Thank you very much, Dr. Patry. I appreciate the question, because GOPAC is working with parliamentarians around the world.
The role of a parliament is to hold the government accountable on behalf of its citizens. That is fundamental. Usually we find that the first thing corrupt governments do when they get into power is to change the rules to preserve their power. In order to do that, they co-opt the parliament. Therefore, Canadians and parliamentarians need to work with those parliamentarians who believe in honesty and integrity.
I'll be honest, Mr. Chairman, not every parliamentarian really believes and is committed to that philosophy when he becomes a parliamentarian. They can be bought and co-opted for whatever reason, by whatever method, by the government, and therefore the public are left out of it. The public no longer have the capacity to hold the parliament accountable and the government accountable, and that's why they're poor, remember? Nobody votes for poverty. It's because a vote doesn't count that they're left poor and they're left on the outside.
So what can we do? Go back to three simple concepts.
Peer support. Peer support in politics is fundamental because the guy who builds the biggest coalition wins. You do that every day. You vote in the House of Commons. The party that gets more than half the vote wins. You've all run for elections. If you got more votes than anybody else, you won. When you sought the nomination and you got more votes than anybody else, you won. You have to build a coalition. We have to build a coalition of ethical parliamentarians who believe in honesty and integrity, not on party lines but across party lines in the parliament. If we can find that cadre of parliamentarians who are committed to honesty and integrity and can build that coalition big and large enough to dominate the parliament, you are going to see a government that is accountable.
The second thing we have to do is education for parliamentarians. We were all something before we came here: lawyers, doctors, farmers, fishermen. It doesn't matter what we were, we were all something, but we weren't parliamentarians and we weren't politicians. One day we arrive here and we're deemed to be fully trained and we know everything there is to know. Well, the answer is, we didn't. Therefore, we have to educate parliamentarians, because their role is the counterweight to the executive, to pass judgment on the legislation, to pass through the public accounts committees and other committees, to hold the government accountable and bring in the witnesses and the bureaucracy to say what's going on over there. Access to information for the preservation of the freedom of the media is a fundamental responsibility of the parliament to ensure that parliament is the counterweight to the executive in an open and public way so that people can see what's going on.
The third objective is what I call leadership for results: we have to do something. It's fine to know what we're supposed to do, but if we don't do anything, that doesn't mean anything either. We have to know what we're doing. GOPAC promotes, for example, the UN Convention against Corruption. Most governments, and I presume even the Government of Mongolia, have signed onto the UN Convention against Corruption. But has it implemented the UN Convention against Corruption, or do they just sign and send out the press release and say, count us in? We have to do these things. Anti-money laundering legislation is vitally required in many countries around the world. A code of conduct for parliamentarians so we can stand up and demonstrate our own ethics and probity is desperately required. We have a number of these agendas.
So peer support to build a coalition, education so we know how to do the job properly, and figuring out agendas where we can make the government accountable to the parliament and to the people will build an ethical society where the people are in charge and they will vote the crooks out and vote the good guys in. I'll never say which ones are which, but we'll leave that to the voter. That's how you build an ethical society.