I think that perceptions can undermine public trust. Again, we're talking about situations where there isn't even an actual conflict of interest, let alone corruption, but there is the appearance of one. I think that a provision in the conflict of interest legislation that requires office-holders to take care not to allow the appearance of a conflict of interest to arise would be helpful.
The difficulty or the push-back on that, just so everybody knows it, is that it's a very vague provision. It's not necessarily the case that an office-holder—and I can think of cases that involve both Conservative and Liberal governments, but I won't detail them here—or an official did violate what would have been an appearance standard, had there been one, but it's also obvious that they might not have reasonably anticipated that this could have happened.
I think an appearance standard is important, but it's also important to make sure that the penalties attached to it are appropriate, since there is a certain degree of vagueness attached to what it means.