Mr. Speaker, just to set the context, and I doubt I am the first to read them into the record today, but I think it is worth quoting the ethics principles that the ministers were given:
There should be no preferential access to government, or appearance of preferential access, accorded to individuals or organizations because they have made financial contributions to politicians and political parties.
I share the view expressed by many members here today on both sides of the House that these are not the kinds of things I came here to talk about. There are a lot more important issues that we should be addressing.
However, that cannot be used as an excuse. I would say that is an argument for ministers not to engage in this kind of activity, so we do not have to spend time talking about it. However, as long as there is going to be that kind of activity, we have to talk about it.
It is not opposition members who should be blamed for having brought this issue forward. If the government earnestly wants to spend our time talking about the other issues, and I would agree with the government that we should be talking about an expansion of the Canada pension plan, instituting a national pharmacare program, and rolling out child care across the country, that is what I would like to be talking about. However, as long as the government is going to engage in the kinds of activities that brought about this debate, then we are not going to be able to do that.
These things have to be addressed and not cynically used as a smokescreen to try to get the government out of trouble when its ministers are behaving in ways that are obviously inappropriate. They are not illegal. We are not here to say that this is an illegal activity, but they are inappropriate activities and we do hold ministers in this country to a higher code of conduct. That makes sense. That is what Canadians expect. It is certainly what I expect.
We have seen this with other governments; we saw it under the previous government, and we saw it under governments previous to that government, this tendency to insist on the narrow, legal definitions of conduct for ministers and not accept that there is a higher code of conduct and that ministers not only have to be following the law, and not only following principles of ethics, but they have to be seen to be following those principles, or there is a problem.
Traditionally, ministers would step aside if there was a problem while it was investigated. Those ministers would come back later if they were cleared, and not if they were not.
This tendency, which I find quite unfortunate, to bear down and say that if it cannot be proven in a court of law, then too bad, they are going to carry on as if it does not matter, is not acceptable. It flies in the face of the code of conduct that the Prime Minister himself brought in.
It was not eons ago, 100 or 150 years ago, that some former prime minister brought this in. This is something that the new Prime Minister himself, just months ago, brought in. He said it was important that his ministers be held to this higher standard. It is not something that the opposition is suddenly making up. It is not something that the Prime Minister just brought in willy-nilly either. We hear it every day, ad nauseam, frankly, when ministers get up to talk about transparency, openness, accountability, and how they are setting a new bar.
What has happened here, a private fundraiser for lawyers to meet the justice minister and to advertise access to the justice minister, is not anywhere near consistent with setting a new bar. It is pretty low, and people have a right to be concerned. They have a right to be concerned not just because this is selling access to a minister of the crown, but also because it is doing that within her area of responsibility, which is quite significant. This is a person who appoints judges for Canada.
It is a fundraiser of potential candidates, or we do not know exactly but certainly people who practise law are potential candidates for appointment to the bench. They bought a $500 ticket to an event to meet the person who could be the gateway to the next promotion in their career. One does not have to be a lawyer or a professor of ethics to understand what is wrong with that. I do not think one does.
I was sympathetic early on. There were accusations levelled pretty early on about the justice minister. Another member alluded to that earlier, having to do with her husband. Privately, I kind of felt that one cannot put one's spouse in a blind trust. I understood that and there had not been any evidence that she was going to demonstrate poor judgment, so let us wait and see.
We did not have to wait very long to show that this minister is capable of great lapses in ethical judgment, because this is not defensible. Then she tried to say it was not really in her capacity as minister that they wanted to meet with her, that a whole bunch of high-priced lawyers in Toronto just wanted to meet with her because she is an MP from Vancouver. Come on.
I appreciate that government members want to defer to the ethical lapses of the previous government. There is a lot of material to mine there. I can appreciate that the Liberals want to bring those things up. They want to bring them up because, in part, it was those arguments and actions by the previous government that created the impetus for change. It is a double-edged sword for the Liberals to remind Canadians of just how angry they were with the ethical lapses of the previous government when their Minister of Justice is involved in the very kinds of activity that we are here to talk about today.
Part of the issue is about trust. When we hear the kind of defence that the Minister of Justice is putting forward about her actions and it does not pass the smell test, that hurts trust in government. It speaks to questions of openness and transparency.
Just before the member previous got up to speak, the government came into the House. Again, if the Liberals want to distinguish themselves from the previous government, what should they do? There is a serious debate before the House about the jobs of Canadian aerospace workers, and we just witnessed the government House leader come into this House and serve notice of a motion to invoke closure. Of all the cynical and worst tools of a majority government to ram its agenda through, closure is the worst. The previous government took that tool and reformed it, and brought it to new heights, I would say.
Again, consistent with this criticism of the previous government, we were told we were going to have a new government. It was going to take the role of Parliament differently. It was going to treat Parliament differently. The ministers were going to be held to a higher ethical standard. We see this on the legislative end. They hardly have a bill before Parliament. They have had several routine bills on the estimates. They have two bills that are mandated by the Supreme Court with a deadline before summer. They have a few bills that will simply repeal some acts of the previous government.
They hardly have a bill of their own that they wrote themselves. We have had two days of debate on that bill, and they are already invoking closure. It is unconscionable, when we have such a sparse legislative agenda, that they would be using closure. Then they want to say to just trust them on the other stuff and not talk about their conduct outside of the House, that it is a trustworthy government. However, when we want to have a discussion—or not, as closure would seem to imply—about the 2,600 families, with members who are working for Air Canada, the Liberals are going to shut that down. That is what the Liberals are doing, and that is what we are seeing from the government today.
The Liberals want to show us that they are to be trusted and that we do not have to have these kinds of debates to hold them to account. However, I submit that as time goes on, their methods are beginning to look a lot like those of the previous government. Where the previous government, to its small credit, had a similar fundraising scandal with a member of Parliament from my hometown, the former MP for Saint Boniface, she at least paid the money back.
I heard the arguments of members across the way on the government side in terms of their disappointment in the ethical conduct of the previous government. However, I would say that the more they make those arguments, the more it raises the question: Why would they not at least do what they did, at the very least? Never mind holding themselves to a higher ethical bar. At the very least, they could hold themselves to the same bar. We are not seeing that. Already the current government is beginning to adopt some of the habits of the previous government, and I find that quite unfortunate.