In my view, accountability is essential. It has to come. I've been elected four successful times. I have elections coming and I can anticipate being elected again for the fifth successful time. I always tell my people that my job as president is to manage their money. At the end of the day, I have to be accountable. I can tell you that we're definitely strongly accountable in the sense of our design. We continue to stress how we can be more effective in how we expend our resources. For example, our challenge is this. This committee wants to talk about poverty, about how you change the very essence of that process. It's by helping governments like the Métis government.
The more successful I get, the more government wants to cut me. I'm punished for being successful. That's wrong. Somebody should be praising us for being successful. It's scary. I have to hide my assets, because if you find out I have money, you want to take it from me. I'm not joking about that. I'll give you an example. We bought buildings, and these buildings are now profitable. The government came back to me and said they should own half of those profits. I asked, “Why should you? Because we rent from you? Well, you rent from other people and you don't go after the profits from the private sector. So why would you take half of mine?” But that was the mentality. We had to fight with them.
Somehow we have to think outside of the box and start actually enhancing the ability... As I said, I'm not coming to this table to ask for a bunch more money as a solution. That's not the solution. The solution is putting a plan of action where you can measure it, make it accountable, and target it at the same time. If we produce, don't punish us. Praise us and give us more.