‘Accountability loop’ in ethics breaches causing distrust from public: Dion

Mario Dion, the federal Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, says that while there may be some politicians who knowingly breach federal ethics rules, many don’t have the ability to identify conflicts of interest.

In an interview with CTV News Power Play’s Vassy Kapelos, Dion said he had previously called for mandatory training for ministers and parliamentary secretaries so they could understand what’s considered to be a such a conflict.

“You have to have an overall appreciation for what’s required of you under the Conflict of Interest Act, and very few people take the time to take the training we’re offering,” he said on Thursday.

Dion, who is set to have his last day in Parliament on Feb. 21 after announcing his retirement Tuesday, says it would benefit some politicians to recognize their own errors in judgment. Over the last five years, Dion has found Trudeau as well as members of his cabinet and caucus in contravention of federal ethics laws on several occasions. News of the latest ethics breach came out less than two hours before Dion announced his departure plans.

“By and large, [it’s] ignorance; your inability to identify a situation where a conflict of interest will arise, that’s the key, is that being able to tell one when you see one,” he said.

Additionally, he says there’s a lot of mystery on the handling of ethics breaches, especially for cases that aren’t highly publicized, like the one involving International Trade Minister Mary Ng. He said there should be transparency even with cases that don’t result in punishments for a cabinet minister or else the public will never know about it.

As the ethics commissioner, he said it’s been his job to bring up the breaches of ethics, not decide on punishments; he said that is up to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as the employer.

“The employer must decide whether something needs to happen by way of punishment and there’s no feedback to me ever about the consequences, so we all assumed there was no consequence,” he said. “You’re having some accountability loop whereby we find out what’s happened to Minister Ng, maybe something has happened to Minister Ng and we don’t even know about it.”

In December, Trudeau said in an interview with CTV National News Chief Anchor and Senior Editor Omar Sachedina, that “it sucks” when breaches of ethics arise but the current system to handle these conflicts are working.

Dion disagrees, saying the government focuses too much on single issues rather than conducting mandatory training and the amount of ethics breaches being reported aren’t keeping up with the efforts being made to combat them.

“Mistakes keep being made in spite of efforts, that’s why I thought that maybe the key part of the solution is in better education, better consistent, mandatory education,” he said.

With files from CTV News Senior Digital Parliamentary Reporter Rachel Aiello