Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for a couple of very important and relevant questions to this debate. It is true that in 2013, the Ethics Commissioner made quite a few recommendations in her annual report for improvements that might be made to the Conflict of Interest Act, which was at that time about nine years old. The reason it was not acted upon was that there was no clear and pressing need to block attempts, such as we have seen by the current finance minister, to exploit some of those imperfections in the original act. To my knowledge, going back decades, there has never been an instance where a minister of government, Liberal or Conservative, has tried to avoid either placing their holdings into blind trusts or divesting those interests.
I agree with the previous speaker's suggestion that this is in some ways more serious than some of the previous instances where we have seen ministers who had to be disciplined, in a variety of ways, for impropriety.