Source : Globe & Mail

A cloud of controversy envelops Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, and the Ministry of Natural Resources as a result of the medical isotope crisis and the subsequent firing of the head of the commission.

But could there be a silver lining to this cloud? Yes, indeed, if one of the consequences is a long overdue clarification of the rules governing relations between federal politicians and quasi-judicial regulators.

When I first went to Ottawa as an MP in 1993, I was amazed and appalled at the apparent lack of ethical and administrative guidelines governing relations between ministers of the federal government and its regulatory bodies -- a deficiency that persists to this day.

My personal understanding of what those guidelines should be was based on rules established in Alberta when the petroleum industry was in its infancy - rules to govern relations between provincial politicians and energy regulatory bodies such as the old Alberta Petroleum and Natural Gas Conservation Board. Those rules, initially formulated to avoid the patronage and corruption that had tainted the first petroleum regulatory bodies in the United States, included the following:

(1) Regulatory agencies were to be established as quasi-judicial bodies at arm's-length from the government;

(2) Regulatory board members were to be selected on the basis of merit, not on political connections, and evaluated on performance;

(3) The government was to give direction to the regulatory bodies by statute, statutory amendments, and orders-in-council providing policy direction or ordering inquiries;

(4) Regulatory bodies were to communicate with government via public reports and written decisions usually based on findings gathered and vetted through public hearings;

(5) Communications between government ministers and regulators via informal social contact, political middlemen, and the media were to be assiduously avoided.

In Ottawa, however, during the Chrétien years, no such rules appeared to exist. This became apparent in the first year of the government when the minister responsible for the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, Michel Dupuy, personally lobbied the CRTC in support of an application for a radio licence by one of his constituents. When this indiscretion came to light, both the minister and the prime minister professed to see no conflict of interest and maintained that no government guidelines, ethical or otherwise, had been violated. The prime minister's ethics counsellor took no action to investigate until hounded to do so by the opposition and the media, and ended up merely whitewashing the affair.

And this was only the beginning, subsequent years being characterized by numerous patronage appointments to agencies such as the Immigration and Refugee Board, government interference for political reasons in "independent inquiries" such as the Krever inquiry into tainted blood and the Somalia inquiry, and blatant political interference in the work of regulatory agencies and Crown corporations as diverse as the RCMP Public Complaints Commission and the Business Development Bank of Canada.

This is the administrative and political culture in which regulatory bodies such as the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission have operated for more than a decade. The time is long overdue to clarify the rules governing relations between federal politicians and such entities.

Adopting and enforcing the five rules stated above would go a long way toward restoring public confidence in the performance and regulation of Canada's increasingly important nuclear industry.

Preston Manning, a former leader of the opposition in the House of Commons, is a senior fellow of the Fraser Institute. He is also president of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy.

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