Mr. Speaker, I value the intervention that my colleague has made today especially because he sits on the industry committee which is the overseer committee that the ethics commissioner presently answers to. He made allusion to the fact that he did not know Mr. Wilson. I would probably put myself into that same classification even though I have been around longer and have probably had more direct contacts with Mr. Wilson.
I must share with the House that I often genuinely felt sorry for the man because I had, and to a degree still have, a lot of respect for the individual. I can say that honestly because even though we felt that there was a real shortcoming in the way some of the investigations were conducted, he honourably conducted himself as required by the Prime Minister. In that sense, he need not hang his head in shame.
As my colleague has indicated, under the present system, the ethics commissioner has his hands tied. He is appointed by the Prime Minister, he answers to the Prime Minister, and even though he may table a report to Parliament in all instances, it is not a requirement to fully divulge the issue that is at hand. This is a very serious flaw.
The thing that I am concerned about in Bill C-34 is that with respect to dealing with charges of conflict of interest of cabinet ministers, it appears to me that nothing has changed and that is regrettable. I have said before in my speech that, if a charge is laid and if in fact the person is guilty, the public has a right to know on what grounds the individual was found guilty and there ought to be penalties. If the individual having been charged is judged to be not guilty, then that person should be fully and totally exonerated. If that were to occur, then it almost would require public disclosure of the facts on which the conclusion was based in order that the public would fully trust the judgment that was been made.
I know there would be some cases where one could say that we were treading into grounds of personal privacy and that some things ought not to be disclosed. I do not know, but it seems to me that if I were a cabinet minister being unjustly charged and part of the investigation went into some of my personal affairs, I would gladly give permission for those personal affairs to be made public if it were to help clear my name. I made mention of that, for example, when we were dealing with the government credit cards being used by a cabinet minister. All these things were whited out and the reason given was that this was private.
I argued that if the individual put charges on a government card, it has moved out of the range of being called private. It is now public. I said at that time, and I would still say the same thing if it were to clear my name and show that everything was done properly. At the present time at least I would have no problem showing my private credit card statements. I have nothing there to hide if people want to know that I went to Pizza Hut. There is other evidence that supports that, too; there is just nothing there to hide.
We need to carefully rethink how important all these privacy issues are and whether or not the ethics counsellor, now the ethics commissioner, should make all of the hearings public and that the amount of stuff that is withheld due to privacy considerations be minimized. I would like to hear my colleague's comments on that.