Mr. Speaker, when he says that I have a beef, the question of course is: Where is the beef? Is this their only one Big Mac in this House? Come on.
I spoke about the ethics counsellor and then I was asked by Big Mac himself about grassroots lobbying, about disclosure, about information lobbying, about semi-annual updates. I am
talking about the half of the bill that talks about the ethics counsellor; he is talking about the part of the bill that deals specifically with lobbyists. That is fine.
There have been some good moves in the right direction. However, all of this is nothing but fluff if we do not have an ethics counsellor who can monitor this kind of stuff, who can monitor it, who will be independent and who will report to Parliament, not to the Prime Minister.
This is not good. He can talk about all the lobbying stuff in the world and we might talk just briefly in my remarks about tier one and tier two lobbyists. I thought that was kind of sweet because we talk about two-tiered things in health care around here and in that context it is absolutely horrifying. Yet, here we have something where we have two tiers of lobbyists.