Mr. Speaker, with regard to the Wheat Board, this is a little more complicated than the minister has relayed to the House. The member for Malpeque laid out the case very well. I would urge the President of the Treasury Board to look at his commentary and his responses to some fairly tough but fair questions.
With regard to Commissioner Reid, I had the pleasure to join him at a conference where I was a speaker. We talked about the changes that were not there. In fact, his description of what was not there was basically an evisceration of the recommendations that he had made as the Information Commissioner. He held that position for some seven years. I know the gentleman through committee work, his experience and expertise and counsel that he has given to parliamentarians over the period he was here. I respect his opinion. In his view, and I agree with him, there were substantive changes or exclusions made from proposed amendments by him to the Access to Information Act. In that regard we have not taken the opportunity to enhance one of the most important tools we have to promote accountability in government.
I would remind the President of the Treasury Board that government is not just the elected political people, it is also the people in those departments, in his own department, collectively, who represent the government. The accountability act unfortunately has the presumption of guilt or wrongdoing as opposed to the charter principle of the presumption of innocence. We may have unintended consequences with this bill.
The government has decided to go down this route. We are prepared to accept its decision to basically overlay an administrative burden and some very onerous tasks on the public service, which may in fact reduce productivity in the public service and which may do more harm than good.
I would have thought from my own perspective that the better approach to improving the accountability of government, being elected as well as unelected persons responsible for taxpayers' dollars, would be to look at the areas where there was significant risk or examples of where there were problems to be dealt with. It would be better to deal with those on a more focused or surgical basis rather than to overlay and have the presumption of guilt to all involved.