Mr. Speaker, the hon. member ended her comments dealing with the issue of ten percenters. When I was first elected to this place just a few years ago, I recall that the ten percenter was a communications mechanism that allowed the member of Parliament to communicate with his or her constituents on an ad hoc basis.
At some point, it expanded beyond the riding. One could mail it to any riding. At some point, the bylaws were changed to allow party whips to do what they called regrouping which opened the door to virtually unlimited mailings of ten percenters. I do not think it was an unwitting expansion. It was an advertent expansion on the part of the party whips of all the parties in the House and suddenly we had this mushrooming.
Would the member not agree that this is the effective conversion of an MP communication mechanism by all of the parties in the House to the use of the political parties? Because it is unlimited, is it not a little bit like letting somebody else use our credit cards? Are we, the individual MPs, not letting somebody else use our credit card on an unlimited basis? I can see the numbers here guesstimated by our research, but it is over $10 million a year for these worthless ten percenters.