In subsection 30(2) of the Conflict of Interest Code for Members of the House of Commons, it says: Any rules approved by the Committee shall be reported to the House and shall come into effect when the report is concurred in by the House.
It's intended that all the rules and administration of the code will be supervised by the committee. When the commissioner was here, I specifically asked him why he was requiring the public reporting of this kind of information. It's hard to see how this kind of information would help to ensure that public scrutiny will prevent conflicts of interest from occurring.
He said that the reason he was doing it was that he had been told by this committee. Frankly, I don't recall him being told that. But in response to a specific question, he said that's why he's doing it.
I then asked him, if we recommend that you stop doing this, would you consider that to be a countermand to the previous instruction that you believe you received? He said yes. So I'm simply following through on that.
I do note also that in the summaries made available to the public, there's quite a long section of the code, section 24, where it says, in the relevant part of this, that “any other asset, liability or source of income that the Ethics Commissioner determines should not be disclosed” can be left out if the information is “not relevant to the purposes of this Code”--and I don't think this information is relevant to the purposes of the code--or if it is “a departure from the general principle of public disclosure” to release this information.
Again, I think this departs from the general principle regarding public disclosure. This would allow us to simply bring the application of the code better into conformity with the purposes of the code.