Mr. Walsh and Ms. Mortenson, I have a question with regard to your comments on subsection 29(1) of the code. You raised the issue of the question of documents, and in particular, with regard to the meaning of the words “the matter”. I am not sure whether this is in your written presentation so much or whether it was transcript from last week.
I am looking at paragraph 29(1)(a), where the Ethics Commissioner suspends. You deal with that on page 11 in the first paragraph in the middle of the page, but in a slightly different way. If members will be bear with me, I think it is worth reading:
29(1) The Ethics Commissioner shall immediately suspend the inquiry into a matter if
a) there are reasonable grounds to believe that the Member has committed an offence under an Act of Parliament, in which case the Ethics Commissioner shall refer the matter to the proper authorities;
You raise the question of what does “the matter” mean. Does it include the documents? What does it include? We agree that it's ambiguous, and we came up with some wording that we'd like to run by you. Possibly you can suggest something better, or if you think this would remove the ambiguity we would be interested in knowing that.
The latter part of that sentence would read, “in which the case the commissioner shall inform the proper authorities of the commissioner's belief”. That belief would be that an offence has been committed.
Do you think that would remove the ambiguity?