Mr. Speaker, I agree with my hon. colleague from the Bloc that this is undoubtedly the pivotal group of the items we are discussing today.
As I mentioned in my earlier intervention, the ethics counsellor and the registrar basically will be the people who administer this act and the revisions to the Lobbyist Registration Act. The ethics counsellor is undoubtedly the one who will make it work or allow it to fail. It will not be due to his or her work. Subsequently it could be anyone. It is possible their work could be undermined simply because this legislation is inadequate.
It is not really what the ethics counsellor does but the freedom he has which will determine whether his reports will be received with trust by the Canadian people or whether they will be suspect. This is what I am speaking about.
The word independence is mandatory here. Imagine a court in which a judge ruling on a matter is part of the family of one of the people in the dispute. I am not a lawyer but I think it is against the rules. A judge cannot sit on a case which involves a member of his family.
Liberals are in government but next time it will be the Reformers and then they will obviously have a need for an ethics counsellor. There should clearly be no connection to the Liberals. When Reformers are in power after the next election-I hear no objections so I take it the House approves of the idea-the ethics counsellor should have no connection to the Reform Party. There should be not only a perceived independence but an actual independence, or else the ethics counsellor will not be heard.
When is the ethics counsellor needed? Primarily when there is an item in dispute. If everything is tickety-boo, as we say, if everything is running smoothly, there is no need for an ethics counsellor. People are not suspicious and everything is fine.
The ethics counsellor comes into importance when there is a perception that something has gone awry.
In this Parliament, even after the Liberals ran under the platform of more accountability, more openness, more trustworthiness, a number of questions have been raised. There are really only two possibilities. Either the suspicions and accusations are accurate and something has gone wrong, or the suspicions and accusations are not accurate, which means the people involved are innocent of the suspicions.
If we have an ethics counsellor who is basically answerable to the government of the day and not to Parliament as a whole, nor to the people, then we will have an ethics counsellor who is totally unable to put the matter to rest. If there is something untoward and he is answerable to the Prime Minister, he now has lost his freedom to be totally open and honest in describing the situation. He will not be able to make his friends or his family look bad, so there will be a restriction there. If the people are innocent and he so declares, the public will not believe him. It will be perceived by the people-probably incorrectly-that he is part of a cover-up, he is part of trying to put the matter to rest without necessarily disclosing the truth.
I would like to remind the members opposite that I am not trying to persuade them of something they do not believe in. At least their words are that they believe in this. I would simply quote from the Liberal red book, quoted often here. I do not think we have any reason to distrust the integrity of the people who wrote this in their book as part of their election platform: "A Liberal government will appoint an independent"-I emphasize that word-"ethics counsellor to advise both public officials and lobbyists in the day to day application of the code of conduct".
That is the Liberal aspiration. Frankly, it is our aspiration as well. It is what Canadian people are asking for. If we agree, then I am sure we will have consent to the motions before us, which will provide that independence.
There are several of these motions here. The first one is really a choice we have between accepting Motion No. 22 or Motion No. 23, because they are very similar. Both provide that the ethics counsellor be appointed by governor in council but subject to the approval of the House of Commons and to be removed by the same authority, rather than just being an appointee of the Prime Minister with all of the implications of that closeness, answerable to him-a necessity to make him look good, a necessity to try to cover up. Whether it is true or not, it has that appearance.
The ethics counsellor must have a method of appointment so that there is absolutely no connection. He must be totally independent.
I want to move on, because the time is limited and we have a number of items in this grouping that I want to address. I would next like to talk briefly about the code of conduct itself, which the ethics counsellor will be administering. He of course is responsible under this act for developing the code of conduct and then administering it. I would like to say something about that code of conduct.
It is almost impossible to legislate goodness. Sometimes governments try to do that. I have said in public meetings, especially when we talk about gun control, criminals, and the Young Offenders Act, that there is probably not a law we can pass that will make people good. I believe that. However, we do have to have laws that will restrain those who are not good. That is the objective of a law.
When we think of the flaws in the human psyche we are trying to prevent here, it has to do with office holders and their relationship with lobbyists. If we are going to have a code of conduct that is going to be fair, that is going to satisfy the needs of the Canadian voters and taxpayers, that code of conduct also will have to have a certain degree of independence. There will have to be a development of that code that has a broad support.
I would like to recommend Motion No. 25, which says that the ethics counsellor as proposed now will be producing the code of conduct but that it will be approved by both Houses. Both the House of Commons and the other place will have approval of this code of conduct.
Indeed, I would even go further and say that it would be very judicious of us to give that code of conduct wide reading. It should be published in the papers so that the people know what level of expectations we have of ourselves. Then they can comment on it and we can get feedback from the people.
We need to provide for not only independence of the ethics counsellor but also independence of the code of conduct. That will come through open debate and free votes, as promised in the red book, on that issue in the House of Commons. So all members, if they see a flaw in the code of ethics, will have the freedom to move an amendment to it and to vote against it unless that amendment is made.
These are necessary things. They are absolutely mandatory. Without the acceptance of these amendments, the code of conduct, the ethics counsellor, the whole of Bill C-43 will essentially come to naught.