Thank you, Mr. Chairman. That is very helpful and perhaps this is a good time for me to bring up a case that I know of, which I think should be considered by the Minister and whoever is in charge of determining what is in the public interest of forgiving a loan. Mr. Chairman, I have written to the Minister about this and I would just like to highlight this issue so that the Minister could pay more attention to it and hopefully give me a favourable response.

This has to do with a constituent of mine who worked for the government for about 16 years up to 1996. It has been six years since he has retired. While he was working in Inuvik, he was routinely receiving travel advances of $1,000. You travel and you have to file the claims and so on and get accountings done. Six years after he left the public service, he received a bill from the government saying that he owed the government $1,000. He did not know what this was about so he wrote back and he called the finance office to ask what this was about. The government officials just told him that, "We do not have any accounting of you paying it back so you have to pay it now."

He said, "Well, not six years later. All the accounting had been settled and you should give more information about what this is about." The government position was, "We have no records to show that you paid us, so unless you show it."

I believe actually that this thing happened 13 years ago. Although he left the government six years ago, the actual situation when this happened was 13 years ago. I do not think it is reasonable for anyone to expect that somebody would keep Visa receipts or cheque stubs back 13 years. I do not even think that Revenue Canada expects you to keep records for that long. So he is put into a position where, unless he can produce records going back that far, he has to pay $1,000. He told the government to go take a hike, and then he learned -- he happens to be a Justice of the Peace and he gets $175 every six months. This is voluntary work. You spend a lot of hours and he gets $175 as an honorarium -- that the government actually took off the money.