First of all, let me thank you once again. As I said to Mr. Peterson earlier, in the rather odd situation I'm in of being a public servant who never talks to his minister, coming to these meetings is as close to being with my boss as I get. So I really appreciate the ability to come here and I appreciate the comments and the constructive criticism about the operation of the office, because it's very important to me and it's important to my staff.
In terms of moving forward, as you'll see in my RPP, which will be the very first and perhaps the last, because the next could be a different office, strategically there are three pillars I think this office and this function needs to move forward on.
First, the registry is our outreach. It's in an era when you can Google just about anything and get any information. To deal with an ancient system as we're dealing with, our registry system is very frustrating for clients and it's frustrating for staff. So we're making strides to make it much more searchable and much more user-friendly. So updating the registry and enhancing its transparency is very important.
The second pillar is increasing the awareness of the LRA and the lobbyists code of conduct along the lines I talked about so the public office holders and people who hire lobbyists who actually want to do the right thing have the ability to do the right thing. There are many lobbyists who have registered; there are 5,100 people who have registered, so it's a lot of people trying to do the right thing. I need to help them understand this arcane act a little better.
Finally, the third pillar is to pursue enforcement and communicate the results, which again goes to this notion that there needs to be evidence. So I'm looking forward to tabling my reports, and it will be interesting to me to see what Parliament does with my reports, because the act is silent on what you're supposed to do with them.
Thank you so much. We look forward to helping this committee in your work in whatever way we can.