I will say it again because I hear members opposite saying it is not true. I would not stand here in the House and say that the Liberal promise is not in the red book. I would not do that. The authors of the red book promised an ethics counsellor would report to Parliament. The ethics counsellor does not report to Parliament and all those geniuses jabbering on the other side better get their facts straight. It is a direct violation, a broken promise.
Along with the government we wish to restore integrity to politicians. We have to get there from here because there is a long way to go. The book On the Take has cast a negative light on all politicians.
I am a rookie politician. I am a politician now by profession because I get paid for it, but in my heart and in my mind I am still a businessman. I know what I thought two years ago when I was on the outside looking in here at what these people were doing. I was not too happy about that. I was so frustrated that I decided to run.
Now I am hoping that by being here and being able to express my point of view I can now say I would like to restore integrity to politicians. The government should be listening rather than talking. I know some of its members are very talented and can talk and listen at the same time, but not too many people are able to do that.
When I accuse the government of sophistry, which is no more than using clever but misleading arguments for a false conclusion, sleight of hand is another good way of saying it, my concern is it talks about the great and wonderful things it is doing for the country when it really is not. It is letting Canadians down.
It has bills like the Lobbyists Registration Act and the motion today for a joint committee on a code of ethics, a joint committee with the Senate and the House of Commons to enact a bill that would define the code of ethics. Why is there a need for all this?
Two months ago the Prime Minister said in the House that we have all these things in place. Cabinet ministers must take all sorts of oaths. We have to take oaths as members of Parliament. We have all sorts of rules controlling what we can and cannot do. We are into about six levels of controls to ensure we restore respectability for parliamentarians.
We want to know what is happening in the bureaucracy. We want to know who is in charge. The Lobbyists Registration Act does make a lobbyist register who they are lobbying with within the department. Are they seeing the deputy minister? Are they seeing Mr. Dodge? The Canadian public should know that after a meeting with Mr. Dodge he changed his mind on a certain issue or that his recommendation changed. There is nothing wrong with that. That is a positive. That is not a negative and yet the government will not put that in.
We have about three or four strong recommendations for the bill and we will continue to put them forward in the interest of all parliamentarians and in the best interest of some lobbyists. There may be some former politicians who after a couple of years off could come back and be lobbyists, and they would be darn good lobbyists, to help their reputation, to help them build on the experience they have gained by working in government so they can help other Canadians. Through open disclosure and the rules working both ways, I believe the bill could help a lot of people within government.
The bill is another example of the feel good, talk good, do nothing government that likes to tell us everything it is doing is wonderful and there is no room for improvement. I am sorry to hear that. With my intervention today I hope maybe one or two of these suggestions I have made may stick, although I rather doubt it.