Evidence of meeting #20 for Procedure and House Affairs in the 40th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was code.
A recording is available from Parliament.
October 6th, 2009 / noon
Denise Benoit Director, Corporate Management, Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner
Since we have just launched our new Web site, we are not keeping those statistics at present. We will continue to upgrade the site and, no doubt, we will begin monitoring the numbers of hits our site gets and which pages are being consulted.
Noon
Director, Corporate Management, Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner
I cannot answer that because there is no counter.
Noon
Director, Corporate Management, Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner
At present, we have not made any decisions in that regard. That is not where we have focused our efforts over the first two years. We wanted to provide what we felt was essential information and that is what we have done, but we are not counting the number of hits our site is getting.
Noon
Conservative
12:05 p.m.
Director, Corporate Management, Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner
In the weeks following the creation of the office back in July 2007, there was a Web site with basic information. I would say that the new site, the new structure, is about a year old.
12:05 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Joe Preston
I have no one else on my speaking list, and we've done a very good job of answering questions about the annual report.
Madam Dawson, let me ask you a favour. I know we'd like to probably go a step or two further, if I can speak on behalf of the committee. Would it be possible for you to provide us with some fairly specific recommendations, and maybe even your answers to those recommendations? Sometimes we get the recommendation, and we're not the experts; you're doing the job. Maybe you could provide us with at least a teaser concerning how you think it could be solved or what changes need to happen.
Every year we find three or four of these things. We did a good job of cleaning up the question of gifts and some of those other technical things last time. If I could ask your indulgence to send us a letter on.... I know you mentioned one or two fairly good-sized ones in your annual report, but if there are some other things in there, I think it may be best for the committee to handle them all at once, at least four or five at a time, instead of trying to do one-off kinds of meetings. Once you send us that letter, we may then have questions from you and could have you back to discuss those changes.
Committee, what do you think of that proposal?
Ms. Dawson, go ahead.
12:05 p.m.
Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner
We could do anything like that. Certainly on the one proposal that we discussed in detail about giving out information, I'd be very pleased to pull something together quite quickly.
On the broader task of taking a look at the entire inquiry and the way it's drafted, we could suggest a redraft of it, if you want—
12:05 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Joe Preston
This committee is always looking for more work, and we'd be happy to take it on, but it will of course be put in with the other stuff we're working on.
12:05 p.m.
Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner
We're living with it and have more or less sorted out how we want to interpret it now.
But I certainly can give you the short list. As I said, I think you dealt with a lot of the little irritants last year, so I'm not sure we're going to come up with a very long list at this point. I took a look at the list of four or five items I raised last year and decided that most of them....
One of them was wondering whether it was really necessary to come here to get our guidelines and our forms approved, but you worked very well last year to approve the forms, finally, in a speedy way. With respect to guidelines, it's up to you whether you always want to vet the guidelines. We've not been able to do any guidelines, and I think one might ask whether we should do some guidelines on the gifts, for example. But I'd like to give six months or a year to see how it's working before I did some guidelines on that.
I'm not aware of anything else we necessarily need to do, but should we decide we want to do guidelines, we have to bring it through you. Anyway, I thought I'd let that one lie for a bit.
The other one I raised was the government contracts. It was a mystery to me what the heck you were looking for in the report. Nobody has ever told me, so that one has gone away. Unless you looked at that list and there was anything bothering you in it, I think we've now dealt with that report from the committee.
12:05 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Joe Preston
From today we have also had some discussion on compliance deadlines for the code. It's specific in the act, but the code is not specific, and perhaps it's something we could look at also.
12:05 p.m.
Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner
Okay. We'll look at those two items, and maybe not do a huge research on the inquiry right now, but we'll send you a couple.
12:05 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Joe Preston
Great. We may very well, after discussing those, call you back to ask you some questions on them. I think that's truly the best way for this committee to handle that.
12:05 p.m.
Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner
Perfect. So I'd say maybe in a month or a month and a half or so.
12:05 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Joe Preston
That sounds right to me.
Committee, that concludes what we were working on today. On Thursday we have the Chief Electoral Officer to speak, mostly on H1N1 under the conditions of election and that type of issue.
I guess we will leave it until Thursday and will see you all then.
Is there anything else for the committee?
Since I see nothing, we're adjourned.
