Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to have this opportunity to draw the attention of the House to an aspect of this legislation that might be otherwise overlooked. It is a very important aspect of the legislation and one that I, because of my particular interests I suppose, am especially qualified to comment on, or at least I am the one most likely to notice and that is because of my interest in issues pertaining to access to information and privacy.
I draw the attention of the House to section 72.06(a) and (b). This section of the act describes the functions of the ethics commissioner in relation to public office holders. What we have in this section is a definition of public office holder that includes a minister of the Crown, a minister of state or a parliamentary secretary, which is fine, and in (b) even more significantly a person, other than a public servant, who works on behalf of a minister of the Crown or a minister of state.
Members of the House will recall that about a year ago there was quite a controversy involving the expense accounts of an exempt staff member of one of the ministers. The Treasury Board had ruled that the exempt staff of ministers were not public office holders. This was a fairly longstanding definition, or interpretation I should say.
Actually I have the Treasury Board analysis. It was actually a guideline, guideline 78 that was released in March 2001. It advised with respect to section 3(j) of the Privacy Act that ministers and their exempt staff are not deemed to be officers and employees of government institutions and as such are not covered by section 3.
When ministers take office they certainly have staff that are provided to them by the bureaucracy, by the public service, but they also have a certain number of employees who are their direct aids that act as intermediaries between the minister and the bureaucracy, sometimes as intermediaries with the media. Sometimes they also look after some of the ministers' politically partisan activities.
The problem is that as a result of this interpretation, this type of individual was not covered by the Access to Information Act. This exploded into something of a controversy when it was discovered, quite to everyone's surprise, that access to information requests made to this type of staff of ministers were being denied and were being denied as a result of this guideline set out by Treasury Board.
What is so interesting about the section I alluded to in Bill C-34 is the good news is that the government has acted on that controversy. We already knew that the government had acted on that controversy because after the hearings before the public accounts committee, even though it became very clear as a result of the testimony that this was a valid interpretation that ministers' staff were not covered by the Access to Information Act, there was a directive issued, I believe by the Prime Minister's office, to ministers to exercise their discretion and endeavour to ensure that type of information was released.
Thus we have the news of the day now where the staff of certain other ministers are receiving a certain amount of media coverage because of--I do not know how to describe it--elaborate spending, shall we say. I do not want to suggest excessive because I do not want to make a judgment, but we have seen in the news a number of expense account stories. That arises directly out of the public accounts activities and the questions raised about ministerial exempt staff.
As I say, the really good news is that obviously in Bill C-34 the government has received the message from the backbench, has received the message from the public accounts committee and has actually put into this legislation that a public office holder is indeed a minister, as indeed are the staff that the ministers hire. That is good news.
It means that the ethics commissioner will be part of a package of transparency that looks at not just how people spend money in departments, but how they deport themselves. I think it is a very good thing that the government has seen fit to put that actually in the legislation.