Mr. Chairman, the problem here, in my view--and members of Parliament sitting around this table who are experienced and acting on behalf of their constituents would know better than I would--is that I don't know if there's any easy way of distinguishing between what a member might do in a certain set of circumstances on behalf of a constituent and whether that is not furthering someone else's private interests. A person's dealings with the Government of Canada in the member's ombudsman role, where he's seeking to help a constituent deal with a private interest of the constituent, is arguably a problem, given section 8, but he's only doing what every member of Parliament does on behalf of his constituents. So that's the nature of the clarity problem here.
Private interests as such aren't defined well. They're defined in terms of furthering of private interests as the offence, but are we really talking about commercial interests? Are we talking about pecuniary interests as opposed to immigration problems or passport problems? That's the problem, Mr. Chairman.