Mr. Speaker, it is going to be hard to follow that, but I will do my best to make sure I say “lawyer” when it is appropriate and the other word when it is appropriate, but I cannot say that word in here.
This debate today provides us with a great opportunity to reflect and take stock as Canadians watch the debate. When Canadians elect people and send them to Ottawa they want them to behave in a way that shows our country both domestically and around the world in the brightest light and in the highest standard possible.
That brings me to what the motion is all about. The government party and members on the other side who are taking us to task for presenting the motion today are using words like “frivolous”. They are making comments like “this is a waste of time”. We are debating a rather substantive document, a document called “Open and Accountable Government”. It is written on the letterhead of the Prime Minister of Canada and it bears his signature. This is the standard to which this debate should be held. Members of the Liberal caucus who are rising are hiding behind a technical ruling from the Ethic Commissioner's office. I want to be very clear for people watching this debate at home how this works.
Currently, we have the Conflict of Interest Act and the code of conduct for ministers, parliamentary secretaries, and members of Parliament. This is administered by Mary Dawson, the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner. She has come before the ethics committee many times. I chair that committee and I have been on that committee in previous Parliaments. We are reviewing the legislation, which has not been updated since the 1980s when it was first introduced. That is how archaic the legislation actually is. Every previous government owns the responsibility for not updating the legislation. I am not here to debate that with the member for Lac-Saint-Louis. I would agree that the time has come.
I remain cautiously hopeful and optimistic that the new bar that will be set in law will actually meet the supposed tests that the Prime Minister expects his cabinet ministers to meet. Here is the reality.
The witnesses who come to committee recommended by the Liberal Party, the NDP, and the Library of Parliament, virtually all are unanimous in saying that the Conflict of Interest Code and the Conflict of Interest Act which creates the code do not stand up in today's society. That bar is here. The Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, the Information Commissioner, the access to information commissioner, and the Commissioner of Lobbying, have lobbied many times to raise the bar on all of these things. The bar to which they say that the legislation should be changed is here.
The document that the Prime Minister has penned, which has been quoted from several times today, and I will quote it again, says:
Ministerial Conduct
Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries must act with honesty and must uphold the highest ethical standards so that public confidence and trust in the integrity and impartiality of government are maintained and enhanced.
It goes on:
Moreover, they have an obligation to perform their official duties and arrange their private affairs in a manner that will bear the closest public scrutiny. This obligation is not fully discharged merely by acting within the law.
The law has a standard that is down here according to almost anybody that comes before the committee. That is not a high bar to achieve, and it is not a bar that I would hide behind if I were on the other side of the House today trying to defend.
This document, “Open and Accountable Government”, holds a lot of hope and optimism, but we have to remember who penned this document. This document is supposedly penned by the Prime Minister. My guess is that it was penned by somebody else who might have worked at Queen's Park, where they currently have quotas for ministers to achieve, fundraising targets, and was simply signed by the Prime Minister. Nonetheless, even if the Prime Minister did not pen it, he signed the document, so he is responsible for it.
Let us take a look at that particular individual's conduct. After becoming an MP, we know that the current Prime Minister accepted numerous paid speaking engagements while he was a member of Parliament, and for that he was admonished, not necessarily technically by the Ethics Commissioner, but certainly anybody with any credibility in the media or in civil society would look at that and say, “You are a member of Parliament. You have been invited to a speaking engagement and you are charging a fee?”
In one particular case, the current Prime Minister, in his capacity as a member of Parliament, actually billed a school board $780 for a limousine service to take him from Ottawa to Kingston and return him to Montreal. That is when he appeared at the Algonquin and Lakeshore Catholic District School Board, in Kingston, where he was paid $15,000 to be a speaker. That was in 2010. He was a member of this House. He probably had designs on being the prime minister at some point in time. My guess would be that one would have to do that at some particular point in time.
George Takach said, “MPs shouldn't get paid extra for public speaking, it's part of their job description”.
I certainly would not even dream of accepting payment in my capacity as a member of Parliament, which I have had the privilege of being for the last 10 years in this House.
Others go on to say, “I certainly wouldn't be, as a member of Parliament, receiving money for speaking out on matters of public interest”. This is something that we already get paid quite well to do.
We have to ask ourselves whether the Prime Minister actually believes the document he has penned or whether it is “do as I say, not as I do”. This raises a lot of questions.
He has charged $20,000 to the Certified Management Accountants of Ontario. Would the certified management accountants have anything to lobby the government about at some particular point in time?
He has also taken speaking fees from the Ontario Public Service Employees' Union. We all know about Bill C-4. The ink was not even dry on the swearing in of the ministers, then there is pro-union legislation on the table in the House of Commons. We have to wonder just exactly where the Prime Minister is at on this.
Notwithstanding the credibility of the author of the document, I still have high hopes, as chair of the ethics committee, that we can actually elevate the legislation we have here.
Then we come to the justice minister and the conflict of interest that is abundantly clear to everybody in the world except the Liberal caucus.
The government House leader just stood in this House and tried to rationalize her appearance, because he is able to get $700-a-plate fundraisers in his own riding, 20 minutes from his house, where everybody knows him. He is happy with $750. That is enough to have access. Then he asks us to equate that with an MP from Vancouver, who is unknown to most people in the greater Toronto area, charging $500 a plate for an invitation-only, not even advertized, event. That just does not pass muster. It does not make any sense at all.
We can compare that with some of the decisions, and I was hopeful before Christmas. My birthday is at Christmas, so I was feeling good—