Information & Ethics committee  I'm not sure exactly what you mean. Could you be a bit more clear?

Information & Ethics committee  Without using the term “philosophized”, I certainly have thought about how to organize in order to deal with the new legislation. My sense of it is that it doesn't require so much a change in process. I think many of our processes will stay the same; there will just be a lot more of them.

Information & Ethics committee  I'm going to ask Lyne Robinson-Dalpé, who's in charge of financial arrangements in the office, to respond to that question.

Information & Ethics committee  Without comment on the very last comment, I do believe the currently proposed act is an advance in many ways.

Information & Ethics committee  My view is, if it's implied, it certainly won't hurt to state it, but you are right that no set of rules, no set of principles, will guarantee appropriate behaviour in the future. I don't think we've been served all that badly. I think most people who are public office holders, and most people who are members of the Senate or the House of Commons, have done perfectly well and continue to act in the appropriate way.

Information & Ethics committee  Then we can relax about the whole thing.

Information & Ethics committee  Not entirely, but these would primarily be new appointments to the office of a public office holder. We receive the confidential documents and then we try to make sure they've arranged their private affairs in a way that's suitable for their public responsibilities. That would be the major issue.

Information & Ethics committee  I don't have an easy answer to that question, but you are quite right that I do have mixed views on the proposed legislation. There are many good things in it. For example, the definitions are better than they were before. It covers more people. It provides for more public information.

Information & Ethics committee  No.

Information & Ethics committee  My jurisdiction is very limited--as I said before--much more limited than the title suggests. When the jurisdiction is limited to breaches of the code that would be applicable to any particular person, relative to inquiries, it would be further limited simply to ministers, secretaries of state, parliamentary assistants, etc., and not to public office holders, more generally speaking.

Information & Ethics committee  In any request for an investigation, my first response is always to know if it's within the powers that I have as the Ethics Commissioner. I don't want to try to decide in advance in a hypothetical situation whether or not that would be the case.

Information & Ethics committee  There isn't any specific answer to the question you ask, in the sense that what might be kept confidential will differ d'un examen à l'autre, par exemple. What I do is reveal only enough information to support the conclusions I'm offering in the report. Remember that the investigations are conducted in private, and we try to guard confidentiality as much as possible.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, that's correct.

Information & Ethics committee  Both are new.

Information & Ethics committee  The whole law does not apply to members of Parliament particularly because this is not the members' code; it's the public office holders' code. So it doesn't relate to what happens as a member of Parliament, or as a member of the Senate for that matter. My concern with Bill C-2, as I've mentioned a number of times, both in front of the Senate committee and in the House of Commons, doesn't have to do with the issue of restrictions on lobbyists, or of, for example, the penalties.