Information & Ethics committee  It is not broad enough.

Information & Ethics committee  I am talking about special treatment. I will give you two examples. The first is related to the National Post's decision to kill the story. Mr. Mulroney named Conrad Black, someone from outside government, to the Privy Council. The Asper family was very grateful for Mr. Mulroney's intervention in the Milgaard case.

Information & Ethics committee  Those were expenses of the party.

Information & Ethics committee  No, because throughout the period during which I worked in the Prime Minister's Office, the system provided about $5,000 a month to the Prime Minister. That is all there was in my day, to my knowledge. That is not a huge amount of money.

Information & Ethics committee  First, to the preamble of your question, I have presented new evidence here.

Information & Ethics committee  I've presented new evidence of reimbursement systems that I was not aware of when I wrote the afterword to the Kaplan book. What I've written in Le Devoir and The Globe and Mail is new evidence. This is something that has not been heard before. I've said in response to your chairman that I have no information about it.

Information & Ethics committee  In terms of the second part of your question, I am aware of the reforms and I think they've gone some distance. But I also know that the Prime Minister said that he would make deputy ministers accountable to committees of Parliament, and he has not done so, and there's a fight going on between the public accounts committee and the Privy Council Office, which I assume has the backing of the Prime Minister, over the protocol to apply.

Information & Ethics committee  His brother, and others.

Information & Ethics committee  It was the committee. You are one committee. Well, okay, if we're talking about the Conservative side of this committee now—

Information & Ethics committee  Mr. Chairman, I'd like to—

Information & Ethics committee  I find quite interesting your statement that the public inquiry is the way to go, when particularly your Prime Minister, in his Christmas interview, suggested that maybe we don't need one, and when we then got a report suggesting very narrow terms of reference for that public inquiry.

Information & Ethics committee  Obviously I have no problems with the ethics of the cash transactions. I wrote about them in the afterword. I've been very forthcoming about them and I have no problem. I think that particularly because I was told they had passed muster with CCRA. So no, I don't have any ethical....

Information & Ethics committee  I got them from a file in the Prime Minister's Office, which I asked to have made before I left the office. I thought what I was asking for was the documents that related to my involvement in this, but apparently there was more in the file. The first time I looked at this file was two weeks ago, when I was preparing for this committee.

Information & Ethics committee  I don't know. All I know is what I read in the newspapers.

Information & Ethics committee  I have no information about that.