I'll comment on the Bloc amendment and then I'll table a subamendment.
The reason we chose the member of Parliament route is that we want to make this process administratively sound. If you allow 30 million people access to one bureau to submit their complaints, there might be so many complaints and so many of them frivolous that they're not ultimately going to be investigated with any rigour.
For example, I think back to the gun registry. I think you would have found that out of the Prairies in western Canada you probably would have had over 50,000 complaints about the ethics of that program and the people who were involved in administering it. To expect that one commissioner would be able to investigate all of those complaints with any rigour is unrealistic. So what we suggested instead was that they make their complaint through their member of Parliament and that the member of Parliament then move forward with the ones they find have some merit and discard the ones they believe do not and then ultimately be held accountable for their decisions locally at election time.
That is the only way we can do this, I believe, with any administrative sanity. That is why we opted to allow every citizen the right to raise a concern and submit a complaint. That is our approach. We believe that every citizen should have the right to do that, but that a member of Parliament should have the responsibility to take a look at it first and decide whether they believe it has merit.
I should also say that if there is any question about the ethical behaviour of a public office holder, in a House of Commons with 308 members representing four parties, somebody is going to raise the concern. Somebody is going to submit the complaint. Somebody will have a partisan interest to submit the complaint. There's nothing wrong with their doing that. So we think that it's more than sufficient to allow members of Parliament to lead this process, and with that, I'd like to move on to a subamendment I have.
I move that government amendment G-15 be made a subamendment of BQ-4.