Thank you for your comprehensive answers.
There's another area. This may be as much a political/cultural difference. I found it interesting when you talked about ensuring the independence of the commission, and therefore, under the old adage of he who pays the piper calls the tune, you go out of your way to ensure there's no government money. You are looking to the corporate side to ensure that independence.
I have to tell you that many of us here in Canada would see it the other way around. We look at public funding as the neutral dollars, and at the private sector—whether they're NGOs on the progressive left or, on the right, corporations making billions of dollars—as having a political agenda, so we go out of our way to make sure they don't have any money.... Public funding is the way we look at it to ensure there is fairness.
Obviously the government of the day holds the purse strings; for instance, our Elections Canada is funded by the public purse. No one believes that just because it's the government that sets the budget they get to decide how that commission runs. That is dictated by other legislation and other regulations.
Just as a matter of curiosity, could you tease out for me how your view is so completely different from ours and why there's this fear, almost—those are my words—at having public money in any way because that begins the tainting process?