Thank you, Chair.
I'd like to start from the premise that a lot of us feel that the current regulations governing lobbyists are completely toothless, useless even, because we keep getting faced with examples like the David Dingwall affair, which so horrified committees when they found that he had a contingency fee to get a technology partnership loan of $450,000. When he was reminded by the commissioner or somebody that you're not allowed to take contingency fees, they restructured it so that it was a fee of the exact same dollar figure called something else. So how is that helpful?
I understand some of the points that Mr. Duguay is making, but some of us are coming from the starting position that lobbyists have bastardized democracy in the U.S. and we're not going to let that happen here. The revolving door of influence peddling is offensive to Canadians. Mr. Duguay is trying to paint it in a positive light that he's an ordinary Canadian and he has a right to talk to any politician. The fact is ordinary Canadians shouldn't have to talk to politicians through lobbyists. You aren't real estate agents. It's not like you need an agent to buy a house. We should never have a system where you need one of you guys to go and access the people who represent you.
I don't know, but I get really angry when I hear both the tone and the content of your remarks that there's nothing wrong with the system, it's just a bunch of good guys accessing their elected representatives. There was a famous case where a Liberal cabinet minister went on to work for big pharma and was lobbying big pharma at the same time that the Liberals were talking about the drug patent review and the 20-year patent period. So here you had a high-profile, famous Liberal minister lobbying the Liberal chair of the committee that was going to rule on the biggest corporate giveaway since the CNR, the 20-year patent protection for pharmaceutical drugs. That was offensive. That was influence peddling of the highest order, and people want it stopped.
So some of us feel this act doesn't go far enough. If it's too onerous for you to write down who you're talking to and when for the fees that you collect, there's something wrong with your side of the table, not ours. That tells me we're doing the right thing when you're complaining about that level of accountability.
This bill does ban contingency fees, and I would hope that the enforcement process would be such that you can't just call it something else and charge the same amount of money based on whether the deal goes through. But do you also believe that companies that are engaged in lobbying shouldn't be allowed to get any other kinds of contracts from the government while they're lobbying the government? This is a way to get at the Earnscliffe revolving door situation where it's common practice for a lobbyist firm to also be selling other services to the government that they're lobbying. Do you believe that's one of the changes we should put in place here?
