I'll be voting against it. I think the notion of a parallel investigation concerns me deeply. The integrity of the Ethics Commissioner and the work that independent officer of Parliament does is profoundly important. The idea of competing opinions on interpretation of evidence simultaneously as that independent officer goes forward, I just think is wrong. I think it undermines, as I said, a very strong ethical framework that Parliament has put in place to hold us accountable, because we know that's, unfortunately, a necessary part of any parliamentary process. I wish it weren't true.
The issue that is in front of us is how to, I would hope, make the ethical framework, the rules of conflict of interest and rules of integrity clear and stronger so that future parliamentarians are framed with an independent, principled way of finding information, assessing facts and, if necessary, taking action to hold members accountable. It was a deliberate decision of past Parliaments not to have parliamentarians do this for good reasons, and I am deeply concerned about this.
I don't think it's inappropriate to have the Prime Minister here, as I said in my comments, to answer questions as to what's happened. That's not the point I was making. The point I was making and the concern I had, and the concern I still have with what's being decided here today, is this notion of a simultaneous parallel process to the Ethics Commissioner's. What happens if this committee reaches a separate set of conclusions than the Ethics Commissioner? What does the Ethics Commissioner do? Have we not undermined the independence of that office?
I think we need to think about that, not in the context of the current timetable or framework in which we sit, but I think we need to think about that in the context of the next situation that comes along. Do we want independent oversight of parliamentary processes as they relate to both cabinet members and backbenchers, any member elected to the House of Commons, or are we going to constantly have a committee that will be able to call a member, accuse a member, demand evidence of the member, display that evidence to the public and then reach a conclusion that has no consequence whatsoever because the Ethics Commissioner hasn't been involved?
There's a reason why opposition parties went to the Ethics Commissioner first. That's the process. That's the appropriate process, and that's the process we've agreed to as parliamentarians. We're changing that today. We're not changing it based on strengthening an overall ethical framework or accountability mechanisms. We're changing it because there's information in the public realm, and there is a political opportunity to exploit that in the committee setting. Let's be frank about it.
Of course you're going to get push-back from a political perspective, but I'm not speaking here from a political perspective or from a partisan perspective. I'm speaking here as a parliamentarian who takes the issue of ethics and accountability extraordinarily seriously, and I support wholeheartedly the notion of an independent office of Parliament doing this work.
History has shown us that there were pitfalls to politicizing accountability, instead of strengthening it, and this committee's job is not to go after members of Parliament. It's to set the rules by which parliamentarians are held accountable, and the decision in past Parliaments was to very clearly put that in the hands of an independent Ethics Commissioner. I have confidence in that commissioner, and certainly my experience as a parliamentarian over the last six years has seen that they have the capacity and the fortitude to speak truth to the power that parliamentarians hold and to hold us accountable through that process.
I have confidence in that, and I have a great deal of concern about the way in which this committee is reinterpreting its mandate and, in particular, the notion that there should be a parallel accountability process that could look very different from the one that gets delivered to us by the Ethics Commissioner, whose job it is to do a non-political, non-partisan interpretation of fact, present findings to Parliament and then move forward with accountability measures.
I support, as I said, getting all the information to the Ethics Commissioner. I think that's fundamental to a good decision, but I don't support simultaneously delivering it to other groups of parliamentarians so they can go off and do their work in different committees.
I have a great deal of reservation with regard to some of the things we made today, irrespective of which party we're talking about, irrespective of what issue we're talking about, from an ethical process, from a legal process of how we're handling this issue. I will just end with this: God help you if you find yourself in a situation where parliamentarians are suddenly swirling around your behaviour and you no longer have access to an independent Ethics Commissioner and instead it's just a partisan committee. That is not a good practice to be establishing.
I have made my point.