Information & Ethics committee  Right, so what we have now—

Information & Ethics committee  I don't see any reason why. We have this thing called the Internet. It's searchable. It's very easy to upload stuff. There's no great burden to putting more information on the Internet.

Information & Ethics committee  No. What we have now is a system like a stop sign on a rural road at midnight. If you go through it, there is no one sitting there watching, because one car goes through every half hour. That's the enforcement system and those are the rules that we currently have. You need to make it more like some of the toughest rules and laws and the toughest enforcement systems that we have.

Information & Ethics committee  No. Also, as I have said in terms of enforcement, she's not doing any audits. She's sitting back and not reporting on what she's doing regularly, so that we don't even know whether she's doing her job properly. I'll have more on that next week, actually—an analysis for you that you can ask questions about when she's here on the 16th.

Information & Ethics committee  We have our submission, and the very first page of it has the ten recommendations.

Information & Ethics committee  The lobbyist will disclose it. That's what the Internet is for. The government has just trumpeted the fact that 250,000 data sets from StatsCan have been put up online and now are searchable in broad data form so that people can manipulate them and put them into applications for mobile phones.

Information & Ethics committee  Very briefly, if you don't want to come back in five years and say, we have administrative penalties now, and they're not really working, make them minimum penalties, not maximum. If there is a maximum penalty of $25,000, then you'll see the commissioner levy penalties of $500 for the next five years.

Information & Ethics committee  For the purpose of transparency, I think it should be as broad as it is. And it does cover staff. That's good, because you wouldn't want to allow a politician to be indirectly lobbied by having the person lobby that person's staff and not register the contact because the registration is not required.

Information & Ethics committee  The Bruce Carson situation points out two things. First, the media found it out, not the Commissioner of Lobbying. It's part of the scandal that no audits are being done to find out who's even meeting with ministers. I mean, that would be a very simple thing. The commissioner currently has the power to do that under her general enforcement administrative powers, but she's not.

Information & Ethics committee  We spent 10 years in court trying to finally get it enforced, and if it's gutted now, you're going back to the free-for-all where they'll be trading favours again, as there was back to Confederation.

Information & Ethics committee  If I could say one brief thing about administrative penalties, a representative from the Government Relations Institute of Canada, when he testified, and also Joe Jordan, both said that when the commissioner reports that someone's violated the lobbyists' code, it's a serious penalty and no one would want to hire that person again.

Information & Ethics committee  Sure. When this committee looks at the Conflict of Interest Act, which I imagine will be on your agenda soon, because the five-year review deadline is coming up, you will have this issue. You will be looking at this rule that says that former public office holders covered by that act are never allowed to give advice to any client, ever, using information they learned on the job that is not accessible to the public.

Information & Ethics committee  No. As I mentioned, I was the only staff person. I'm now a board member of Democracy Watch. I have very publicly stated that since I was here three times, pointing out the loopholes, and the government refused each time, I was going to de-register, because I didn't have to be registered, and that until the loopholes were closed, I would not register again.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you. I'll answer in English. My French is rusty. Yes, all communications that are decisions have to be disclosed. That's the rule that should be in place. It's very important. Again, if the promise had been kept in 2006.... The promise by the Conservatives was that ministers and senior public officials would be required to disclose their contacts with lobbyists—meaning all communications—and instead, only oral and pre-arranged communications are required to be disclosed.

Information & Ethics committee  The difficulty, though, is that—