Thank you, Senator Wells, for your speech. I, too, voted for the Auditor General to come in to audit the Senate, a decision I regret very much in hindsight, not because I was found to be in violation of any of the rules, which I was not. Rather, I was shocked that the amount of money that was spent was over $27 million. You have indicated in your speech the categories that were done and how minimal it was. But the $27 million doesn’t include the expenditures of the Senate, where we had an army of people, it seemed— I was on Internal at the time— working on this file, working overtime, expenditures, to get all of this information that they requested. Then, over and above that, our individual office staff had to go back to every claim for two years. For example, they had to dig up records of who I visited, where I was, what I was doing and so on. It was a tremendous use of resources.

My question is this: Is there any limit, any check, so that we don’t get into this excessive auditing on a continuous basis? It seems to me there needs to be a balance between taking care of taxpayers’ money, on the one hand, and the Senate spending, directly or indirectly, tens of millions of dollars to that end.

Keep in mind, of course, that the House of Commons, down the hall, when they had the opportunity for transparency and openness, all of the parties denied any authority for the Auditor General to come in to check their books. We’re beyond reproach, I guess, in our level of information.

I’m just wondering, what are the restrictions on the amounts? I don’t want to go down this road again, where we think we’re approving one thing, and then we, in my opinion, hose the taxpayers for an incredible amount of money.