Evidence of meeting #6 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was conacher.
A video is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Gurbux Saini Liberal Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
If there was a scandal, there would be legal implications, legal charges. I don't believe what we are trying to accomplish has any conflict with that.
Professor, Faculty of Management, Dalhousie University, As an Individual
If there was a scandal and there were legal charges.... Do you mean under the Conflict of Interest Act?
Professor, Faculty of Management, Dalhousie University, As an Individual
I think sometimes it's a strange thing for the public, because, again, to the extent that they're leaning into it at all, if you're talking about something that's so bad that it engages the Criminal Code, such as if you're talking about bribery.... People paid attention the last time a senator was charged with a whole bunch of counts of.... He wasn't found guilty of anything, but when it meets that kind of threshold, for that kind of charge, the public pays attention.
When there's something under the Conflict of Interest Act, even if it's the worst-case scenario, it's going to be reacted to with an administrative monetary penalty. The public is not going to be super stressed out about that—to the extent that they even know about it. They find out that somebody forgot to disclose their French villa, so they were charged $250. It makes the whole thing look ridiculous. I don't think that administrative monetary penalties are the way to make the public think that politicians are ethical. It's a weird space.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative John Brassard
Thank you, Ms. Turnbull.
Thank you, Mr. Saini.
We have Mr. Thériault.
Bloc
Luc Thériault Bloc Montcalm, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm going to direct my questions to Professor Stedman.
You've heard me ask questions for a while, so you surely know what my current area of interest is.
Right now, we're talking about an unusual scenario, even if not everyone recognizes that it's unusual. The Ethics Commissioner doesn't feel that it's that unusual, that there was no problem because there was a conflict of interest screen. In addition, all situations would be resolved by the provision stipulating that there is no conflict of interest or appearance of conflict of interest when the general application rule is used.
Do you also agree that, thanks to the general application rule, there is no appearance of conflict of interest or conflict of interest in the position of prime minister? I'm not talking about a position as a member of Parliament or a minister, which are much better managed, but about the position of prime minister.
Associate Professor, York University, As an Individual
No, the general application rule doesn't eliminate the very fact of a conflict of interest. It is a decision that lawmakers have made with respect to where they want to draw the line of best fit between eliminating conflicts and not disincentivizing public service. Your only way, as was mentioned earlier, to eliminate conflict entirely is to just not have assets that could put you in conflict. There's no other way.
Screens—to come back to the screens—are interesting. We've never seen anything with this breadth before. I think what we need to do is learn from it. What we need to do is, in a very open way, ask what's working and how we make a screen like this work. This is a unique circumstance. Is there something we can do in the act to improve it so that screens like this make sense and actually give the public confidence that they're useful? I think that's the question and the conversation that we need to have. It's how to make screens make sense at this level.
Bloc
Luc Thériault Bloc Montcalm, QC
What do you actually know about that screen? The Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner talked about a conflict of interest screen that was negotiated with the Prime Minister.
What does anyone who is not among those responsible for enforcing it know about it? Do you think this way of going about it is transparent enough?
Associate Professor, York University, As an Individual
One of the things that we can learn here is that we should be learning as we go with respect to this screen. There should be an ongoing conversation about how it works and how that proportionality clause is going to be operationalized.
What I really believe is that, if we understand how this screen works, then we can update the act to include standards that are higher for screens, including with respect to public reporting. I think the thing that everyone's getting at here is that there's no public reporting that's part of this screen. Maybe we want some of that. I think that maybe we also want to put into words the proportionality bit. That is the counterbalance to the “general application” rule.
Bloc
Luc Thériault Bloc Montcalm, QC
Given that people subordinate to the Prime Minister must oversee the screen's application, don't you think it would be appropriate to provide for an ongoing review by a reviewer or supervisor from the Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner? In that case, the Commissioner would not have to make a commitment. It would be a way of holding people to account as we go along rather than when a problem arises.
From a transparency standpoint, don't you think that might be more reassuring? The people who enforce the act are subordinate to the Prime Minister, and we don't even know if they're not in a conflict of interest themselves.
Associate Professor, York University, As an Individual
I think that point is very well taken. You would get some resistance to the idea of someone external to the Prime Minister's dealings being able to provide oversight. There are going to be interactions that are confidential and that must necessarily stay so. There is a level of trust that we have to put in the people who are responsible for the screen.
I think you're absolutely right to point out that being subordinate to the Prime Minister means that you are in a conflict of interest. You care about his interests as much as you care about the public interest because you sit at his pleasure. There's no way to avoid that.
You could have part...or at least some sense of reporting back to the commissioner's office on an ongoing basis. That may have to go through the commissioner as opposed to through someone delegated by the commissioner.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative John Brassard
Thank you, Mr. Stedman.
Thank you, Mr. Thériault.
Go ahead, Mr. Cooper, for five minutes.
Conservative
Michael Cooper Conservative St. Albert—Sturgeon River, AB
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Recently, our jet-setting Prime Minister, in his trips to New York City and London, England, met with several prominent business as well as investment leaders. When he was asked on the weekend who he met with, the Prime Minister refused to say. He refused to be transparent. He merely said he met with investment-type investors and “people who have global capital”. Then he said we'll need “significant capital” in respect of certain unnamed and unspecified projects.
We know that there's never been a Prime Minister with more potential conflicts of interest than this Prime Minister. We have never had a Prime Minister with an ethics screen as vast as the one that is imposed on this Prime Minister in light of the multitude of potential conflicts of interest. We know that this so-called ethics screen has no mechanisms to ensure that there are checks and balances to see that it is being triggered when it ought to be. Instead, we are left to simply trust the Prime Minister's chief of staff and the Clerk of the Privy Council, who serve at the pleasure of the Prime Minister, answer to the Prime Minister and are therefore not independent. It simply isn't good enough to simply say that we're going to trust them.
Frankly, we don't know whether the ethics screen should have been triggered. We don't know what was discussed or whether the Prime Minister stands to personally benefit in any way from any discussions or any decisions that might be in the process of being made, arising from the discussions he had in London and New York. We know that despite the fact that the Prime Minister is subject to this ethics screen, he may make decisions that he stands to personally benefit from. At the very least, that's unacceptable. There needs to be, in the face of that, at the very least some level of transparency. Canadians deserve to know who the Prime Minister was meeting with and why he was meeting with them. They need to have the assurance that this very flimsy ethics screen is, at the very least, being triggered when it ought to be. The Prime Minister has provided no answers to any of those questions.
With that, I would put on notice the following motion:
That, having regard for the fact that the Prime Minister met with several “business as well as investment leaders” in his recent trips to New York City, New York, and London, England, and the Prime Minister has refused to disclose which individuals and/or entities he met with during those trips, and is subject, pursuant to the Conflict of Interest Act, to an ethics screen intended to prevent him from making decisions related to 103 companies that would place him in a conflict of interest, the committee order, from the Prime Minister’s Office, the production of records which comprehensively list each individual, and, if applicable, the name of which entity, corporation, organization, and/or agency they represented and their job title, that was present in a meeting with the Prime Minister, the time and date at which those meetings took place, and what was discussed in those meetings, from and including September 21, 2025, to and including September 28, 2025, and that these records be deposited with the clerk of the committee in both official languages no later than one week following the adoption of this motion.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative John Brassard
Thank you, Mr. Cooper.
You are putting that motion on notice. I would ask that you distribute that to the clerk in both official languages so that it can be distributed to all members of the committee.
Mr. Cooper, you still have 20 seconds left.
Are you done? Okay.
Ms. Lapointe, you have the floor for five minutes.
Liberal
Linda Lapointe Liberal Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I would like to welcome the two witnesses to the committee. I enjoyed listening to their presentations.
Dr. Turnbull, my question is for you. Earlier, you mentioned that opposition leaders, who could one day become prime minister, should be subject to the same ethics rules as the Prime Minister.
I'd like you to tell us about that.
Professor, Faculty of Management, Dalhousie University, As an Individual
Thank you.
If I said they “should”, I'm sorry because it's not so much that I think they should; it's more that it's an avenue to think about in the event that you were looking at potential loopholes.
I really don't think that leadership candidates should be subject to disclosure requirements. I think that's inappropriate. It's putting an undue burden on them when they are not public office holders. There's no public value to having someone who is a contestant, and who's not necessarily going to win, disclose their financial holdings. That's not appropriate.
However, if the person wins and they become the Prime Minister in the same moment, then immediately they are subject to an ethics regime. If you win and you become a leader of an opposition party, you're not. However, it could be possible that if the government is defeated, for example, that person might come into an executive position very quickly, in which case they would be subject to the Conflict of Interest Act and would have to disclose within 60 days.
It doesn't stress me out that this is the case, but opposition leaders are powerful. Opposition leaders, in my view, can be the subject of foreign interference, for example. They can be the subject of people who are anticipating perhaps that they will become Prime Minister and they want to think about what that might mean down the road, so it's not like they're necessarily just the same as an MP who is not in a leadership role. Whether that puts them in the space where they would have to bear different ethics rules, I'm not sure about that, because if they're not in the executive, it could be that the public responsibility is not enough to warrant their having to disclose what they have.
Liberal
Linda Lapointe Liberal Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, QC
I'd like to go a little further. You talked mainly about the leader of an opposition party. We are in a minority government and we know that any party could come out on top.
Would you expand this to all party leaders, suggesting that there could be conflicts of interest?
Professor, Faculty of Management, Dalhousie University, As an Individual
If you were going to do it, it would make sense to do it that way.
It strikes me that in the current situation, where you have a minority government and then the official opposition has such a significant amount of the seats.... It's not like the opposition benches are equally divided. There's a clear official opposition. They're the obvious contender to government. I think there would probably be a sense that, in terms of that particular opposition leader, the official opposition leader, who's constitutional role is to be a Prime Minister-in-waiting, there's an argument to be made that maybe there's a special responsibility on the part of that person to be transparent about what their holdings are in the event that they end up in that role, but I think, to be fair, it could be any party leader who ends up holding the confidence of the House in the event that the Prime Minister loses it.
Typically in Canada we don't see that. It's not so much the constitutional side of it, it's the way that we see party relationships develop. There's no sense that the parties are all going to work together to hoist someone up and defeat the government. We don't see that kind of thing in our parliamentary system normally, but in other parliamentary systems it happens all of the time, where there could be a party leader who ends up organizing amongst a number of other political parties to say that now they're going to put themselves up for Prime Minister.
There's a tradition of how we practice things versus what's possible.
Liberal
Linda Lapointe Liberal Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, QC
Thank you, that's interesting.
Earlier, when we were still talking about ethics rules, you mentioned the very thin, hard-to-define line between what is right and what is not. I'd like to hear your thoughts on that.
Professor, Faculty of Management, Dalhousie University, As an Individual
Sometimes you're going to get a lot of public agreement about what's appropriate and what's not, but sometimes the ethics rules will create a rule about something in order to provide clarification.
If a gift to an MP, for example, is under a certain amount, that's okay and you can accept it. You don't have to make a big deal out of it. Over that amount, maybe you don't accept it or maybe you disclose it. That sort of thing can be arbitrary. It's not necessarily that everybody's going to come to that in the same way, and it's not that someone who thinks that a $500 gift is appropriate is unethical and a $200 gift person is ethical. It's not that. It's a question of putting something down in writing so that everybody knows and everybody has it as a common standard.
To the extent that ethics rules provide clarity about that, they're very helpful. It's not about some people being good and some people being bad. It's a question of where we draw the line and where we can agree that there is a line so that you're not having people on different sides of it.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative John Brassard
Thank you, Ms. Lapointe.
Thank you to both Professor Turnbull and Professor Stedman for being here today. I found your contributions valuable to the committee, and I appreciate that both of you took the time to be in front of us today. On behalf of Canadians, I want to say thank you.
I have two things before we go. First, I want to welcome a new staff member in my office. Rachel is with us.
You can wave, Rachel, and say hi to everyone.
You'll be seeing a lot of Rachel over the coming months.
The second thing is that, on Monday, we will have both the Privacy Commissioner and the Commissioner of Lobbying before us. I believe you've already received the briefing notes on that. I look forward to a great discussion. We haven't seen them in months, and it will be good to see them again.
That's it for today. Thank you, everyone. The meeting is adjourned.