Mr. Chairman, I thank the member for his comments. I must admit that I have not put my mind to doing that. My experience has been that members of parliament work very hard when they are here and look forward to their time back in their constituencies. There are obviously some problems, but his opinion has merit and is probably worthy of some investigation.
With regard to the member's first comment that all the people interested in these areas are already gainfully employed, I do not know if that is quite true. If this thing could take on a life of its own, I suspect that once people got the impression they could have some impact on the way governments spend in the future it would possibly be more popular than the other two committees he talked about.
Another function of creating this committee and its interface with some of the other ideas about societal indicators and horizontal issues as opposed to vertical issues is basically to raise awareness. What would come with that pilot project would be some kind of education process for members of parliament. Treasury board officials or others would explain the process and how they could impact it. It would be a very powerful tool. People would warm up to the idea once they understood that they had an impact.
I have seen the reverse scenario. People came to this place in 1993 and were all keen about these things. Now that keenness has declined and people are not interested and have drifted away to other things. This would be a great forum to attract members who are keen and idealistic about changing things.