I have no idea the extent to which gifts are being reported to me, so all I can use as my guidelines are the ones that are reported.
I issued a report under the act about a year ago. That brought many more questions to the fore. That report had to do with someone who left office and went and worked with.... It was the Bonner report. It was about taking a post-employment position with someone who had been a lobbyist. It drew attention to our rules. Where questions arose were with respect to receptions and the whole question of gifts.
I've always that said if you receive a dinner, that is a gift. Of course, if you receive a bouquet of flowers, that's a gift. Everything's a gift. Then the question becomes, is it acceptable? There is a lot of confusion between acceptability and reportability to begin with. A lot of people align the two and think if it's not reportable, it's acceptable. That message seems to get lost constantly.
I'm pleased to see the reporting threshold has come down to $200, because now we'll see the ones between $200 and $500.
I put forward a number of possibilities over the years as to how we could handle this. Just to give you a bit of history, when you guys made those amendments in 2010 or 2011 the rules were different. The rules said if you were given a gift that had anything to do with your job then you had to refuse it. Those rules were being totally ignored. It was like they didn't exist, and I was troubled by the hypocrisy of it all. I said we should at least look at putting out some realistic rule on gifts that people could then accept and not ignore. What happened was that we took the same rule that was in the act for the public officer holders and mirrored it in the code. It's much easier to receive a gift as a member than it is to receive a gift as a minister because there are a lot more potential conflict situations.
I'm giving you a diatribe on gifts. I hope this is okay.
One area where you can't receive gifts is if you are sitting on a committee voting on a particular matter and the person who is the stakeholder takes you to a big, fancy dinner or gives you tickets to something.
I'm just explaining the gifts, but the area that gets the most attention by people complaining about the gift rules are these receptions that seem to take place on the Hill.