Madam Speaker, as I indicated in my remarks, the ultimate goal of any of this is to eliminate in its entirety any actions such as those we are discussing. However, being realistic, we must realize that we are going to move a long way to diminishing them.
If this was an isolated case, and I think in many instances some of the things that have happened are pretty unique to that office, but we have seen other aspects in government operations where that is the type of attitude, that the public purse is somehow disconnected from the people who send in those tax dollars. That is something we should never forget.
My lessons came from the municipal level of government. Everything that we did, whether it was a change in the water rate or garbage pickup or whatever, we knew all the people we were affecting. We knew the people who were on fixed incomes who did not have that extra $5 a month. We knew the people who would not be able to do some of the other things that they enjoyed in life because they would have to put more money toward utilities and taxes.
When we went through the process at that level, it was minute. We were not talking about billions of dollars that were farmed out over many departments. We were talking about dollars and cents and what it meant to each and every taxpayer. That laid the ground for having a respect for tax dollars.
Hopefully we can all stand the scrutiny of a full-blown exposure of what we spend. Why should a member of Parliament have any aspect of his operation that the public cannot scrutinize? I understand some of the privacy concerns as far as the people we deal with and that is separate. That is dealing with the problems we face every day for our constituents on a one to one basis, but if it has to do with spending taxpayers' dollars, then certainly we should have to stand and answer those questions when they are posed.
Hopefully over a period of time these issues will be resolved to the satisfaction of Canadian taxpayers.