Mr. Speaker, as I said in my comments, there is more work to be done.
Clearly what we have heard from many learned people on public policy is that we can bring in bills and we can enact legislation, but unless there are good men and women working day to day to make sure those things are enforced, they are not worth much. I do not take issue with the member about the need for more work to be done in certain areas.
This place needs to do more work on looking at the books and looking at the estimates process.
Let us go back to the genesis of Bill C-2 and the ethics package that my predecessor put forward. It was the sponsorship scandal and some other areas that were of concern, such as lobbying, et cetera. With respect to oversight in Parliament, we should be taking more time, paying more attention and shining more light on the money before it is spent. When the estimates go through this place, it should not be done in a day. We should take more time and put them under the microscope. It is done in other jurisdictions.
It would mean having more resources for committees. We need to make sure that the people on those committees have more time to serve on the committees. The appointments need to be for longer periods. One way to do that is through electoral reform. The people who are in the third that we are proposing who are elected from the so-called list would be able to spend more time on committee work. A concern of people who have evaluated public policy for many years is that people do not spend enough time on committees.
Maybe we need to have a subcommittee of finance to look at the estimate process and take more time. It was not that long ago that it was a committee of the whole that looked at the estimates. I am not suggesting we go back to that practice, but that we spend more time at the front end examining every single line item that is being proposed. In the past, if we had caught some of the things such as what we saw with the sponsorship scandal, we would all be better off.
Those are some ideas for the future.