Mr. Speaker, Bill C-29 deals with the Canada Elections Act and accountability.
I will do a bit of history and talk about public accountability. Unfortunately what has happened for decades is the confusion with respect to what public accountability is or is not and the confusion between public accountability, conduct and responsibility. To the casual observer it seems they would be very much the same thing, but they are not and the implications of that are quite significant.
I owe much of this to Mr. Henry McCandless, from Victoria, who is a retired senior member of the Auditor General's office. He has waged a battle for many years to introduce true public accountability into the public service and into Parliament for the reason of affecting conduct. If we get public accountability right, in effect what we will be able to do is affect conduct and have a transparent means upon which the public can know what we, as elected officials, do and therefore be judged by that. In fact, if we get public accountability correct it is a liberating exercise for those of us who serve and for the public itself.
Let me for a moment give a true definition of public accountability. Public accountability is the obligation of authorities to explain publicly, fully and fairly, before and after the fact, how they carry out their responsibilities that affect the public in important ways. It is an obligation to report publicly to explain the intentions and reasons, including performance standards, what those performance standards are and, after the fact, whether they have been met.
In other words, the outcome of performance and the learning game can also be applied and in doing so, it is the liberating experience. Said another way, we as elected officials and senior members of the public service have an obligation to Canadians to tell them what we will do, why we will do it and what the public performance standards are upon which we will be judged. Then the outcomes can be judged and measured. We not only can go hand on heart and tell the public, in a transparent way, what we will do, but we know what we will be judged on. We know what the goals are, the public knows what the goals are. In doing this, we can measure very clearly how effectively we have executed our duties in the interests of the public good.
That should have been in the public accountability bill, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with public accountability and had everything to do with conduct. It has put on layers upon layers of administrative oversight, which are utterly unnecessary, upon the shoulders of the public service. This has created an expensive mechanism that will add absolutely nothing to public accountability and, in fact, will diminish the effectiveness of the public service to carry out its duties.
I cannot overemphasize the fact that the public accountability bill has been one of the most damaging public initiatives by the current government, or any government, in allowing the public service to execute its duty and for the public to be served well by an effective public service and an effective Parliament. Because this happened on the back of Gomery inquiry, it was a political initiative on the part of the government to try to make it look like it was cleaner than the previous government. It was all a bunch of nonsense. It was purely a political exercise.
The tragedy of the political exercise, the public accountability bill, is it has diminished the effectiveness of the public service and Parliament. Maybe the government wanted to do that. The Prime Minister is a follower of the U.S. political philosopher, Leo Strauss, who believed that a small number of people were predestined and preordained to lead. The Prime Minister is exhibiting that in Parliament and in the execution of his duties and that of the government.
Through what he has done, we do not now have a Parliament by the people, for the people or for the public through their elected officials. We have a government that is run by the Prime Minister's office, by a small group of unelected, invisible people who govern. These people do not listen to the public service. They exclude civil society and NGOs. They certainly diminish the effectiveness of the House by not listening to their members, their backbenchers and their ministers, their executive for the most part. They certainly do not give a care what anybody else thinks in the House. They also do not care what the public thinks.
If they are so sure in their ideology, that they believed they were preordained to govern and that their ideas are the only ideas that count and they have a tin ear to anybody else's ideas, then they will only move forward what they want and they will not listen to anybody else. However, by that, the public and our country is not served well. If they do not listen to Parliament, if they do not listen to other ideas from across the House, if they do not listen to their members, if they do not work with members from different sides, if they do not listen to NGOs and civil society and experts in our country, even the provinces, which are largely and often being excluded from decisions that affect them, what we have is a government that is less than what it could be, that is open to umpteen mistakes and that makes our country less than what it could be.
Is it not a government's responsibility to tap into the best and brightest ideas in our nation? Is it not a government's responsibility to tap into those great minds and those great ideas from coast to coast? Is it not a government's opportunity to tap into those solutions and implement them in the interest of the public good? I submit they are.
If the government were to truly introduce a public accountability act, it would put the responsibility on the shoulders of elected officials and unelected public servants, which includes people in the PMO and the PCO, to tell the public what they will do, who will benefit, why they will benefit and identify the public reporting standards upon which its activities are going to be judged. This would liberating for a government. The government could go to the public, tell it what it had done and how effective it had been. In those areas where a government had fallen short, there would be lessons to learned, and the public would fully understand that.
If a government were to do that, it would affect conduct. The conduct of an individual or a party would be measured by that which it told the public it would do. The government ought to be transparent, effective, wise and accountable.
There is a misnomer that public moneys or private moneys can somehow affect decision making. I wonder how many folks out there know that the limits for what people can donate legally to our elections, and to anybody who is running federally for a public office, is very modest. I believe it is between $1,000 and $5,000, $5,000 being the maximum. Banks, organizations and such, could only donate $5,000.
That is very different from the situation south of the border, where there are no spending limits. Thankfully our country has spending limits and they are governed by law. Therefore, if somebody is going to provide big money to somehow affect the public voting or influence an elected official: (a) the amount of those moneys would have to be large; (b) the person would have to be unscrupulous; and (c) if the person accepted it, he or she would be committing an illegal act. For many years it has been illegal for elected officials to accept large sums of money that would influence our decision making.
The government's notion of public accountability is dead wrong. It needs to review what it is and implement true public accountability. It would be something that no other government has done before and it would be a remarkable legacy if it were to do that.