Thank you, Madame Bélanger. It's a pleasure to have you at our committee, and I want to say that I have enormous respect for your predecessor. I think she always felt the issue of the spirit of the act was very crucial. We've had situations, again, with two reports—from the Ethics Commissioner and the Commissioner of Lobbying—but the Federal Accountability Act didn't foresee every possible loophole. It couldn't, so the spirit of the act is crucial.
This is what I want to speak with you about this morning, because in every Parliament we deal with different sets of issues, different conundrums that we didn't face before. Our committee right now is dealing with the Facebook scandal. The issue of the sudden massive rise of very powerful U.S. data oligarchies is becoming a real concern. The Bank of Canada is actually saying that their power is now so great that it's actually threatening economic competitiveness in Canada.
In the United States we've seen Google, Facebook, and Amazon not just move very heavily into lobbying, but actually put key people into government positions because they do not want to be regulated. So this is the question I raised in my letter to you about Kevin Chan.
I know you're not in a position to talk about specifics, but the 20% rule, to me, is a very outmoded thought. If you have someone who is very connected to government, who can phone up and can meet politicians and be really friendly with them and meet with all senior ministers, his goal is to make sure that they really like him, like the company, and don't want to regulate him, and he doesn't meet the test of lobbying.
What do you think we need to do to ensure that there is greater compliance between giant companies like Facebook and the spirit of the act?