Information & Ethics Committee on May 25th, 2010

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

Yes.

Mr. Chair, ministers are ultimately accountable and answerable to Parliament. Therefore, ministerial staff members will not appear when called before parliamentary committees. Instead, ministers will appear before a committee when required to account for staff members' actions. Virtually all departmental activity is carried out in the name of the minister, and ultimately that accountability lies with cabinet ministers.

We've been witnessing over the last several weeks what I was going to say is an unprecedented event, but this committee created the precedent at its last hearings on this matter, where a minister has arrived at the committee—

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

Order. Mr. Poilievre, order, please.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

—and has asked to be held accountable, but then the committee and the opposition have fought against—

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

Order. For the fourth time, order.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

—that accountability.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

Mr. Poilievre, I simply want to remind you, if you're going to call a point of order, we want to get to that quickly--

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Do you know what the role of the chair is?

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

I'm not on a point of order.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

--but the motion before us is fairly clear.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

You gave me the floor as a speaker on the motion.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

The motion is with regard to procedure, whether or not we are going to move forward to another point of business.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

And I'm arguing against that, which is my right when I'm arguing on a motion.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

I want to encourage people not to go too far to the issue of debating the matter that's before the House right now. It's a very serious issue.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

Fair enough.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

The committee is the master of its agenda, and the member has made a motion. It's in order.

I ask all members just to respect, try to speak to the motion.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

Thank you.

The motion speaks to the matter before the House, Mr. Chair, and I'm arguing against the motion. As a member of Parliament with parliamentary privileges, I have the right to make the arguments I think most germane to the motion, and I will.

The government fully recognizes the authority of parliamentary committees to call persons and papers as they carry out their work. However, ministers are accountable and answerable to Parliament for government policies, decisions, and operations. Ministerial staff are ultimately accountable through their minister.

Ministers have run for office and accepted the roles and the responsibilities of being a minister, including being accountable to and answering questions in Parliament. Again, ministerial staff are ultimately accountable through the minister they serve. When they accepted their positions to support their ministers, ministerial staff did not sign on to being humiliated and intimidated by members of Parliament.

Ministers' staff who have appeared before committees have been denied the accompanying support of their ministers. They have been denied the opportunity to get basic treatment of due process. They have been stripped of the ancient tradition that guarantees ministers are responsible for the function of their ministries and their departments.

We have a minister here today. He's agreed to answer questions. He has graciously answered all the questions to which he's been permitted to respond. The committee should respect the centuries-old tradition that the minister is responsible and let him answer those questions.

Ms. Freeman wants to move a motion that removes those centuries of parliamentary tradition and replace it with an ad hoc system that singles out staff members in areas of ministerial responsibility. I think that leadership starts at the top. That's why the heads of the ministries, in this case the ministers, are appearing before this committee.

As you know, the witness the committee asked for was a member of the Prime Minister's Office. Prime Ministers typically do not testify before committees—that matter is not in dispute. Therefore the Prime Minister does send a designate to represent him. In this case we have Minister Baird.

I will point out that at least three of the four parties in this room have referred to Minister Baird as a charming minister. I think we could probably pass a motion to that effect if it were so moved. The very least we can do, out of respect for our system of government, is to give him a chance to respond to the questions before the committee. Perhaps the members would be satisfied and satiated in all their curiosities if they were to allow such a discussion to go ahead.

I don't think we even heard ten minutes of questioning at this point, and opposition members are already asking to shut down this ministerial accountability.

Mr. Chair, I would encourage members to not only allow the discussion to continue, but to also give the minister opportunities to answer questions. I think in the last exchange between Minister Baird and Mr. Easter, Mr. Easter spent about six minutes of his time in a monologue and permitted the minister only about a total of 15 or 20 seconds to speak. That does not appear to the objective observer to be an exchange or even a question and answer. It appears rather to be a speech.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

Sometimes that happens.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

Sometimes speeches do happen in this committee. Thank you for entertaining mine.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

I'd like to hear from some other members.

Mr. Siksay, please.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

Addressing Madam Freeman's motion, I have to say that the committee and you were generous in allowing the minister to speak when he arrived here this morning unannounced, but it is clear from the questions we have already had that the Minister of Transport has no direct responsibility for the staff person we were hoping to have appear before the committee this morning.

It is very clear that the Minister of Transport has no direct supervisory responsibilities for Mr. Soudas. I can't imagine that he has knowledge of his day-to-day activities. I can't even imagine that he's been briefed about Mr. Soudas's activities in any detail that would be helpful to this committee, and certainly he hasn't provided any evidence that he is willing to do that or has been briefed on that.

Instead, what we have had from the minister are allegations about the conduct of this committee, which I find extremely objectionable and unfounded. We've also heard his rather patronizing assessment of senior ministerial staff, which, as a former staff person to a member of Parliament, I also find extremely unfortunate. I guess I will say calmly that I just don't think that is appropriate. I believe that senior staff are chosen for their abilities and certainly have many skills that make it possible for them to deal with the kinds of circumstances that arise in our parliamentary system.

I do believe we are not getting anywhere with regard to our study of the allegations of political interference. In fact, our study did not involve any allegations of political interference in access to information requests in the office of the Minister of Transport, so I don't see any relevance to his testimony here this morning.

We need to move on to the question of Mr. Soudas's failure to appear. I don't know what the notion of collective responsibility is that the minister mentioned this morning. It seems to me that ministers have specific responsibility for their departments, and I can't believe we're going to get into a situation where we can ask any minister any question about the conduct of any department. It seems we are going down a very strange path.

We need to get back to our agenda and discuss the failure of Mr. Soudas to appear when he was invited by this committee.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

Go ahead, Mrs. Thi Lac.

[Ève-Mary Thaï Thi Lac, Bloc, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Mr. Chair, the minister and Mr. Poilievre maintain that ministers are responsible for whatever goes on in their office. However, when Minister Paradis was questioned about interference into access to information requests, the topic on today's agenda, he denied any knowledge of the situation and placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of his staff.

Both Mr. Poilievre and Mr. Baird have just told us that responsibility rests with the ministers, whereas Mr. Paradis argued that his staffers, and not himself, were the responsible parties. Your government maintains that ministers will take responsibility themselves. When the question was put to him, Mr. Paradis said that responsibility must rest with his staff and that he had no knowledge of the situation.

I'd just like to know how we are going to proceed. In this particular instance, the minister placed the blame on his staffers and said he had no knowledge of the request. We're hearing two completely contradictory stories from the Conservative government. For that reason, I will support my colleague's motion.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

Merci.

Mr. Hoback.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Thank you, Chair.

Mr. Chair, the Liberal coalition partners are acting in a hypocritical and unreasonable fashion here. There are many examples where issues concerning the activities of ministerial staff in Liberal ministers' offices were studied by parliamentary committees in the past. At that time ministers exercised their duties and responsibilities to Parliament by appearing before parliamentary committees and answering questions on the matter at hand.

For example, when Judy Sgrowas Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, her chief of staff, Mr. Ihor Wons, was reported to have engaged in meetings in Toronto at a strip club known as the House of Lancaster, and was apparently negotiating with the proprietor of that business in regard to visa applications. The matter was investigated by this committee and the ethics commissioner and it was found that a Romanian-born stripper who worked on Ms. Sgro's campaign received a special immigration visa.

The ethics commissioner found that it was Mrs. Sgro's ministerial staff who broke the rules and violated the ethics code; however, it was Mrs. Sgro who was responsible to and answered for the matter in Parliament, correctly fulfilling her duties under the Westminster doctrine of ministerial accountability. This was accepted then, and is exactly the same principle that the government is adhering to in terms of ministerial accountability.

Mr. Chair, I was at a meeting when we had Mr. Togneri as a staff witness, and I experienced exactly what went on in that committee meeting. I watched the Liberal member across the floor attack him, embarrass him, and then I watched the chair continue for another seven minutes with the same attack. It's just unexplainable. I was abhorred at what was going on in this committee.

This is the responsible way for the committee to act. The minister is responsible for what happens in his department, just as I, as a member of Parliament, am responsible for my staff. If I sign off on something, I take responsibility for that. Therefore, there is no way you should be calling my staff members to a committee, nor should you be calling the minister's staff to committee. We have the minister here to speak and we are not listening to him. Let's let him speak.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

Mrs. Foote, please.