Thank you, Chair, and thank you to members of the committee for the opportunity to talk on this important situation and the issues surrounding it today.
I will be making a written submission to the committee just to follow up on these remarks today and on your questions, which I welcome.
I actually wanted to start by referring the committee to the June 2021 report by your colleagues on the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, entitled “Questions of conflict of interest and lobbying in relation to pandemic spending”. This report was filed with the House in June 2021, almost two and a half years ago. The recommendations in it have not been acted upon, and the government continues to delay taking these effective actions to prevent conflicts of interest and secret, unethical lobbying in spending decisions. Therefore, unethical lobbying and excessive government secrecy, as well as unethical big money influence and unethical decision-making in spending, are all legal in federal politics.
There are huge loopholes in several key laws that allow for all these things to be legal. As well, the enforcement is so weak that Canadians are more likely to get caught parking their car illegally anywhere in Canada than politicians and government employees are likely to get caught violating key ethics and spending rules.
As well, the penalties for illegal parking are higher than the penalties for serious ethics and spending violations by federal politicians and top government officials and government employees.
The system is the scandal. It's not surprising that it encourages dishonest, unethical, secretive and wasteful actions, and this dangerously undemocratic and corrupt system must finally be cleaned up by closing all the loopholes, increasing transparency and making the ethics rules and enforcement of penalties much stronger.
To specifically focus on this situation, the fact that you can actually legally lobby in secret with no record is one loophole that has to be closed, and the way to do it is to reverse the onus, so that for all government employees, officials, politicians and their staff—everyone involved in politics—if someone communicates with you with respect to your decisions, then you register it. That's the way to close all the loopholes and have all communications registered.
Those communications should be up on a registry. The Access to Information Act should require a duty to document all actions and decisions and also proactively disclose it. That will end excessive government secrecy.
Finally, as you have studied extensively, whistle-blower protection needs to be extended to everyone in Canada, not just government employees, so that suppliers can blow the whistle and be protected from retaliation by the system that the Integrity Commissioner runs. Of course, that system needs to be strengthened very much, as you have examined and reviewed, and hopefully Bill C-290 will end up making some of those key changes. If not, it's just another area that needs to be addressed.
I'll leave it at that, and I welcome your questions.
Again, I would just refer you.... In your deliberations on recommendations to prevent another ArriveCAN situation from happening, I think you should review again the June 2021 report of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, which was aimed at addressing questions of conflict of interest and lobbying in relation to pandemic spending.