming their own conflict of interest code, I don't expect that Dion will be much different from Dawson in the office.

Photo Credit: CBC News

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