Ethics Commissioner

Also known as: Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, CIEC

The independent officer of Parliament who administers the federal Conflict of Interest Act and the Conflict of Interest Code for Members of the House of Commons.

What it means

The Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner runs the federal conflict-of-interest system: receiving confidential disclosures, publishing the public summaries, advising members and public office holders confidentially, examining alleged contraventions, and reporting to Parliament.

The office is independent of the government of the day. The Commissioner is an officer of Parliament, appointed under the Parliament of Canada Act, and cannot be directed by a minister on the substance of a file. That independence is the reason the registry is usable as a primary source at all.

Its powers are real but bounded. The Commissioner can examine a matter, compel information, and publish a report finding that a rule was contravened, and there are administrative monetary penalties for certain reporting failures. What the office cannot do is impose a criminal penalty or remove a member. Under the Members' Code the report goes to the House, and the House decides what follows.

The Senate has a separate officer, the Senate Ethics Officer, administering the senators' own code. The two offices are distinct and a search of the Commissioner's registry will not return senators.

Every province maintains an analogous office — an Integrity Commissioner or Ethics Commissioner — with its own statute, its own registry and its own publication practices. They are peers, not branches: there is no national conflict-of-interest registry in Canada, only a federal one and thirteen sub-national ones.

One practical note for anyone following links from older articles: the federal Commissioner's site is now published at ethicscanada.ca. Bookmarks and citations pointing at the previous domain may no longer resolve.

What the registry gives you

The public registry is searchable by name and holds, for each reporting public office holder and member, their public disclosure summary, any public declarations such as gifts or recusals, and any reports the Commissioner has published about them.

Starting from a member's name in the registry and working outward is usually a better research path than starting from a news story, because the registry tells you what was filed and when, which is the part a story rarely includes.

How it shows up in our data

Federal disclosure entries and sponsored-travel filings on member profiles originate from the Commissioner's public registry, and each links back to its source.

For provincial members, we point at that province's own commissioner rather than the federal office. Where a province's disclosure feed is not yet ingested, our coverage page says so and those members are shown as Unscored rather than given a grade built from partial data.

Related on Integrity Index

Sources

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