Information & Ethics committee  Yes, that's a technical problem with the act, because we very frequently don't hear about people who have left their positions until after they've left. There's not much we can do about that except continue to work with the people who should be telling us.

Information & Ethics committee  I actually don't think so. I've had the archivist say he falls heir to an awful lot of gifts left over, but there is in fact a Treasury Board policy. The policy is that it's left up to the individual departments to decide what to do with forfeited gifts. Most departments, I believe, have rules and several options as to what will happen to those gifts.

Information & Ethics committee  Actually, it belongs to the crown if it's forfeited, so it comes from the crown.

Information & Ethics committee  I think they're all cleaned up. I put a real effort in to clean up all the backlog when I came in, and I understand it's finished. So we're now dealing with the current cases.

Information & Ethics committee  The budget is $7.1 million. Of this amount, $4.5 million is for employees' salaries.

Information & Ethics committee  The difficulty is that in order to get the facts I have to institute an investigation, so it's a bit circular. I require at least some evidence to satisfy me that there's probably something there to investigate. The difficulty I had with the Democracy Watch requests was that they were all over the place.

Information & Ethics committee  I did a very complete investigation. I interviewed 16 individuals, including the Prime Minister, to see exactly what had happened. I found that Mr. Soudas had only attended two meetings. Nobody had any sense that he'd applied any pressure at all. He was asking why this case had been running for 10 years, and why people weren't able to move forward with it.

Information & Ethics committee  That's the maximum for a gift you can receive as a public office-holder.

Information & Ethics committee  I can't think of any particular distinction. The rules are pretty well the same.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes.

Information & Ethics committee  They would have been established in 2004, I think, when the code was established.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. But if it's under $200, it doesn't make it right, necessarily.

Information & Ethics committee  With the gift rules?

Information & Ethics committee  Gifts are very difficult to monitor, because I only know about them when somebody tells me about them. I can't go out and investigate everybody to see whether they've received gifts. I'm entirely reliant on their coming forward and telling me. And a great many people do; most people do.

Information & Ethics committee  But in fact there's no way for me to know whether I'm getting reports on all the gifts that are being received. I'm actually trying to do a bit of work on that, to figure it out. I've dealt with a few ministers' offices now. There was a delay in reporting gifts, a very noticeable delay, which came to light last summer in a newspaper article.