Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. House leader for his question. I believe, though, that there is a certain misunderstanding or perhaps an inaccuracy in what the House leader for the official opposition has just stated. I believe he said that the guidelines for public officeholders are not public. That is not accurate. The guidelines for public officeholders are public, both category A and category B. They have been in place for a very long time and they are public.
The hon. member also said that the ethics counsellor does not report directly to parliament, but he does. Let me elaborate on this a little. The ethics counsellor reports directly to parliament for the registration of lobbyists and reports to the Prime Minister for that additional threshold of accountability that the Prime Minister asks of his own ministers in addition to the regular guidelines for public officeholders that are the exigencies of everyone else. With respect, I believe that is what the hon. member does not correctly understand.
The Prime Minister is obviously in a system known as responsible government, with a capital r . We could argue that the government is also very responsible in the regular lower case r for that matter. In the system of responsible government it is the Prime Minister who appoints cabinet and it is the Prime Minister who has the ultimate responsibility for recommending to Her Excellency to of course remove someone who is behaving in a way that is inappropriate. Therefore that responsibility is upon him and not upon anyone else, and it cannot be. I am sure none of us would want it to be otherwise. How could we ever tolerate a situation in the House where someone, a prime minister some day, could say “It is not my fault. I have nothing to do with this. Ask the ethics counsellor”.
That is not the way in which the Prime Minister does his job. This Prime Minister is accountable to parliament, does not try to pass the buck to someone else and takes full responsibility for his ministers. That is the way I believe it should be, both in terms of accountability in the House and in terms of the constitutional requirement of how it should be done.