Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, Speakers, for your attendance today. This is all very helpful.
Let me say, just by way of a little assistance, that IPSA, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, the British system that has been set up—this is from our library analyst—in a nutshell has three main roles:
...it regulates the system of costs and expenses, sets MPs’ pay and pensions, and administers and pays MPs’ salaries, business costs, staff salaries and expenses. IPSA is fully independent from Parliament but does respond to written questions from MPs, and publishes all Freedom of Information requests.
As some of us would see it, that's the ideal, the gold standard, and the question is whether we feel we're going to go there or not.
I might just also say that, like some others here, I have sat on a Board of Internal Economy—at Queen's Park, but as you know, the rules there are very consistent with ours and it is similar in the way it functions—so I am very familiar with not only what goes on outside but what happens inside BOIE.
Speaker Milliken, I jotted down that you said the BOIE for the most part did a wonderful job, that it functioned really well, that there were no partisan fights, and that it worked very effectively—things such as that. I certainly wouldn't disagree; I think it has served us well.
But that's the whole point: one of the Speaker's most important roles is to protect the rights of members of Parliament. This is about the issues of the rights of the public, and I would contend that we don't have to prove that the BOIE is broken to justify going to a better system.
Yesterday, the Auditor General told us:
In my opinion, governance can be strengthened by having an independent body that would either advise the Board of Internal Economy or be given the responsibility for all matters related to Members' expenses and entitlements. Regardless of the role of such a body, it is important that Canadians are confident that its membership is independent and that the members have been chosen in a non-partisan manner.
And of course our guests from Britain advised us as to the system they had set up and how it works.
Here is my issue. Every party talks about transparency and accountability, but you can't just talk the talk; you have to walk the walk. That's the difficulty with staying where we are right now. The public views this, and rightly so, as part of—to use an expression—“the old boy network”, and you can't blame them for feeling that, when it is us deciding on things about us and for us.
That doesn't necessarily mean that there has been anything wrong. For a long time, the notion was that we'd just have a few good chaps go in and do a good, competent job. Well, good chaps sometimes turn out to be not so good, and competency often is not so competent. Yet there is no accountability, because it's all us; it's all in-house.
The issue I would put to Speaker Milliken, because I quoted you, but certainly to Speaker Fraser, if you wish to comment, is....
And Speaker Fraser, you said that you could be convinced. I would put the question to you: do you really think we need to prove that the BOIE is not working and not functioning and is effectively a failed body, in order to justify going to a better system? If we can show that there's a better system that meets the public needs, and we have something to draw from—a standard, which is Britain's, in the Westminster mother ship.... They went through horrible scandals and came up with this model. We're in the process of changing everything, and we have a motion on the floor that says we should look at that model. I'm just asking, do we really have to prove that BOIE is broken before we can justify going to something that meets the current, modern era and public needs of accountability and transparency?