Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to my hon. colleague, because he sat on this committee alongside me.
We went into this committee to deal with a very important piece of legislation on parliamentary rules, the Conflict of Interest Act, which is a commitment that the current Conservative government made following the sponsorship scandal to ensure that there was some level of credibility and accountability for public office holders. However, what we saw in these hearings was unprecedented in anything that I have ever seen in Parliament.
Numerous credible witnesses were invited to come forward, untold tens of thousands of dollars were spent hearing testimony, and then the Conservatives came in with recommendations that did not reflect in any way anything that had been said by anybody, so what is being perpetuated on the Canadian people and the parliamentary system is a fraud. The work of the committee was completely ignored. The recommendations that were brought forward have nothing to do with any of the testimony.
However, the most serious and more egregious abuse is the fact that now the designation of a public office holder will include anybody who is in a bargaining unit under the federal government.
We asked the ethics commissioner about this, and she told us that it would be in the nature of 260,000 people that she would have administer. It would mean that if someone was working in a call centre for Service Canada in Moose Jaw, that person would now be under the same rules as the finance minister. We see a government undermining the act by including anybody in any position anywhere in this country. An office cleaner for the federal government could suddenly be under the act.
The ethics commissioner said that it would swamp her office and make it absolutely impossible to function. It would also allow for all the backroom corruption, all the insiders, and all the friends to basically get off scot-free, because they will be thrown into this massively large pool that has nothing to do with what the Conflict of Interest Act is supposed to be about.
I would ask my hon. colleague what he feels the message is that the Conservatives are sending in terms of not only their contempt for the parliamentary and committee process and for all the witnesses who came forward, but also for the fundamental act that got them elected in 2006, which was their promise to bring transparency and accountability to this House.