Thank you.
I have three items I'd like to touch on. They all flow out of the special role we have as the public accounts committee. I'll be repeating things that we're aware of.
Public accounts is quite different from the other committees in the sense that we do not develop policy; we're here to hold the government to account. I think we've somewhat reflected that in the position of the chair being from the opposition. But I've always felt that because their currency is ideas and thought, standing committees that deal with policy should have resources that are adequate enough to travel the country and do the research, etc.
Quite rightfully, the electorate makes a decision and the committees should proportionately reflect what the electorate has decided. Being quite different in intent, I've always thought that public accounts should be a mirror reflection of the proportion of seats won in the elections. So if there is a majority government, it's the opposition parties that should actually hold the majority of seats. The greater the majority, the greater the number of opposition members who would sit on the committee. This is because the greater the majority you have in government and the longer the time, the greater the potential for a lack of accountability. In terms of the actual structure of the committee, besides the chairmanship, I've always thought that might be an interesting idea to discuss.
In terms of resources, one thing that's always worried me is when the Auditor General says they use a reference point of $1 billion, and when there are issues that are $1 billion or greater, they take an interest. They may or may not do reports on other issues that are raised through whatever means. That's always unnerved me. Let's say there's a $100 million issue. Well, if it's not dealt with in 10 years, it becomes a $1 billion issue. We're not doing our job unless we can address these sorts of issues in an expeditious way.
Once again, flowing out of the thought that this is a very different committee, our resource base should be significantly different and allow us to have researchers who would potentially do initial--