Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to my hon. colleague and the history lesson of what brought this act about. We certainly need to root out the horrific corruption that was endemic back in the Liberal years.
In this five-year review, which was a reasonable timeline to review because we did not know how the act was going to work, a lot of the testimony was focused on who should be under the act. We call them the public office holders. These are the people who hold power and make decisions. These are the people in charge of procurement, sometimes in the order of hundreds of millions of dollars, the people who are lobbied. Therefore, the question was this. Who should be under it and how should the act ensure that it is not too broad but it is broad enough to ensure that people cannot be corrupted or that they would not undermine their public roles?
However, at no point in any of the testimony that I heard, and I was at pretty much all of the committees, was there the idea that we were going to throw every civil servant in the country under the act, which now means, if we follow the recommendation brought forward by the Conservative government, that the ethics commissioner would have to oversee more people than live in the city of Saskatoon. Anyone looking at that would think it an absurd position to take, being that the people who are now under this act, along with the people who handle procurement, and the people who are being lobbied, sometimes could have the most minor position. However, because they are in the federal government they would be under the act.
I would like to ask my hon. colleague this. Where the heck did this recommendation come from?