Mr. Speaker, I rise today to address Bill C-15, an act to amend the Lobbyists Registration Act. First, I would like to go through exactly what this bill would do. Second, I will offer some specific comments and then address some general issues with the ethics package as a whole.
What will this do? First, it would remove the expression “attempt to influence” from the Lobbyists Registration Act to make clear that all communications covered by the legislation constitute lobbying and therefore require registration. That seems very reasonable to us.
Second, it would clarify that registration is not required for simple inquiries or administrative requests for information, again a reasonable amendment.
Third, it would clarify that lobbying occurs when a public office-holder initiates contact with anyone who could be lobbying the public office-holder, or his or her organization. This applies to all forms of communication and is in response to a recommendation by the standing committee report of June 2001, again a sensible amendment.
Fourth, it would require the ethics counsellor to notify the appropriate police authorities if, in the conducting of an investigation into an alleged breach of the lobbyists code of conduct, he or she has reasonable grounds to believe that a criminal offence has been committed.
Here are some specific comments. Obviously the bill is in response to the standing committee report of June 2001 and is primarily administrative. It would remove the exception for communications made in response to requests by public office-holders, which we support. It would also provide that communications that are restricted to requests for information are not subject to the act. The enactment would require lobbyists to file a return for every six months and opposes new registration obligations on in-house lobbyists for corporations.
We should point out that the bill would make a number of minor improvements to the Lobbyists Registration Act based on a parliamentary study conducted in 2001. It would improve the communications between the lobbyists registration branch and those who are registered. We would highlight at this point that the bill will go to committee before second reading, which is certainly a positive sign. However at this point section 7, subparagraph (1)(a)(v) does not refer to the wording of government contracts directly and we would like the committee to look at that.
I have three points I want to make that relate not only to this bill but to the entire ethics package. In particular the bill is not and should not be presented as a part of a new ethics package. The reality is that the committee studied this and produced a report in June 2001. The government response was by former industry minister Tobin in November 2001. At that time he stated very clearly that he would amend the Lobbyists Registration Act to deal with the committee's recommendations.
This bill deals with those promised amendments and the government is being a little disingenuous by saying that this is part of its new ethics package. The fact is since former minister Tobin was considering this, I hardly see how the government can present this as part of a new ethics package.
My second point is that the bill does not deal with the main criticism of the laws and regulations concerning lobbyists; that is, that there is not an effective mechanism in place to enforce the code. We heard over and over again at committee that while we had all these regulations saying that they must register, there was no effective enforcement or any consequences of not registering. Therefore what is the motivation to register other than a person's good will?
We have some concerns. This shows that the legislation was drafted before because of the way it refers to the ethics counsellor in this piece of legislation specifically. The ethics counsellor, Howard Wilson, enforces the lobbyists code which requires that lobbyists follow the registration act. There were obvious questions, even from government members of that committee, about the effectiveness of Mr. Wilson's ability to enforce this code because of his perceived lack on independence from the Prime Minister, as was stated by many witnesses and many members before the committee at that time.