Mr. Speaker, it is an important issue that needs to be addressed and it comes back a bit to the comments I made in my opening remarks about the way we drafted the mandate that the commissioner was under in the code. We did not clearly define what liability meant. The commissioner obviously drew the conclusion in a very narrow sense of what liability was.
Again, if we read the part of her report that dealt with the issue of liability, she was trying to make it very clear that she was interpreting it very rigidly and in a very narrow scope. She clearly was saying that liability arose at the time the action arose in court and perhaps, although she did not say this but I think we would have to draw this as an inevitable conclusion, it happened at the time that the alleged defamation occurred. It was really back when the member was alleged to have made the offending comment. Therefore, the liability actually arose at that point.
The context of it obviously had to do with a future liability. When we look at liability in the sense that she was, which is what is in the code, a liability arises out of some conduct but may not be realized until the future. It was in that context that the commissioner found that liability was that broadly to be interpreted. However, it really is a very narrow focus of what the word meant. It would be relatively easy, from my perspective, to change the code so we could more clearly define what we mean by liability.