A member across the way said that she was re-elected. Well there were tens of thousands of people who were concerned about the comment.
Where do people or members of parliament go when such a slanderous, demeaning comment is made? They can come into the House and complain about it as much as they want, but with a majority government it will basically laughed at them. They can go to the Prime Minister but he will only say that if he gives it to the ethics counsellor that person might come back and say that something is wrong and then he would be embarrassed. He will not do that. Why should he embarrass himself?
The control and the jurisdiction that the Prime Minister has over the ethics counsellor is totally inappropriate. It would never exist in any normal organization. We have a minister who, in my opinion, has a lack of ethics that should be challenged, and people want it challenged, but there is no avenue to do so because the Prime Minister would see it as a problem for himself, a problem for his cabinet.
Therein lies the problem. If that individual did not report to the executive but reported to the House of Commons in general, I would bet my bottom dollar that minister would be up for investigation now.
The way the whole ethics problem in the House of Commons is handled is totally inappropriate. It should be a matter of ethics for all members of parliament on this side and that side, not just ministers.
We have heard a lot about the Prime Minister and his flirtation with money for the last few years. People are speaking about that today but I guess the same problem exists. Why would the Prime Minister appoint the ethics counsellor to investigate the Prime Minister? How naive would anybody be to think that the Prime Minister would even permit that? That will not happen. That is why the whole situation has to be reviewed.
One of the members on the opposite side said there was a difference in that he is an ethics counsellor and not an ethics commissioner. An ethics counsellor counsels. He is not an enforcer yet he should be. If the problem is that they cannot understand the difference between names and roles then we should do away with the ethics counsellor and bring in an ethics commissioner who does not report to the executive but reports to the House of Commons.
It is simple. To suggest for a moment that the real problem is the difference in a name between counsellor and commissioner is assuming that we on this side of the House and the rest of Canadians are just plain stupid. The real problem is that there is no chance on earth that the Prime Minister will allow an investigation of ethics of his ministers, members or himself, because he would bear the political outfall from that.
The position is a plain waste of time. As much as we would like to talk about having a person do one thing or another, we are really wasting our time. If we cared about ethics in the country and in the House on the part of all members, we would concentrate first on an ethics commissioner, shortlisted, hired by a committee of the House of Commons and reporting to the House on any issue not passed on a motion of the majority. Then again the majority government would get to pooh-pooh all investigations of the majority government and allow them or even push them all on the opposition. There has to be some other mechanism to kick in an investigation by this new position.
I want to summarize two things. First, the current Minister of Citizenship and Immigration undertook a particular and devastating ethical error and still sits in her job unaccountable for it. Second, we cannot make ministers or anybody else in the House accountable to a position that reports to the Prime Minister. That has to change.