I'll make a couple of comments.
Looking back over the history of the committee from the beginning in 1867, the lure, the trap, in which the committee can fall, is scandal hunting at the expense of worrying about the system and improving it.
I like the balance of an opposition chair and the committee membership in proportion to the representation in the House, because it gives the chair an incentive, as an opposition member, to go after things, and that's balanced by government members.
That's why I emphasized the need for unanimity in reports on the committee. Not everybody gets what they want, but there's an awful lot more power in a report in which every member of a committee from all parties has agreed than there is to a report that's rammed through by a majority. That's where I find that report on ministerial and deputy ministerial responsibility and accountability in Canada was such a tremendous achievement by the committee. As I say, you've gotten extraordinary results out of that. It was really a very good one.
I want to make one other point. In terms of the Auditor General's audit, the sponsorship program was—and I think I'm quoting here—“below the level of materiality”, which means that the amounts involved were not big enough to be a major issue in terms of finance.
On the other hand, in terms of political importance and what it indicated about government finances, it was big enough.
The same is true for the Firearms Act issues, which the committee has been looking at, in terms of the amounts the Auditor General looks at—$25 million, or whatever it was in supplementary estimates. It was below the level of materiality, but in terms of its importance in parliamentary control of the public purse, it's much bigger than that.
It seems to me this is something the committee can wrestle with and on which it might want to offer suggestions to the Auditor General and/or the government, regarding what the important issues are. Sometimes very small ones are very important, and they are symptoms of the larger problem, or they symbolize something that needs addressing.
I'll leave it at that.