Mr. Speaker, the official opposition's motion today is clearly of interest to Canadians. I do not know if “regret” is the right word, but it is lamentable, I suppose, that we need to spend a day in Parliament asking for something that should have been clear and obvious when the finance minister took on the most important job in the cabinet, outside of the Prime Minister's job. There has been a pattern with the finance minister.
Maybe I am naive, but I think many Canadians believed the finance minister two years ago when he suggested that he would put his wealth into a blind trust. I believed him, because that was the obvious thing for a finance minister to do. Paul Martin did that, as well as a succession of finance ministers, because if they are wealthy and have assets that could be impacted by the decisions they make as finance ministers, the only way to shield themselves from ethical violations, either perceived or real, in which they would benefit from their ministerial decisions is to put all their assets into a blind trust, as the Prime Minister did. I believe the health minister and other ministers in the current cabinet did, like previous cabinets did.
Today the Conservatives are requesting access to what the Ethics Commissioner was told. I believe those conversations, by their nature, need to have some element of privacy so that people can divulge information to the commissioner, and because MPs have to share a lot of personal information with her. If one has held a senior position in a private company like Morneau Shepell, one would have to divulge a great deal of personal information about one's shares and when those shares get sold. There is also legal counsel within a company to advise about the sale of shares. With Equifax recently, we saw senior management of a company that was in a lot of trouble suddenly start selling shares.
However, on the political side, is there perhaps a gap in the way that our ethics and conflict of interest legislation is designed that something like this could happen, whereby, in a private meeting with an Ethics Commissioner, finance ministers could simply choose not to put things into a blind trust and choose, in that way, to expose themselves to a conflict of interest?
I concern myself with the larger conversation in this country, which is our economy, how things are managed, and how a finance minister could continue to do his job when he is shrouded in this much personal controversy of his own making. Do we need to strengthen the way that disclosures happen so that the obvious and ethical thing happens each and every single time, not just by that person's particular choice?