Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will be supporting the motion. I can appreciate the perspective the folks on Cabinet have to be able to do this. I did go to the Government Operations meetings to hear this out. I understand about the continuity of a position. I would just think, deep down, there must be a better way to do this. I’m not actually against direct appointments; I just want transparency on them personally. I think what this does is we don’t know what’s actually… There’s a lot of vagueness to this.

This is our opportunity by being clear, honest and fair to all around. If we say vacant position, then no one has anything to worry.

I know people are saying today that isn’t how it’s going to work, but yet we can’t guarantee that once laws are in place. The application is we have to trust people in the future someday to apply it in a manner that we thought it was designed for. Am I of the mind that this is going to be a problem all the time? Probably not. Am I of the mind that it will

happen? Yes, it will happen. If we don’t clearly specify on how something is to work, my goodness, we have to be very prescriptive when we do these things and not allow them to be enabled in a manner that people can do this.

The only other thing I would add to this particular discussion, and there’s been a fair bit of it and I welcome hearing people’s perspectives, but the big issue I have on top of that is the fact that there is no clarity, there is no scrutiny and the fact that all the power is in the Cabinet’s hands. Now, woe is us when we hear the constant line that these are private matters and not for public. But I’ve often said all direct appointments should be something we should be proud of. I do agree that there are lots of occasions why they should happen, but I feel that it’s unfair to the public service and it’s unfair to the bureaucracy at large. I’m really speaking, when I say public service, of those in the unit, sorry, because they see someone getting a job walking in on that Monday and they wonder: how the heck did they get that job? First thing they think is, well, they must know somebody. It’s that type of perception.

The famous ointment is called transparency on this one. It would cure all questions. If people knew who was being appointed, they knew what reasons they were being appointed, it makes sense. In some communities it’s tough to put somebody in a job because we can’t find them, but we could find people who could do the job who just need a fair opportunity. In cases like that, I am very supportive of transition, training opportunities, where we work with people to put folks in jobs where we know they have the ability to step up to the plate. They may not have the university degree; they may not have the technical training. Sometimes we can look past those because we know they are darn good at what they can do and we see promise in them to do those things. They just don’t have the three, four, six, eight years, whatever the case may be, to run out somewhere to go get those types of training and then hope there’s a job when they come back. There are lots of ways to make things happen.

Again, my issue is about transparency. This at least provides some confidence from this side of the House. I understand that Cabinet doesn’t like change from Members’ points of view when they have decided that this is the way it is. When we get it in writing, it is pretty much done from a perspective of negotiation, and my comfort level is that I would like to know, that when we leave this building today, if Cabinet has now downloaded it’s responsibility of redirecting these things to the Minister and it’s being redirected down to somebody else in the bureaucracy such as maybe the deputy minister, that at least I know somebody is ensuring that it is going to a vacant position that we’re transferring somebody over to it, and at the end of the day, I don’t have to worry that there are any shenanigans going one. The bottom line is, it’s

the smallest amount of transparency that we can hope for by guaranteeing that no one will be trumped, no position will be at risk, and if it’s a vacant one, like I said, we should be proud of these things. A lot of times they make a lot of sense. Thank you.