Mr. Speaker, we need to underscore the importance of this debate. I know there are probably government members who will at some point, either on the floor or in some fashion, be asking why are we wasting our time on this when we should be dealing with blah, blah, blah.
The reality is that stopping and dealing with these kinds of fundamental issues are crucial when they happen because we soon forget about them and go on about our daily business. This is not a partisan issue and it is not even about us. It is about those people who are elected to sit here. Today it is us but there will be a day when it will be someone else. So this is about the rights of members of Parliament. As time goes on, those issues will pop up and at that moment, as you had to do today, Mr. Speaker, and as the Table had to do, there is a scramble to determine what the ruling should be.
The first thing that is looked at is the precedent for when it came up in the past, what was said, what the circumstances were and whether any of them were similar to the issue at hand. It could be decades before anything remotely similar comes up. However, a parliament in the future expects that those who came before would have done their job, just as we are fortunate enough that parliamentarians who came before us took the time to lay down the foundations that are truly the basis for our democracy in this great country. Therefore, this is important.
It would be fair for someone to ask, because I know it crossed my mind, that we have had the issue come up, we have had the ruling, we had a review and another report as a result of actions taken by the House, what is left to do? That is a fair question. The amendment is particularly important because it talks about ensuring that if there are any unexpected results from this rule change, which, in the world of the CIA is called “blowback”, will it affect other things that we have not thought of. Given the fundamental importance of this issue, it makes every good sense to ensure we do the job thoroughly and properly.
If the committee could spend as little as five minutes taking a look at it and saying that everything is okay, so be it. However, if it is not, we need to grab it now, wrestle with it while the issue is fresh in front of us, while we have actually made changes to our Standing Orders or the code which forms part of our Standing Orders, so that when it comes up again in the future the homework will have been done and we will have done collectively what we believed was the best we could do in the interest of current and future parliamentarians.
If anyone thinks that this is all inside baseball, that nobody really cares about this and that even though we can think it is a big deal, no one else does, I would like to place on the record two editorials from the Globe and Mail. Unless I missed the memo, the Globe and Mail is still considered to be the national paper of record. That is the paper that takes it upon itself to watch the national scene in a very detailed way on a regular basis as opposed to most of the other great newspapers and the not so great newspapers, which will, from time to time comment.
If we were wasting a lot of time on this issue or if it were not important, believe me the Globe and Mail would be the first to say so. On May 12 of this year, the Globe and Mail stated:
In March, at the height of the Chuck Cadman affair, [the Prime Minister] threatened to personally sue [the leader of the official opposition] for libel over allegations of attempted bribery. Few would suggest that, had the Prime Minister followed through, the Liberal Leader would have had to recuse himself from parliamentary debate on the controversy. But based on a ruling last week by the federal Ethics Commissioner, Mary Dawson, [the leader of the official opposition] would have had little choice.
Among all MPs, [the] Liberal [member for West Nova] was most aggressive last fall in asking questions about the relationship between former prime minister Brian Mulroney and businessman Karlheinz Schreiber. It only made sense that he would sit in on the ethics committee's hearings into the affair when they began in November, establishing himself as one of the few MPs with a strong grasp of the relevant issues.
I did not say that they were always correct. I said that they did not always pay attention.
The Globe and Mail goes on to state:
But in response to a query from [the] Conservative MP [from Dufferin—Caledon] Ms. Dawson has ruled that because he was facing a lawsuit from Mr. Mulroney over comments he made during a television interview, [the member for West Nova] had a “private interest” in the matter that left him in violation of the Conflict of Interest Code for Members of the House of Commons.
Ms. Dawson is right that [the member for West Nova] — who had not yet been served with a libel notice in November, but was aware of its likelihood--