Madam Speaker, it is my great pleasure to participate in the debate this afternoon. What some of this relates to, in dealing with the ethics counsellor, is obviously the ethics of the government and the question of ethics in public service in general.
From that standpoint, the debate this afternoon has not really addressed some the broader issues that we in government face in terms of ethics. If we go back, for instance to the beginnings of this government in 1993, what we saw was an honest commitment to correct the errors of the past. God knows, we had a number of errors in the past in terms of ethics in government from the previous Conservative government of Brian Mulroney. Books have been written about the issue of ethics in the previous Mulroney government.
I was around here working as an assistant at the time of the first Mulroney parliament, from 1984 to 1988. What I witnessed, and some of the files that I worked on at that time, was absolutely astounding. I think back for instance to the case of Robert Coates, the former defence minister, who was discovered in a strip club in Germany with secret NATO documents in briefcases with him. Of course he was called upon to resign, and once it was discovered what he was up to, he did in fact resign.
However what bothered some of us at the time was the fact that the Mulroney government just had no idea as to what the concepts of ethics were, what they meant in terms of public confidence and what they meant in terms of the larger issue of the consent of the governed. It is absolutely essential to establish in the public mind some competency, some sensitivity to issues of cleanliness in government , if I can put it that way.
I think back to the case of the former solicitor general Elmer MacKay who by all accounts was an honest individual but who was drawn into a situation with the former premier of New Brunswick, Richard Hatfield, in connection with an investigation relating to marijuana in 1985. I remember that very well, and the result it had on people's confidence in government, the fact that there were these secret meetings between the former solicitor general and the premier of New Brunswick related to an RCMP investigation.
The impact that had, certainly on the people to whom I spoke, was very profound and it resulted eventually in a repudiation of the government of--