Yes. Say that somebody was a constant stakeholder of yours and gave you a trip to the States to some fancy resort. We had a case like that about five years ago. It was one of the caucuses. The members were offered a trip to some fancy resort for a week. That was sponsored travel. They were flown down there and given a meal. I would say that was not very acceptable. That's when I learned about caucuses. It took me a couple of years to discover that there were these caucuses doing these things. They used to call them all-party caucuses.
Quite often it's international countries. It's countries that are looking for support from Canada. The big ones are Israel and Taiwan. Just about every year you can see it in the list of sponsored travel. The question is why MPs are accepting gifts of travel from other countries. A decision has been taken and I think it's probably not going to change. MPs like to get these chances to go abroad to see these countries, so they're not going to put an acceptability test onto sponsored travel. But I'm suggesting that they think about it and that maybe they should have an acceptability test.
I've raised this before and I didn't get a very good reception. That's what I'm talking about. It just seems odd. For example, it's interesting because it's carved out that it's not a gift under the code. Where I see it is in the case of ministers and parliamentary secretaries, because it is a gift under the act. Then you get the whole question of whether it's an acceptable gift, but I can't apply that acceptability test to members under the code, because it's carved out of the gift rules.
It just works in a different way. It's rather a question of whether parliamentarians really want to give up these goodies.