Information & Ethics committee  I believe that is exactly what I will be doing in my two annual reports, one of which will be on the Code and one of which will be on the Act. That is why I failed to understand what you meant. We do not need to table a third annual report, because I hope to say everything I hav

Information & Ethics committee  In a word, no, I don't think so. My mandate generally covers issues relating to conflict of interest. It is a fairly narrow mandate.

Information & Ethics committee  That is an interesting point, because the word “ethics” almost never appears in the Act, except in my title and with my name. It is mentioned only in the Act of Parliament, which states that I may advise the Prime Minister when he asks for such advice on a range of limited issues

Information & Ethics committee  Yes.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, but that constitutes only a very small part of my work.

Information & Ethics committee  In general, I submit my reports to Parliament.

Information & Ethics committee  It hasn't to date. Mind you, I've only been in the job for nine months. Inquiries or examinations are part of the work of our office, but it's only a small part of that work. A large part of the work of our office is administering the annual reports and answering inquiries from t

Information & Ethics committee  It's things such as, “Should I accept this gift?”, or “Should I accept this invitation to speak here?”, or “Is it a problem that I'm a member of this board?”—things like that.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, and those are the things I'm hoping to get guidelines on, gradually. But as I say, I want them to be right; I don't want to have false starts with my guidelines.

Information & Ethics committee  There doesn't seem to be. I'm, in a way, a single window for a number of people. But in fact we have different systems, so that if a question comes in that obviously shouldn't have been directed to our office, we will, within a couple of days.... There's a certain portion of my s

Information & Ethics committee  An inducement might well be a gift. If somebody gives you $100 to do something, it's an inducement, but it's also a gift. By using the word “inducement”, you're suggesting there's something wrong with it, that there probably is a conflict situation, but....

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, it would be the MPs' code for that.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, although—

Information & Ethics committee  It depends on what kinds of active files you're talking about. All our MPs have an active file in a sense, so we have three hundred and whatever it is.

Information & Ethics committee  It's a double-edged sword. You don't want to have a situation where everybody's doing bad things that need to come in complaints to you.