Mr. Speaker, I agree with the hon. member. In fact, I think I began my remarks by saying that NDP policy for many years had been to have an independent commission. We do have commissions after every parliament, but they have been subject to criticism because they are commissions made up of former members of parliament. A cynical public will say “Yes, but they are guys from the club”. That is a legitimate point of view, and it can be a legitimate point of view without reflecting on the integrity or the objectivity of the people who have made up those commissions. It is just a fact that some, not all, but some members of the public will never trust the recommendations of former members of parliament.
Others have said that there should be a completely independent commission of people who do not come from parliament.
The interesting thing about that is—and I will say this by way of saying how complex this is—now that we have been members of parliament for a while, could we pull somebody in who has lived his or her entire life in the business world who could have an appreciation of what being a member of parliament is like, how different it is from so many other jobs? I assume it is very different. However, that is neither here nor there. The fact is, if we brought people in from the corporate sector and if the recommendation was that we be paid $150,000 a year or $200,000, we would have to live with it. It would have to be binding before they were given the mandate. Otherwise we would end up voting on whether to accept the recommendation and we would be right back in the same box we were in to begin with.
This box is not easy to get out of, unless we want to completely hand over judgment with respect to the remuneration of members of parliament to somebody, if we want to give up that responsibility. There may be members of the public who would say “Isn't that cute. You guys want to wash your hands of it altogether”. Then we would be criticized for who we appoint. “They appointed a bunch of high rollers from the corporate sector to determine this. Those people think that anything under $150,000 is peanuts. No wonder they appointed those guys”. If we appointed somebody else, they would have some other criticism to make.
We can all say everything that we said here today, but we should not be under any illusions that we are not going to get out of the world, this side of the kingdom, without these kinds of criticisms which will prevail.
I remember seeing in a bookstore a book of headlines from the last 100 years or so. I just happened to turn to 1905, to a headline about MP salaries. It comes with the territory.
We need to determine amongst ourselves what we think is fair either in terms of process or in terms of outcome and realize that no matter what we do there will always be a certain amount of public criticism.