Mr. Speaker, on the question of the Richardson's ground squirrel, more commonly known as a gopher, for about seven or eight years I have been pursuing this issue in the House of Commons, through private members' bills and motions, and across the country. Quite frankly, I have received literally dozens of phone calls from farmers and municipalities across western Canada encouraging me to keep that up, and I will.
I will now be working with the appropriate ministers to have returned to farmers the effective gopher control. Many people may consider this an unimportant issue, but to western Canadian farmers it means possibly $200 million a year that is currently lost and can be returned to them. It is an important issue and I will continue to work on it. I look forward to making progress on that as quickly as possible.
In terms of the offshore registering of companies that allow Canadians to avoid paying taxes in this country, I do not know exactly what is going to be in the federal accountability act in its entirety. We put out a document before the election, which certainly lays out some of the key ingredients, but as far as I know that will not be dealt with in this legislation. I really cannot say for sure, but now that it has been mentioned, I will look into whether there is an intention on the part of our government to close that loophole.
The other question was on polling. The Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates dealt with this issue at various times. It was completely unacceptable and inappropriate the way the former government used taxpayer money to fund polling, which was done strictly for partisan reasons. We exposed several cases of that.
In the federal accountability act we have committed to end that practice. It is inappropriate, and we simply will not be a part of that. Through this legislation, we will end it for future governments as well.