Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Ms. Dawson.
I for one am very happy that the office is up and running. We looked forward to the idea of a truly independent ethics commissioner for years, and this is the realization of all the hard work that went into this.
I'm always a little critical when we spend so much time on the nuts and bolts estimates of what are really small budgets. For the Ethics Commissioner, the Privacy Commissioner, and the Access to Information Commissioner, we're talking about seven, eight, nine, ten or eleven million dollars. We spend as much time on this as we do on Heritage Canada's multi-billion-dollar estimates. It is rather absurd.
I'm not going to ask you any questions about paperclips or stationery or any of those costs here, but I am interested to know whether the volume of activity, in your experience to date, is showing an escalation trend that might make it necessary to revisit the size and scale of your operation stemming from the new act, the conflict of interest rules now being codified in an act of Parliament.
I suppose the question is whether you anticipate a volume of activity, in that now under the new act all current and former public officer holders could be the subject of an examination. I'd ask you to expand on how you see the current and former office holders, how far back you see that going, and whether you sense that it will cause a spike in activity.