moved:
That an Order of the House do issue for the production of copies of all reports of the Ethics Counsellor concerning the former Solicitor General.
Madam Speaker, you have read the order to which I am addressing my remarks. The solicitor general and cabinet minister in question who was required to resign is now the member for Cardigan.
First, I want to deal with some questions of procedure and then I want to deal with questions of substance. It is important to understand that on issues with regard to the presentation of documents, the only limits upon Parliament are the limits that Parliament imposes itself. Parliament has imposed no limits on the papers or the documents which we are entitled to see and receive. Beauchesne's citation 447 states this in a rather negative way but makes the principle clear. It states:
The House itself has not laid down any criteria for Notices of Motion for the Production of Papers. Any determination of what constitutes “confidential documents” is not a matter for the Speaker to determine. It is up to the government to determine whether any “letters, papers, and studies” are of a confidential nature...
The government has the power to hide documents from Parliament, but the government has no right to hide those documents, and no right to decide what Parliament and the public will see.
The government has set out its own version of the so-called general principles it follows in trying to keep things secret. They are recorded in Beauchesne's citation 446 and I will review those so-called principles. But let it be clear, those are the government's rules for Parliament. They do not bind Parliament. We have the authority to decide by a vote here.
On October 22, 2002, the member for Cardigan, the then solicitor general, submitted his resignation from cabinet. In his letter to the Prime Minister, he said, among other things:
I met with the ethics counsellor and I have learned that he has found me in breach of some obligations.
It is important to remember and to underline that the member for Cardigan, the former solicitor general, disagreed with the finding of the ethics counsellor, at least so he said, but apparently the Prime Minister forced his resignation in any event.
If the member for Cardigan believed that he was wrongly judged, then it would be in his interest to have these documents published and to have the facts known, and certainly it would be in the public interest.
If we are to have rules, we need to know what they are. We need to know why a minister has been found in breach in a particular case and we need to know whether a resignation was triggered by a breach of the rules or by something else. In other words, was the member for Cardigan fired for a real breach of the rules? And, for that matter, was the member for York Centre, the former minister of defence, fired for a real breach of the rules? Or was it for something else, something unknown, and something the public should know?
The only way to know is for Parliament to see the actual documents. Documents that, I remind the House and the public, were prepared by a public official, the ethics counsellor, who is paid and maintained at public expense and whose clear duty is to investigate potential breaches of the code of conduct for ministers and secretaries of state.
What makes this matter so important, more important than simply the documents I am seeking today, is that we are not speaking here of just isolated individual behaviour. There is a pattern of abuse with the government. The tip of the iceberg that we see is the number of resignations or changes in portfolio. The present ambassador to Denmark was chased out of the House and out of the country. The current House leader was forced to change his portfolio. The members for Cardigan and York Centre were forced to resign. There was probably a breach with respect to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, but we have not seen the files. Certainly the Prime Minister was in breach in Shawinigate and it would be interesting to see those files. And we do not know what other ministers were involved because we do not know what the government has not told us.
But we do know that the government on its way to office in 1993 promised a much more independent watchdog than it delivered. Instead of the independent official it proposed, it created a mere illusion of independence by breaking its promise to have that officer report to Parliament and by making that officer subject instead to the Prime Minister. That can only feed the impression that the government seeks systematically to keep secret behaviour and information that should be public.
There is a related issue. Since the government relies regularly on the reports of the ethics counsellor, this Parliament has the right to know what that counsellor reports and we have the right to know what the Prime Minister does with those reports. Does he read them? Does he pay any attention to them? That is not just a question in the air, because the Prime Minister of Canada has a clear obligation, spelled out in his own guide for ministers and secretaries of state; he is the person, the Prime Minister is the officer who is obliged by his own guidelines to ensure that his own ministers follow the rules.
That means that he needs to know what they are doing. The ethics counsellor has the duty to tell the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister has the duty to read and to heed the evidence the counsellor provides. Why is that germane? Because, and I will come to it in a moment, of the blind management trust arrangement that this government introduced despite the fact that it has never been part of any conflict of interest regime before. We have always before had absolutely blind trusts until this government, accommodating some of its richer ministers, decided it would change the rules for this regime. But even under these rules, the Prime Minister is required to come to his own decision about the conduct of his ministers. That is the clear responsibility of the Prime Minister of Canada.
I want to speak a little bit about the blind management trust. What we know about the blind management trust is that the member for LaSalle—Émard, the former minister of finance, was briefed 12 times on his private business affairs while he served as minister of finance. The Prime Minister refuses to answer, whether he, the Prime Minister, with a clear obligation under his own guidelines, has carried out his personal responsibility to find out whether his then minister of finance was acting improperly. One way to ensure that the Prime Minister reads the documents prepared by the ethics counsellor, one way to ensure that the Prime Minister acts on these documents, is to make them public in Parliament, because if we can read them, he will be required to read them.
If I may, I want to go through the arguments that may be used from Beauchesne's to defend secrecy on the part of the government. I want to go through point by point the elements in citation 446. Let me read those elements:
To enable Members of Parliament to secure factual information about the operations of Government to carry out their parliamentary duties and to make public as much factual information as possible--
Here are the “criteria to be applied in determining if the government papers or documents should be exempt from production”: first, “legal opinions or [legal] advice provided for the use of the government” would render a document secret. That is not the case with the matters here. There is no legal advice. There is no legal opinion. Second are papers “which would be detrimental to the security of the state”. There is no challenge to the security of the state to tell people what went on with the member for Cardigan when he was solicitor general. The third prohibition deals with “papers dealing with international relations”. That clearly does not apply in this case. The fourth relates to papers “received from the provinces”. That clearly does not apply in this case. The next item, (e), relates to “papers containing information, the release of which could allow or result in direct personal financial gain or loss by a person or a group of persons”.
All I can say is that I hope that is not the case. I hope the government is not keeping these documents secret to protect the financial position of some person unknown. If it is, it has an obligation to tell us who it is protecting by this secrecy. If it is going to cite that defence, it must make that information known.
The next exemption relates to “papers reflecting on the personal competence or character” of individuals. I think it is important to deal with that precise language. The word “reflecting”, I assume, was chosen with care. The language does not say “reporting facts which might lead third parties to conclusions about competence or character”. The only reasonable interpretation of the word “reflecting” would be that the documents contained a commentary that was a reflection on competence or character. What is intended here is a limitation upon publishing characterizations in documents, not a limitation upon publishing facts in a document.
The exception (g) is “papers of a voluminous character”. If there were such papers, that might be one reason why the Prime Minister had not read them, but there is no reason to believe that the documents prepared by the ethics counsellor were of voluminous character. The next exception is related to documents “relating to the business of the Senate”. There is no reason to believe that exemption applies.
The next exemption says that nothing can be released “which would be personally embarrassing to Her Majesty or the Royal Family”. I doubt strongly that there is anything in these documents that would be embarrassing to Her Majesty or to the royal family.