Thank you very much for the opportunity.
Pertaining to the question, and not to repeat much of what has been said, I think it's important to make two points. One has to do with the administrative complexity and the time required to actually assess the bill. As a practitioner in the field, I can tell you that most of the people who are government relations practitioners are actually small independent businesses. Many of us are actually sole practitioners in the field.
As it currently stands, the amount of time it takes on the administrative side to abide by the rules presently in place is certainly justifiable. In our view the rules are detailed enough to ensure that in the work we do, the reporting required and the transparency needed are already done in the reporting we do at present.
As it stands, from our vantage point, even the resources contained within the office of the lobbyist registrar are such that there is a significant backlog of registrations currently being processed. So if you can imagine, by the time somebody takes a look at what we now have to disclose or provide, we're often required to submit the next iteration of whatever the reporting requirement is.
On the second point in terms of accessibility to government, our view is this. We're quite happy to hear that the government is considering looking at how decisions are made in government and looking at ways to make those more accountable, but our fear is that the bill in its present form looks primarily at access points to government. We certainly believe or are aware of some of the accountability legislation in other jurisdictions, where quite often what is looked at is how you can make government more accessible to people and thus make it more transparent, so that those decisions that government makes can be more just and more in the public interest.
Our fear is that this legislation looks too heavily at the access points themselves. Our view is that it is fundamentally the incorrect place to be looking in terms of what makes government transparent and accountable.