Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you. Thank you very much to your clerk and staff for having been so kind in making the arrangements. I must say you are being very well served, with respect, by your analysts. The material that they presented for you has been excellent.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The answer to that is yes. There will be various levels of tolerance among my colleagues across the country, in response to your question. Some will see it in terms of protecting the independence of their office and so on. I get that. I understand that. But in terms of being ef

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Are we talking about a political contribution to you?

Procedure and House Affairs committee  We have separated the financial aspect of that, in terms of reporting and in terms of keeping statistics, from everything else. I don't know what the system is here, but every year the officers of the legislature are required to go before the finance committee and present a budge

Procedure and House Affairs committee  First of all, we're sympathetic to that, as opposed to saying, “You're trivializing the problem and get over it“. For anyone who wonders about those people who operate in the environment that we operate in on both sides of our, I'm going to say, partnership, they'll understand th

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes, that was my view then. It happened that we wanted somebody who was well experienced. There are other jurisdictions that have some provisions. We have none for what should happen under those circumstances. We were making it up as we went along. We've now made a recommendation

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Right.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Upstairs, I guess. I had one incident, Mr. Opitz, where I handed off a file because, to my astonishment, a member who had asked me to express an opinion told the press—not me, but the press—that he had an apprehension of bias if I were to deal with it, so I passed that off to C

Procedure and House Affairs committee  We have a sort of self-imposed set of guidelines. We report extensively in our annual report on these statistics. We are very conscious of being timely in our responses. I mean, we live in the real world, as you do, and we don't see us residing in an ivory tower. If you have a

Procedure and House Affairs committee  We're delighted, if that includes my ability to be able to explain to you the hold-mail accounts on the blind trust side that I mentioned. I think you'd find this to be rather interesting.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  All right.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Here's the deal. Blind trusts have frailties, as we've discussed here this morning. We have a formal blind trust arrangement, as does Commissioner Dawson. The real need is for people to be able to stand in the House and speak to any subject that comes up without there being an as

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It's always been that amount since the beginning.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It's been that amount for 25 years.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  We do that essentially by simply doing the best we can to understand the mores of the day and to overcome, as my children encourage me to do every day, our age. I'm alive, as we all have to be, to the fact that there are generational changes and generational views. You can't hav