My colleague from Nova Scotia may find that a little different in the next election. You can talk to your former colleague about how that worked out.
This paper on ministerial accountability states, “Australia: After a series of scandals in the latter [days] of Paul Keating's Labor government”—the sister party to the scandal-ridden Trudeau Liberal government—“Liberal leader John Howard effectively appropriated the issue of ministerial propriety as a central campaign theme”—huh, that might be a good idea—“and promised higher standards of ministerial conduct when he [came to power as] prime minister in 1996. He became the first Australian prime minister to institute a publicly available ministerial code of conduct”—leave it to a conservative to bring in an actual code, something that the Liberals try to avoid—“entitled A Guide on Key Elements of Ministerial Responsibility.”
It continues, “This practice has endured with each subsequent prime minister revising the code, and each version becoming less extensive.” Hmm: “This is unsurprising as the code provided ammunition for the opposition and the media”—it sure does—“and critics contended that it became meaningless after Howard’s initial enforcement of breaches by asking ministers to resign began to waver after the loss of seven ministers in...two years.”
Well, at least there was a conservative government that believed in holding their own ministers to account for their performance and that actually held them accountable for their performance. Boy, have we been missing that here. Even the Chrétien government made ministers resign. Not far from here, there's a riding called Glengarry—Prescott—Russell. The minister of the Crown then was a fellow named Don Boudria. I can remember him resigning because he took a free night at the Château Montebello—a free night at the Château Montebello for a couple of hundred bucks—and yet the Minister of International Trade here gives tens of thousands of dollars to a best friend, untendered, and she just apologizes.