Mr. Speaker, I did not know that the hon. member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands—Rideau Lakes would be rising on this question of privilege, but it is a very important point he raises.
I would suggest to you, Mr. Speaker, that the problem the member is pointing out to the House is a long-standing one. It did not begin with the present commissioner; it goes back certainly to his predecessor, Mario Dion, who violated and acted in contempt of the code on a number of occasions.
Before I get to that, I will say that I have personal knowledge of a number of the things that have been referred to by the hon. member with relation to the history of the code. I served for 15 years on the procedure and House affairs committee, which I think is a record. I do not think anyone here has ever served that long on that, or any other, committee.
I was on the committee when we adopted the Conflict of Interest Code for Members of the House of Commons, and I was there for various amendments. I chaired a subcommittee dealing with gifts and where that issue fits into the code. I also dealt with and was part of the writing of the report in which we concluded that Commissioner Shapiro was indeed guilty of contempt of Parliament in his actions. There were very serious consequences of the unauthorized investigatory activities he undertook, including devastating consequences for people who were not members of Parliament. Mr. Speaker, you can read the report to learn more about that.
When I say that this is part of a pattern that goes back to Commissioner Dion, what I am referring to is the use of unauthorized forms, which includes other forms that the House has never seen. I will give an example. I do not know how many of the forms exist, but one form that Commissioner Dion put out is a non-disclosure agreement.
When the Commissioner Dion would conduct an inquiry into a member of Parliament, his office would submit a non-disclosure form, which he told them they were required to sign, because we are all required, under section 27(8) of the code, which states: “Members shall cooperate with the commissioner with respect to any inquiry.” If the commissioner started investigating someone, they would be required to co-operate.
Part of this co-operation, in the commissioner's mind, was signing a form, a non-disclosure agreement, about the way in which he conducted an investigation. This ensured that if he engaged in any abuses of his investigatory power, a person had no recourse and would not be able to speak out against what he had done.
I think this is an absolutely outrageous abuse. It is part of a pattern of administrative justice in this country, in which all the normal protections that exist under the criminal law or civil law are stripped away when it is an administrative matter. This is a fundamental problem we see not just with this commissioner or the previous one, but also with the integrity commissioners, for example, running Ontario's municipalities, where there is widespread abuse, to the point that the integrity commissioners have, frankly, less integrity than the people they are investigating.
The non-disclosure form would then be used to silence the member, who would be unable to say how the investigation had been conducted or whether the commissioner had gone too far.
I was never the subject of an inquiry from the commissioner, but I did have the experience of, again, the commissioner's acting in contempt of Parliament, in sending me a letter in 2020, at the height of the pandemic. I cannot remember the exact date I got the letter, but I believe it was in September 2020. The letter effectively said, “I was approached by a member of the public who tells me that you may have used your office for the benefit of a family member. You have a limited amount of time to convince me otherwise. If you don't satisfy me, I will launch an inquiry.”
The nature of the evidence he then cited justifying his course of action included a number of documents I had written. One of them was an email I had sent to members of the council of a rural township where my wife was involved in a zoning dispute. I had sent an email to them asking them to conduct themselves in a certain way regarding the zoning.
It was addressed to a limited number of individuals. Only those people, our lawyer, my wife and I had seen this letter, so I knew he was taking this from an opposed party in an ongoing legal dispute and decided to weigh in on a private legal dispute on one side based on an anonymous denunciation. To this day, I still do not know who the anonymous denouncer might have been, although, as I pointed out to the commissioner, it was clearly one of a limited number of people: the members of the council, their senior staff or their lawyer. I could list off the names. One of them was formerly a staffer to the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands who had engaged in a similar action against her when he worked for her. I have a suspicion it is that individual, a man named Rob Rainer, but I do not know for sure.
Initiating an inquiry on his own initiative or on the basis of an anonymous denunciation is not permitted under the Standing Orders, under the conflict of interest code. Here is how the commissioner may engage in an inquiry. Subsection 27(1) says:
A member who has reasonable grounds to believe that another member has not complied with his or her obligations under this code may request that the commissioner conduct an inquiry into the matter.
Alternatively, subsection 27(3) says:
The House may, by way of resolution, direct the commissioner to conduct an inquiry to determine whether a member has complied with his or her obligations under this code.
There is no other mechanism for initiating investigations. Anonymous denunciations are not listed as one of the bases for doing this.
I could have pointed that out to the commissioner, but he was in the process of beginning an investigation that, to me, could have resulted in the destruction of my career, so I was not in a position to fight back on technicalities. We went out and collected all of the evidence required, including going through our financial records and numerous legal documents, and in the end, he concluded that my wife had no financial interest in the matter and that I was therefore not guilty of misusing my office. By the way, the way I had misused my office, to be clear, was that I had sent an email from the email address scottreidmp@gmail.com, and he concluded that this represented a misuse of my office because it implied that I was a member of Parliament. That implication and the authority of Parliament somehow represented a misuse.
To say the mere mention that a member is an MP represents a misuse of their office is a ludicrous interpretation, which he previously used in the investigation of the member for Ottawa West—Nepean. He found her guilty of acknowledging that she was an MP when she was campaigning for her husband, who was running for Ottawa city council. It was a crazy interpretation of the code to say that people knowing she was a member of Parliament while her husband ran for public office represented an abuse of the code. The fact that her husband was going from a higher-paying job to a lower-paying one as an Ottawa city councillor, thereby making it a negative financial interest, was of no concern to the commissioner, who was simply looking for a way to find her guilty of something to justify himself and his salary.
It was an outrageous pattern of behaviour that he repeated again when he went after the member for Etobicoke—Lakeshore. Members can read both his report and my views on his report on my website. It was a vindictive attack on the member for Etobicoke—Lakeshore just because he did not like the way the member was behaving. This kind of personal, petty vindictiveness creeping into an officer of Parliament so they can take advantage of the fact that there are no procedural protections for members of Parliament and abuse their authority is an outrage and should be dealt with.
In the event that one member asks the commissioner to investigate another member, it can happen that the commissioner looks into it and says ultimately that it was frivolous, that the member's name was dragged through the mud for nothing. When I was on the procedure and House affairs committee, we changed the code to say that when an investigation is undertaken, both the commissioner and the member who made the accusation have to stay quiet so they cannot damage a person by launching an investigation right before an election, for example. This was put into the code in subsection 27(6):
If the commissioner is of the opinion that a request for an inquiry was frivolous or vexatious or was not made in good faith, the commissioner shall so state in dismissing the request in a report under section 28(6) and may recommend that further action be considered against the member who made the request.
That was done, by the way, when Charlie Angus launched a frivolous accusation against another member.
This is great if an MP does it, but I did not get that right, because some anonymous person anonymously denounced me to a commissioner who kept protecting their identity after the fact, after finding out the whole thing was frivolous. I apologize for revealing a confidential conversation, but when I spoke to the member for Ottawa West—Nepean, I talked to her about how much it cost me in legal bills to fight this. I said that I am very fortunate; I have extraordinarily fortunate financial circumstances. The $40,000 in legal fees it cost me to fight this was something I could sustain. She said she had to pay a whole bunch too.
The commissioner gets a salary for doing this stuff. She and I, and I assume the member for Etobicoke—Lakeshore, had to pay out of our own pockets for this. If a member is not independently wealthy, the investigation itself can ruin them, even if it is completely vexatious.
This is an outrage that exists throughout the administrative justice system in Canada, federal and provincial. It exist right here, and it is time to cut out this cancer.