Mr. Speaker, I actually cannot comment knowledgeably about those provinces. However I can say that I was involved in an instance where a federal minister of transport signed a contract with the province of New Brunswick with a particular person, the minister of transport of New Brunswick. When the federal minister of transport was defeated and lost his job, he immediately signed another contract as a private operator of a company to take over the very same Trans-Canada Highway sector that he had paid for as a minister of the federal crown.
We took that to the ethics commissioner in New Brunswick and it was not effective at all. The same thing happened in Ottawa, even though the same two people signed the contract originally who signed it later on. Again, the federal minister of transport signed the contract with the provincial minister of transport. Then when the federal minister was defeated, he signed a contract as the president of Maritime Highways Corporation with the same minister of transport to take over that highway and all the funding the federal government put into it. I thought that was contrary to the post-employment ethics criteria in the ethics commission report, but again the ethics counsellor is there to protect the ministers and not to get to the truth and to ensure ethics.