Mr. Speaker, this is an important issue and one that I am pleased to speak to. I think increasing accountability is important for every member of Parliament and, indeed, a priority.
The member who just spoke, the member for Charlottetown, and I sat on the public accounts committee during the previous session of Parliament and in that session of Parliament had an opportunity to deal with a wide array of issues and make a broad range of recommendations on how government operations could be improved on everything from deputy ministerial responsibility to internal auditing processes. Some of those are being incorporated and some are not but I would say that this is an ongoing process.
One of the things that concerns me as we have this debate and as we talk about the need to increase accountability is to paint pictures that are, frankly, completely inaccurate.
The reality is that the Auditor General, in her report in the fall of, I believe, 2005, said that when it came to the clarity of our fiscal reporting, the quality of that reporting and the robustness of our internal auditing, Canada was number one in the world, around the same level with respect to New Zealand and Australia. We achieved great things in that period of time and the changes that occurred were met with great effect.
That brings us to the accountability act. I would like to see a number of items changed and improved but the bill concerns me deeply. I started off believing that it was a selective accountability act but it has become more of a realization that it is a non-accountability act in many respects. I think that realization started off with a press conference the Prime Minister had on the topic and he took a total of two questions. He launched a major initiative on accountability, the press was there, he took two questions and he walked away.
When we take a look at the bill and we start skimming below the surface, we see some items here that are of deep concern. We will start with access to information, an issue that I think a number of us have been pushing for some period of time to improve.
I would like to quote what the Information Commissioner had to say on this particular item in the proposal of the accountability act. Mr. Reid said:
All of the positions the government now takes in the discussion paper are contrary to the positions the Conservative Party took, and its leader espoused, during the election campaign.
Mr. Reid recently said, “the decision was taken that they were not prepared to live under the terms of open government”.
He was stating this is what they had done.
He went on to state and criticize the accountability act for introducing new provisions and exemptions protecting sensitive information from public scrutiny.
In another instance he said, “no previous government has put forward a more retrograde and dangerous set of proposals to change access to information”.
When we look at it again and again we see areas of deep concern. What worried me at the time is the NDP member for the riding of Winnipeg Centre had stood and recognized some of these concerns and said that sending the access to information portion off to committee was a kiss of death, that would be the end of it and that it was a stall and delay tactic. However, we are with the NDP supporting the bill despite those very real concerns and no progress having been made with the issue of access to information.
I am also concerned with campaign finance reform but not so much because the amounts are lowered. In fact, it was a Liberal government, through Bill C-24, that introduced some of the most stringent requirements on campaign contributions that one will find anywhere in the world. Those were appropriate and have worked well and served us well.
However, these new changes concern me in one particular area; and that is, in the area of third party advertising and thirty party involvement.
The reality is that third party actors are not being controlled under this legislation and it creates a totally uneven playing field. On the one hand we are saying to political parties and to political candidates that they are extremely restricted, in fact far more so than they were before on how they can raise money, but if one is a third party trying to advance a particular issue, we will not get involved in that. That creates an unlevel playing field and actually gives those who are on the peripheral of the political sphere more power in delivering their message. That is exceptionally concerning. If one were to make a change in one area, certainly third party advertising should be changed as well.
I am also concerned with the notion of lobbyists, not so much on the portion with which the bill deals, but on the portion with which the bill does not deal. We have on the one hand a cooling off period for those ministers who leave the public service and go on to other things, but what about those individuals who are lobbyists coming into government?
We have a situation today with the Minister of National Defence. He was a military lobbyist and he lobbied the same people on whom he now makes decisions as Minister of National Defence. Clearly that does not add up, in my opinion. If we are to deal with lobbying, then we should deal with both those coming in and those going out. It is an example, again, of the government selectively choosing the areas where it wants to be accountable.
We can go further. We can talk about the issue of ethics. It has been brought up a number of times, but I think it is worth mentioning again. It is extremely contradictory to appoint somebody, who was a key part of a campaign team, obviously somebody very partisan, to the Senate, even though the government said it stood against those kinds of appointments, then to turn around within a very short period of time and appoint that same person to a senior cabinet position where we do not have the ability in the House to question him. The government then labels that accountability. Clearly that is highly contradictory at the very best.
We have a health minister who we now discover has a 25% interest in a pharma company. Yet is making decisions with respect to pharmaceutical companies and is not willing to sell his shares.
We have a Prime Minister who, shortly after the election, appointed a good friend as a member of the transition team. He gave that individual an untendered contract to review, of all things, the tendering process. There are all these inconsistencies that simply lead me to have a great deal of concern.
We should take a look at the budget office as well and the notion that we want to know exactly what the figures are. Of course we do and we had that in the last government. The reality is we had a variety of independent experts who gave their forecasts. We consistently had an economy that outperformed our expectations. For a 10 year period, we had an economy that was red hot. We put policies in place that allowed that to happen.
However, when members of Parliament try to become experts at being able to tell what is in the fiscal future, to become clairvoyant on fiscal matters, we begin to cut too close to the marrow. When the economy takes an unintended turn, then we will return to deficits, which is something the Conservatives did very well. We had years of them under the Conservatives. However, it is imperative that we not do that, and that we be careful on a go forward basis.
In terms of transparency and allowing the legislative part of Parliament to have a larger voice, we do not see that at all. In fact, free votes are disappearing. There is more and more control over committees. There is more and more control over media and messaging and Parliament is becoming less and less an open place. There is less and less opportunity for parliamentarians to express their voice. Committees decisions are being railroaded time and time again.
We are seeing an inverse of what was promised, and there is a pattern. In the case of the Conservatives, they say one thing and give it a label like accountability and they do something entirely different on the other side. They take an entirely different tack going forward. Time and time again this hypocrisy reveals itself.
Rather than trying to ram through flawed legislation, which has been not only recognized by the Information Commissioner and the House solicitor as being flawed, but is being recognized broadly as being rushed legislation that is full of holes, we should take the time to do this properly.
We should take a look at the work that had been done through the public accounts committee, as one example. We should implement some of the recommendations, as my colleague said earlier, of Justice Gomery. We should take accountability seriously, not use it as some kind of rhetoric tool, to abuse the word “accountability” for the sake of political gain. Rather, we should take a measured approach and ensure that the measures brought forward will bring real improvements in accountability.
In that regard I would hope, although we will have to see what the House does in the coming hours, we take a pause and we get this right.
