Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to intervene in this debate. It gives me the opportunity, not having been a member of the committee or the subcommittee charged with the matters before the House today, to look back on earlier professional work in another capacity.
Clearly this has been an excellent committee and a really outstanding subcommittee. This is a thoughtful, well-reasoned report. It reflects great credit on members from all parties who did the necessary research which led up to the conclusions. It says a great deal for the capacity of Parliament to evolve as a living institution and about the sort of new responsibilities that committees are being encouraged to take on. My compliments to the committee, to the subcommittee, its chair and its members for the work they have done.
I believe the debate to date has been helpful, constructive and useful. Members of the opposition will pardon me if I make some suggestions on the preliminary definitional question.
The life of the law, as Mr. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes reminded us, has not been logic, it has been experience. It is an error and perhaps the labours of Sisyphus, an eternal task that never reaches a conclusion, to attempt an a priori definition of lobbying.
I think it is best, as the bill provides, to try to reach an operational definition, a definition in logical extensity, and to say what types of activities are to be subject to disclosure or registration, rather than to attempt an abstract definition in advance. It will be, in the end, up to the courts-the courts in the regular sense, the judicial sense, and the court in the original constitutional sense, the high court of Parliament-to decide what is permissible and impermissible lobbying activity. Again, the effort to define in an abstract way is perhaps better redirected to spelling out in more detail the sort of activities one wants to cover.
When I was first a student of constitutional law, lobbying was viewed as evil per se, a reprehensible, nefarious activity. The attitudes changed, however, with increasing sophistication as to what the legislative processes are about and what parliamentary decisions in contemporary democratic societies amount to. That is to say that one is balancing competing social interests.
To do that job effectively one must identify those competing social interests. One must attempt some sort of quantification of the social value of those interests and that requires a detailed empirical record. One must then attempt to establish some sort of hierarchy of importance of the interests before leading to an intelligent, rational decision. The philosopher would tell you this is William James' conception of pragmatism, the pragmatic conception of truth. In constitutional law terms it is simply Roscoe Pound's sociological jurisprudence, the balancing of interests which is at the core of any rational judicial decision making today but not less of decisions within Parliament itself.
The United States pioneered legislation on lobbying many years ago. Its emphasis is on disclosure: the bringing out into the open of particular interest groups involved in any piece of legislation and trying to assess what the interest groups represent. Are the interests they represent substantial as distinct from merely vocal? Does the vocality or the degree of force with which they are expressed balance their representativeness in social terms and their claim to validity in the economic or other terms in which they are being debated? Therefore the emphasis on disclosure is the key element.
Every member of Parliament who does his or her job is subject to lobbying by various interest groups in the constituency or in the general region. Nothing is wrong with that. It really depends on the degree of control of the office and the degree of energy the member brings to putting the interest groups in proper perspective.
When companies or trade unions wish to meet with me I welcome them. If it is a company I want to read the balance sheet, the annual report. I want to meet with the officers. If it is important enough I want to visit the plant. I want to see potential competitors. All of us do this. We recognize the value involved and the good faith and integrity with which people approach this.
The only thing objectionable is covert lobbying, the covert exercise of pressure. I do not think for most of us this is what is involved.
Reference was made to the Pearson airport issue. I would have thought that was less an example of lobbying than an example of the public contracting process and how not to operate it. Very clearly one thing is that in the lame duck period of any government, as the concept has emerged in the United States, public contracting of a high level of community involvement should be avoided at all costs or exercised with extreme discretion.
I do not think it is an example of lobbying gone wrong. It is rather an example of the need to exercise extra control over public contracting when a government effectively has lost its mandate.
Putting it in proper perspective, the bill recognizes the reality that interest groups will bring forward their particular cause to parliamentarians; two, that they are entitled to do so; and three, provided they bring forward proper information, properly researched, and that members themselves exercise the necessary care of reading those reports, trying to make assessments, seeking further information from other independent sources before making any decision, it is a valid and necessary part of the gathering of information in aid of legislation.
Intelligent legislation demands that interest groups bring forward their claims and their causes. In that sense the committee has met the challenge and brought forward a thoughtful law that takes us a good deal along the way to solution of any problems that in the public domain might have been thought to exist.
As I have said, I have no problem with professional interest groups, with companies, with trade unions, with other groups that come to me. I have more problems with umbrella organizations that claim to represent whole segments of society. These are the hardest ones to catch in the scope of legislation such as this because their operation in the political processes comes not through this reasoned process of bringing information in aid of legislation but more in terms of social context. Maybe there is room for covering this. I do not see how we could do it in the present law without destroying the very careful work, the very precise set of ground rules the legislation has established.