By way of background on the current proposed section 38, this is an exception to the general rule that all public office holders are governed by the cooling-off period insofar as the minister can exempt members of his or her exempt staff from the application of the cooling-off period. Under the current regime, with the present code, in fact all ministerial staff are excluded unless their minister directly or expressly has them included for the purpose of the cooling-off period. In this regime, we've reversed the onus so that all exempt staff are deemed to be subject to the cooling-off period unless the minister expressly excludes them. As you'll see, there are statutory criteria to govern the minister in determining whether or not to exclude an exempt staff person.
The kinds of scenarios that are envisaged here are people who may have worked on a minister's staff as exempt staff but who either were there for a very short period of time or who had no substantive responsibilities; in other words, they were there to provide secretarial help, that sort of thing.