Government Operations committee  Thank you. What I wanted to say was with the period of time that was determined after I had my incident in the news last September, I had withdrawn from a lot of the activity of my business--almost all of it, for a period of about a month and a half to two months. From that pe

Government Operations committee  Obviously these are personal questions to do with my finances, but I will answer them because I've got nothing to hide.

Government Operations committee  The bulk of my income during 2009 was my severance pay after my defeat here as an MP. With that--also, I sold my home that I used to have here in Ottawa--I had budgeted to make an investment into my company and to not have to worry about finances for most of 2009, even into 2010.

Government Operations committee  That's right. As I said, our goal...because I know you asked about our business model. It is a bit confusing, because, let's face it, we were new at this. I was an MP for 11 years. We were trying to develop a new business. I had been out of practice. We thought we were going ab

Government Operations committee  No. I said that a lot of work that we were doing was research for our own benefit to determine what kind of business we would do. We didn't want to charge anyone for our own need for knowledge and our need for experience before we established our business.

Government Operations committee  Sure, please.

Government Operations committee  I'm happy to exclaim, as proof shows, that I have no influence whatsoever in delivering anything, so I'm not going to be subject to that provision of the law.

Government Operations committee  If those things were accurate--those things are not accurate.

Government Operations committee  Are you asking me specifically about interactions I had with Mr. Gillani, or are you asking me about influence?

Government Operations committee  As I said, and let me go back to what--

Government Operations committee  No. To my knowledge, no.

Government Operations committee  As I recollect, in our discussions about this whole issue of registration for the Lobbying Act, Patrick and I went through a thorough discussion of whether this was an appropriate action. Because we didn't know the nature of our business at the time and we were not--and I qualify

Government Operations committee  Again, you'd have to ask Mr. Glémaud, but the way I understood it was that in order for us to proceed, by putting any application in—because there wasn't even a guarantee that if we went through the process we would work with these companies—we were taking a risk in order to get

Government Operations committee  As Mr. Gillani said--and my understanding of the contract he tabled and the way it was explained to me--for any future business, whether he was raising money in the private sector or we were raising money from the private sector or any other source, we would have to sit down and

Government Operations committee  I appreciate that. I would just say, Madam Chair, that I'm willing to abide by the expert in this particular area, the Commissioner of Lobbying, and I will follow whatever she determines once she's done her review.