Information & Ethics committee  You can't legislate morality. Every law is violated by someone. If you use that argument, by analogy you would never pass any laws and would cancel all the laws that we have.

Information & Ethics committee  Right, so what we have now—

Information & Ethics committee  No. What we have now is a system like a stop sign on a rural road at midnight. If you go through it, there is no one sitting there watching, because one car goes through every half hour. That's the enforcement system and those are the rules that we currently have. You need to ma

Information & Ethics committee  No. Also, as I have said in terms of enforcement, she's not doing any audits. She's sitting back and not reporting on what she's doing regularly, so that we don't even know whether she's doing her job properly. I'll have more on that next week, actually—an analysis for you that y

Information & Ethics committee  We have our submission, and the very first page of it has the ten recommendations.

Information & Ethics committee  The lobbyist will disclose it. That's what the Internet is for. The government has just trumpeted the fact that 250,000 data sets from StatsCan have been put up online and now are searchable in broad data form so that people can manipulate them and put them into applications for

Information & Ethics committee  For the purpose of transparency, I think it should be as broad as it is. And it does cover staff. That's good, because you wouldn't want to allow a politician to be indirectly lobbied by having the person lobby that person's staff and not register the contact because the registra

Information & Ethics committee  Very briefly, if you don't want to come back in five years and say, we have administrative penalties now, and they're not really working, make them minimum penalties, not maximum. If there is a maximum penalty of $25,000, then you'll see the commissioner levy penalties of $500 fo

Information & Ethics committee  The Bruce Carson situation points out two things. First, the media found it out, not the Commissioner of Lobbying. It's part of the scandal that no audits are being done to find out who's even meeting with ministers. I mean, that would be a very simple thing. The commissioner cur

Information & Ethics committee  We spent 10 years in court trying to finally get it enforced, and if it's gutted now, you're going back to the free-for-all where they'll be trading favours again, as there was back to Confederation.

Information & Ethics committee  If I could say one brief thing about administrative penalties, a representative from the Government Relations Institute of Canada, when he testified, and also Joe Jordan, both said that when the commissioner reports that someone's violated the lobbyists' code, it's a serious pena

Information & Ethics committee  Sure. When this committee looks at the Conflict of Interest Act, which I imagine will be on your agenda soon, because the five-year review deadline is coming up, you will have this issue. You will be looking at this rule that says that former public office holders covered by th

Information & Ethics committee  No. As I mentioned, I was the only staff person. I'm now a board member of Democracy Watch. I have very publicly stated that since I was here three times, pointing out the loopholes, and the government refused each time, I was going to de-register, because I didn't have to be re

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you. I'll answer in English. My French is rusty. Yes, all communications that are decisions have to be disclosed. That's the rule that should be in place. It's very important. Again, if the promise had been kept in 2006.... The promise by the Conservatives was that minist

Information & Ethics committee  The difficulty, though, is that—