Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you all for being here.
I'd just like to follow up a little on Mr. Reid's thought. I guess the question becomes: should there be some kind of safety net, if you will, something that would catch the extremes?
I would ask you this. We are in a climate right now, if you think about some of the recent campaigns—I can think of certain party examples—such that things have happened during the course of a campaign or things have become known in the course of a campaign, and the first thing the national media does in the middle of that national campaign is swing over and ask the leader, “How about this?”
If they have no say at all, is what we would expect them to say to the country, “I don't like their position on things either, but I didn't pick them.” That's a bit of a tough one.
Just to take it to its extreme to make the point, I would ask you how you see us handling that part of it, because we would shift some aspects of what the leader can do, but we haven't changed the national view of what it is that leaders are supposed to do. That is, when a riding picks a candidate who is against a lot of the policies of the party and something comes up and they swing to the leader to ask “What do you think?”, where are we at that point? Where does that leave us?