Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Don Valley East.
As this is my first opportunity to rise in the 1st session of the 39th Parliament, I would like to sincerely thank the citizens of my riding of Saint John for the confidence they have expressed in me. I look forward to advocating strongly on their behalf on issues such as harbour cleanup, housing and child care.
I am pleased to offer my perspective on Bill C-2, the federal accountability act. This is an issue I well understand. In 1988 I represented the Canadian Bar Association before the Holtmann committee that the then prime minister Mulroney had convened to examine the area of lobbying in Canada. In 1994 and 1995 I chaired the industry committee and during that time I chaired the subcommittee on Bill C-43, the Lobbyists Registration Act. In the last Parliament I sat on the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics.
I believe that the government has to tread very carefully on this issue and to be intellectually honest about what it is trying to achieve. A lot of media spin and rhetoric from the government that has surrounded the introduction of this bill would give one the impression that all of government is corrupt. This is simply not the case.
This type of rhetoric brings disrepute on the men and women who serve in public life, the people who come to this House of Commons with the right morals and the right intentions. We all come to this place wanting to make a better country, a better place for our children and grandchildren. Anyone who claims that he or she has a monopoly on accountability does a disservice to Parliament and to this country.
Flippant comments and generalizations that are not based on fact bring this House into disrepute. It also brings honest, hard-working civil servants into disrepute. We need to be judicious and we need to be factual about what we say and the perception that it can breed.
Canada is a successful, modern democracy, not some banana republic as the government would like to portray. What it comes down to is either a person is fundamentally honest or not. As the hon. Mitchell Sharp, the esteemed former member of this place, said before our committee in 1995, “You cannot legislate integrity”.
This brings me to the federal accountability act. The measures in this legislation are not fundamental or even dramatic changes. To describe this legislation as wide sweeping, fundamental, ethical reforms is just not the case. We should not be telling Canadians that we can legislate integrity. We cannot.
The changes proposed in this legislation are things that we as parliamentarians have been talking about and moving toward since the 1980s. This is part of the Canadian tradition. We review legislation after a three or a five year period and improve or change the legislative framework so that it is more reflective of public expectations of legislators and civil servants.
For example, the evolution of the ethics counsellor who reported to the prime minister evolved to an Ethics Commissioner who reports to Parliament, to the creation of a new ethics auditor on lobbying.
Interestingly, we talked about this in the 1995 report, “Rebuilding Trust”. The government speaks of these changes, yet at the same time it seems to have shown disrespect for independent officers of Parliament, such as the Ethics Commissioner. While parliamentarians may not always agree on everything that the Ethics Commissioner says, to politicize the issue casts a negative pale over everyone in this place.
Members in previous Parliaments worked together to establish an Ethics Commissioner who reports directly to Parliament and yet time and time again members of this government refused to participate in investigations and tried to undermine the integrity of Mr. Shapiro. Either we have accountability or we do not. The government cannot pick and choose which investigations it wants to participate in or who occupies the position of the Ethics Commissioner.
The issue of reforming the financing of political parties and candidates is not a new issue. A significant overhaul was already completed by the Liberal government in 2003. I support the latest changes, but they are tinkering with the natural process. When this bill reaches committee, I would also like to see the inclusion of third party advertising restrictions perhaps.
This bill talks a lot about lobbyists. The government, through its media spin, would have Canadians believe that all lobbyists are crooked or corrupt. That clearly is not the case. I would like to remind parliamentarians of a 1995 report called “Rebuilding Trust”. This report came out of a committee that I had the privilege of chairing. It was called “Rebuilding Trust” because of a perception that, between the period of 1984 and 1993, there was a lot of corruption under the Conservatives. That government did suffer some serious ethical challenges which then Prime Minister Mulroney attempted to redress.
Interacting and advocating to government is a natural part of the democratic process, whether it is charities like the Canadian Cancer Society or the Canadian Institute for the Blind, or firms that are looking to do business with the government. There are checks and balances in this current legislation. To pretend that this bill is a complete overhaul is disingenuous indeed.
In the fall of 2002 when the government was in opposition, the then prime minister put forward a motion to the House of Commons proposing that the chairs of House committees be elected by secret ballot rather than being appointed directly by the prime minister. With the cooperation of members of the House, the motion passed and our committee chairs were elected by secret ballot. The government is now seeking to reverse this very process that we in the House put in place. This one act of not electing our chairs would lend some hypocrisy to this legislation. The government has spoken about reforming the appointment process and I am fully in support of this, but this is a natural evolution of this policy.
Whistleblower legislation is also a natural evolution. Legislation was before the House during the last Parliament and I look forward to participating in that debate.
Steps are going in the right direction to expand the reach of the Auditor General. They would build on improvements that we made when we were in government. Strengthening auditing and accountability within departments was done in the last Parliament. It is not something new; it is not something dramatic. There are aspects of the legislation that will work well; however, it is the natural evolution of this Parliament.
Accountability is about doing what we say we are going to do and keeping our promises. Accountability should be about the Prime Minister coming to my riding of Saint John, New Brunswick and delivering money that is needed to clean up our harbour as he promised he would do on three occasions. Instead, the Prime Minister makes a token gesture of $2.2 million and says the government is starting to clean up the harbour. The previous government promised $44 million. To pretend that $2.2 million is going to clean up our harbour is not genuine. Reinvesting money in our community is about accountability.
I look forward to sending this bill to committee and to working with all members of the House toward improvements.