Steven Fletcher

Public record

Conflict-of-interest rules for members of the Legislature

Issues & Impact

Steven Fletcher tried more than once to modernise Manitoba’s conflict-of-interest law for members of the Legislature. His bill went the furthest of any he introduced as an MLA before the governing majority voted it down in 2018, and the refusal is hard to square with the federal record: the same Conservatives, Fletcher and Premier Brian Pallister among them, had voted to tighten Ottawa’s accountability rules in 2006.

The position

Manitoba’s rules on what a member of the Legislature must disclose, and how conflicts between private interest and public duty are policed, had not kept pace with other provinces. Fletcher’s argument was blunt: Manitoba had one of the weakest conflict-of-interest regimes in the country, wide open to abuse, and a legislature unwilling to tighten the rules on itself has a credibility problem. The province’s own conflict-of-interest commissioner had said much the same, describing the existing law as outdated.1

The bill and the vote

Fletcher brought conflict-of-interest legislation forward in more than one session. The furthest it reached was second reading in the spring of 2018, when Bill 208 was put to a recorded vote and defeated, 13 to 32.2 The shape of the vote is the point: every member voting for it was an opposition or independent member, and every vote against came from the governing Progressive Conservative majority, the party Fletcher himself had sat with until 2017.3

The federal contrast

The refusal is harder to explain against the federal record. In 2006 the first bill of the newly elected Harper government was the Federal Accountability Act, which tightened conflict-of-interest, lobbying and disclosure rules across Ottawa and created a standalone federal Conflict of Interest Act. It became law that December.4 Fletcher voted for it, and so did Brian Pallister, then the Conservative member for Portage-Lisgar.5 A decade later Pallister was premier of Manitoba, and it was his majority that voted the provincial bill down.6 The same politicians who had strengthened the federal rules declined to strengthen Manitoba’s, at a point when the provincial regime was among the weakest in the country and, in the commissioner’s own view, outdated.1

What it shows

A private member cannot pass a bill over a hostile majority, and this one did not pass. But the vote is on the record, and so is the inconsistency. Reform that binds the governing party is exactly the kind a majority rarely volunteers for. In 2006, federally, the Conservatives did volunteer. The question the page leaves standing is why the same party, governing Manitoba, would not do provincially what it had done in Ottawa.

Contribution, classified
Authorship Conflict-of-interest bills introduced as a private member, the furthest-reaching being Bill 208 in 2018.
Advocacy Argued Manitoba had among the weakest conflict-of-interest rules in Canada and should tighten the rules on itself, as the federal Parliament had done in 2006.
Influence Corroborated by the conflict-of-interest commissioner’s view that the law was outdated; the bill forced a recorded vote but drew no government support.
Result Defeated at second reading, 13 to 32, on 17 May 2018. The law was not changed.
Legacy A documented instance of a member pressing self-applying accountability rules that the governing majority declined to adopt, despite having backed the same principle federally.

Sources

  1. Statements of the Manitoba Conflict of Interest Commissioner on the adequacy of the existing law.
  2. Manitoba, Bill 208, a private member’s bill to strengthen the conflict-of-interest rules for members of the Legislature (2018); defeated at second reading 13 to 32 on 17 May 2018.
  3. Manitoba Legislative Assembly, Votes and Proceedings and Hansard, 17 May 2018 (recorded division).
  4. Federal Accountability Act (Bill C-2), S.C. 2006, c. 9; the Harper government’s first bill, royal assent 12 December 2006; enacted the federal Conflict of Interest Act.
  5. House of Commons Debates, 39th Parliament, division on Bill C-2 (recording members’ votes, including Fletcher and Pallister).
  6. Contemporary reporting on the governing party voting down the conflict-of-interest bill (CBC News, 2018).

These citations are as complete as the record now allows. More will be added as they are found, and these pages change as the facts do. Where a source is a recollection rather than a document, it is identified as such.