I don't think the plan is to attack the issue from that perspective. We do have difficulties that have been discussed in the board in the past, and indeed, we're proposing to look into some of these matters in the next short while.
Part of the difficulty is that members face different pressures in different places. For example, members in Toronto or Vancouver have to pay rents that are astronomic compared with the rents that many of us in the rest of the country have to pay. So the percentage of their budget that goes to renting an office can be double or triple what it might be in some other parts of the country to have a quite modest office in their own constituency.
Other members have similar difficulties with salaries in constituency offices. Salaries, you expect, might be higher in some parts of the country than they would be in others. We hear about it in the media. The difficulty of hiring people at Tim Hortons or Burger King in northern Alberta is much greater than in Ottawa or Kingston. This makes for a significant difference in the rates of pay expected in different parts of the country.
Those factors are all ones that impinge on members' operating budgets in a significant way and can make for real discrepancies in the amount that members are able to put into salaries, rent, or purchase of other items that their budgets allow them to purchase, because of these differences that exist across the country. As you know, the differences that we make in members' operating budgets are impacted by the size of their riding geographically and the population size of the riding. Supplements are paid for those two factors but really not for anything else. So we don't pay if the rent is higher in a certain place, and we don't pay or deduct if the salaries are higher or lower in a certain place.
We're looking at, really, what the members' operating budget is doing at the moment for members in terms of allowing for engaging of staff, obviously both in Ottawa and elsewhere, because the constituency staff is a very important part of this. Both are being looked at, and I think the board may come up with some recommendations, for a new Parliament, for changing the MOB to a different figure, based on their studies. But we have to do some detailed work on this, and you have to accept the fact that some members pay more in salaries than others.
We have, I believe, ceilings and a base on all of the salaries, and I'm sure those will be reviewed as part of that review, but some members are much closer to the ceiling, I'm sure, than others, and that's just the way it works. Some may have fewer employees than others. Many will employ a bunch of part-time people. The options are there for members to make their own decisions in this within the framework of the budget. But I agree that rents and rates of pay can be significant distortions in the way that members can operate their offices, and the differences or the variables across the country significantly impinge on this, and our process does not reflect the costs of carrying on operations in various parts of the country. At least in Ottawa everyone is the same, but again, some members will hire more people here than in their constituency, and others will hire more in the constituency than here. It's a matter of choice, and it's one that the board does not dictate to MPs, as you know.