Mr. Moore, it's been a very tricky issue. As I followed this debate over the last decade, we have gone round and round in terms of identifying institutions that could possibly play this role. Now we've come to the point where we've rejected the Public Service Commission and rejected some offshoot of the Auditor General that was once proposed.
You make some compelling points, particularly the point that more and more governments don't do things directly; they do them through third parties, in whose hands, then, public money is put at risk. In those circumstances, it seems to me prudent to allow employees of those organizations, and even citizens on the receiving end, to say that there's a problem here with this money. We had a situation with Hydra House, a for-profit operation for developmentally challenged adults in Manitoba, that became hugely controversial. There were Cadillacs, trips, cruises, and all the rest of it. It was a real mess. Yet there was no avenue, no channel available through which the people who knew these things were going on could get that information to the right people. I'm fully supportive of the idea that it accountability shouldn't stop at the boundaries of government. It's got to go beyond it now.
In the United States now there are even proposals to amend the Whistleblower Protection Act to cover money being spent through state governments. I don't want to wrestle with the provinces on that one, but a lot of money is spent through other orders of government, by both provinces and municipalities. Presumably there can be misuse of public money in those circumstances as well.
Again, I guess at some point you have to ask yourself how much trust you want, and how much control, and how you balance that. You can't have everybody being investigated all the time; it's got to be in exceptional cases only.