Bill C-2 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  I don't know about that legislation so I can't really comment on it, but I think people are driven not necessarily by monetary reward but by public service, and people should be driven by that. The first step is increasing transparency and disclosure through the government and not relying on the courts necessarily to do that.

Bill C-2 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  Can I just add to this? I think the first step is having greater transparency and disclosure. I think it would be a very good idea to have some sort of assessment process to find out if proposals for private contracting could be done more efficiently in-house, because obviously that would be better.

Bill C-2 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  I won't disagree that there are a lot of positive elements in this legislation. Obviously, in three minutes we don't have a lot of time to talk about that. Our point was that you could close the major loopholes in it quite simply with a few amendments. I think a lot of other people have some other amendments.

Bill C-2 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  In our view, a central element of the federal Accountability Act should be to increase the transparency, disclosure, and powers of the Auditor General to review contracts with third parties. This was the essence of the sponsorship scandal: a political party's abuse of public funds channelled through private contracts, often with crown agents of the government, for private partisan purposes.