Liberals accused of unethical appointment

‘Ragingly incompetent’

OTTAWA • Liberals followed a secretive, unethical process to nominate a new ethics commissioner and force a decision before a long winter break, opposition parties say.

“It’s just ragingly incompetent and frustrating and cynical,” New Democrat ethics critic Nathan Cullen said Tuesday.

He wondered if Mario Dion, whose work as Public Service Integrity Commissioner was panned by Canada’s auditor general, was fit for the job. But “it’s impossible,” he said, to figure that out in his allotted seven-minute question-andanswer period during a lastminute, one-hour committee meeting the day after Dion’s nomination was announced.

Conservatives agree that Liberals did not respect a legislated requirement to involve the opposition in Dion’s nomination.

“We find very unacceptable the lack of meaningful consultation,” said ethics critic Peter Kent, though emphasizing that he took no issue with Dion as a candidate and “it is most important that we don’t have a lack of continuity between commissioners.”

During the hastily-convened committee, Dion would not commit to completing ongoing investigations into the prime minister and finance minister if he got the job.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is being investigated for the use of a private helicopter during his visit to the Aga Khan’s private island last year. Finance Minister Bill Morneau is being investigated to see whether he broke any rules by introducing a pension reform bill to parliament while still holding shares in his own pension company.

“One of the first things I would attend to (is) review the whole genesis of those investigations,” Dion said. “I would own the final result and therefore I have to assess what has been done to date to determine whether I am supportive of that, but abandoning an investigation completely without reason is not something I would do.”

There’s no guarantee the investigations will be completed before ethics commissioner Mary Dawson leaves her post on Jan. 8 and, more troubling for Opposition parties, there’s no requirement for her successor to do so.

Questions have been raised about Dion’s performance in previous roles. In 2014 Canada’s auditor general found “gross mismanagement” in two separate case files during Dion’s tenure as Public Sector Integrity Commissioner. “We did not do the work as we should’ve done it, but it was taking place in the middle of a crisis,” Dion offered in committee.

Kent boiled it down to Dion having been given “a number of very challenging assignments in challenging organizations.”

But Duff Conacher, head of advocacy organization Democracy Watch, said, “We’re not going to see a future of high ethical standards if this guy is approved. I hope that the opposition party leaders will actually complain to the speaker that their privilege has been violated by this process.”

Well over a year ago, the government hired a headhunting firm, Boyden Ottawa, to conduct “executive search services” as part of the process. A contract that covers assistance with both the ethics and lobbying commissioners began in 2016 and is valid until September 2018, at a value of just over $200,000.

Dion said he was interviewed for the job about three weeks ago. A senior government official said letters were sent to opposition parties last Tuesday. House leader Bardish Chagger, who was in charge of the process, announced the nomination less than a week later, on Monday. Parliament could rise Wednesday and definitely would not sit past Friday.

“There’s a clear conflict of interest that the person running this whole operation, this whole hiring process, is also the spokesperson defending the prime minister on his ethical violations, and the finance minister,” Cullen said of Chagger.