Information & Ethics Committee on March 1st, 2012

[Andrew Saxton, Conservative, North Vancouver, BC]

Perhaps I'll answer the first part of it regarding the administrative monetary penalties.

In developing its recommendations, I encourage the committee to consider the issue of due process and whether the Lobbyists' Code of Conduct is sufficiently robust to support a system of monetary fines imposed on private individuals, and also to consider the Commissioner of Lobbying's status as an independent agent of Parliament operating outside the framework of the ministerial responsibility.

One might also want to consider that the commissioner, in this sense, is the one who creates the codes, who does the investigations, and now it has been suggested that she also be the one to levy the fines. In this sense, she would be the lawmaker, the police person, as well as the judge and jury. So I would encourage the committee to consider what implications that might have.

One thing the committee might consider when it comes to the code of conduct is putting this into rules or regulations, which would be developed by a committee such as yourselves, so that there is some outside influence as to what goes into those regulations. That might be something the committee might want to consider.

Mr. Scott-Douglas.

[Roger Scott-Douglas]

I would simply say in addition that I think you asked whether there could be some other way of enforcement, some other mechanism, and I can't directly think of any such thing. I think the way in which the act is structured, whereby the commissioner has the principal responsibility in that respect, and where she, herself, chooses not to make a report by way of sanction, allows her to refer it to the RCMP. That's the thing.

The only other issue that's come up indirectly is that there are other acts, such as the Conflict of Interest Act, under which other office holders have sanctions and means of enforcement, but I don't think it would make sense to have somebody other than the Commissioner of Lobbying involved in that, in anything to do with the Lobbying Act itself.

[Colin Mayes, Conservative, Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

One of the other discussions was around the eligibility for public office holders to be allowed to lobby, and there's the suggestion of taking the time from the five years and maybe looking at lowering that. I know we want to ensure that there is a separation, and that undue influence could not be made on the government of the day by those who have served in that government.

Do you have any position or opinions on whether or not that could possibly be lowered to, let's say, three years, or to identify those who would be eligible at an earlier date?

[Andrew Saxton, Conservative, North Vancouver, BC]

That, obviously, is something the committee should consider and recommend. I understand you have had a number of witnesses who felt five years was a long period of time when other jurisdictions are considerably less. I would point out that we intend to be a leader, the federal Government of Canada, and therefore we do believe we should be strict and it should be a significant length of time. We don't necessarily have to follow other jurisdictions in this regard.

Second, when it come to the Conflict of Interest Act, obviously there is a difference in the ban period, so if you consider putting it all under one act, then you may want to consider that particular point at that time as well.

[Colin Mayes, Conservative, Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Okay.

Do I still have time?

[The Chair, NDP, Jean Crowder]

You have 15 seconds, Mr. Mayes, but do you have another question. No?

[Colin Mayes, Conservative, Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

No, that's okay.

[The Chair, NDP, Jean Crowder]

Okay. Thank you very much.

I have no other speakers on the list.

A point of order.

[Pierre-Luc Dusseault, NDP, Sherbrooke, QC]

I would like to correct the facts. My colleague accused Mr. Morin of talking about the outcome of a vote that was not held in public. That is entirely false, because, in fact, the motion on the RCMP was put to a vote during a public meeting on December 13. I simply wanted to correct the facts so that the people who are listening to us know what really happened on December 13.

[The Chair, NDP, Jean Crowder]

There was a discussion on December 13 on the public record about that particular matter.

I have no other speakers.

Mr. Dreeshen, are you on a point or order or a question?

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

No, on a question.

[The Chair, NDP, Jean Crowder]

Oh, okay. Sorry, we were told there were no other speakers.

Mr. Dreeshen, go ahead.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

Well, I may not take the full five minutes, but there are a couple of things I do want to talk about.

I do thank you very much for coming, all of the witnesses today.

I really wanted to talk a little bit more about the significant part of duties and the thoughts around that. I know this has been a discussion where perhaps we should be looking at removing that particular part. It's so difficult to be able to define. We look at consultants who are coming in from British Columbia versus from downtown Ottawa. Do you count the travel time? Do you look at the amount of time that is taken into development of questions? Of course, there were other comments. For some people, 15 minutes or 20 minutes have a lot more impact than hours would for others.

I'd like some comment on that so that we have your opinion, so that we can then go back later when we go through our overall discussions.

[Andrew Saxton, Conservative, North Vancouver, BC]

Thank you.

Madam Chair, I'll take the first part of that question.

I believe my colleague is referring to what is known as the 20% rule, and it does allow some people to not report lobbying activity if it's below the 20% threshold. I understand the commissioner has asked for that to be removed. Also, I understand that other jurisdictions do have similar rules. They may not be actual percentages; they may actually be hours that are spent. I believe one province specifies more than 100 hours. That is its threshold.

There are two issues here. First of all, if a threshold is maintained, is that threshold increased or decreased? Second, do you eliminate the threshold entirely so that it captures many more people who would not otherwise be obligated to register?

Again, I encourage the committee to seriously consider this, because it is an issue that I understand has come up time and again. There is some uncertainty as to what time is involved. I also caution the committee that it would cast the net quite a bit wider, and it would cause, for example, administrative contact to also be required to be reported. So there would definitely be an increased reporting burden on those people affected. At the same time, we want to ensure transparency. Again, it goes back to Mr. Scott-Douglas's recommendation earlier that you always consider the balance between transparency and the reporting burden.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

That's fine. Thank you very much then.

[The Chair, NDP, Jean Crowder]

Thank you very much.

I want to thank the parliamentary secretary and the Treasury Board for coming forward as witnesses.

I am going to suspend for five minutes to allow us to reconvene, and we'll be coming back on future business for committee.

[The Chair, NDP, Jean Crowder]

Committee members, we're now on future business.

Mr. Del Mastro.

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

Thank you very much, Madam Chairman.

Madam Chairman, as you're aware, on Tuesday I sent notice of motion with respect to Mr. Adam Carroll, a former Liberal Research Bureau employee. I wanted to bring him forward to respond to questions specifically with respect to an apology that was issued in the House of Commons by Liberal leader Bob Rae that alleged that this individual was responsible for the very dirty, sleazy, underhanded attack campaign against a federal cabinet minister. We believe there are significant questions that need to be answered in this regard. We don't believe we have the full story in this at all, and we think that the Liberal Party is frankly sitting on an awful lot of details in this regard.

That said, we're going to extend a courtesy that the Liberal Party would probably never extend to us. We're going to allow them between today and Tuesday to come forward with the details that we believe they've withheld in this matter. We would encourage them to be fulsome; we would encourage them to indicate exactly who was involved in this. We'd like to know who ordered these actions to be undertaken. There are a number of questions, frankly, that they should respond to. We think in this case we have an individual who has been hung out to dry by his party and released to us to take one for the team, if you will.

If need be, we will pass this motion Tuesday to bring this individual before this committee. But the Liberal Party does have an opportunity in the time between then and now to consider whether they would actually want to see that happen or not.

[The Chair, NDP, Jean Crowder]

Mr. Del Mastro, I understand that you are not moving your motion today.

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

I will not move the motion until Tuesday.

[The Chair, NDP, Jean Crowder]

Then I'm going to suggest that we move on to other future committee business.

We actually have nothing on the table at this moment that's scheduled.

We have passed a motion in the past on something that we agreed to do. I'm just going to read it to the committee. There were two motions, actually. It was agreed:

That the Committee undertake a study of the Annual Report of the Privacy Commissioner, pursuant to the Order of Reference Tabled in the House on Thursday, November 17, 2011.

And:

That the Committee undertake a study of the Report of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada on the application of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, pursuant to the Order of Reference Tabled in the House on Tuesday, June 21, 2011.

Those were adopted on Tuesday, November 29.

So we have those two agreements on proposed studies by the committee.

The other matter is that the estimates have now been referred to the committee on the four commissioners. I'm at the will of the committee about whether you want to hear from the commissioners and the format. We can have one meeting per commissioner and a full review of the estimates.

The other matter is that the committee well prior to my time had started a study on open government, and there has been a significant amount of work. I believe the summary of evidence was submitted to all members. The Information Commissioner has also supported the committee looking at continuing that study on open government.

The last thing is that Google has a new privacy policy, and the Privacy Commissioner, I believe, has raised some concerns about the Google privacy policy.

So there are a number of things the committee can undertake, but we do need to make some decisions about scheduling some business.

Mr. Del Mastro.

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chairman.

We would be interested in moving forward specifically with recommendations regarding our study that we've just undertaken on the Lobbying Act. Perhaps the analyst could provide us with some details as to when they would be prepared to move forward with that. I don't know if it's too soon.

[The Chair, NDP, Jean Crowder]

We did drafting instructions. Right?

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

We've done drafting instructions but not recommendations. I don't know if they actually need to complete the draft before we can have a discussion around recommendations or if we could do that sooner.

[The Chair, NDP, Jean Crowder]

We can do it sooner. If you don't want to wait for the draft report before looking at recommendations, you could certainly do that. We can do that Tuesday.