Thank you.
I wanted to take a moment to clarify for my colleague, Marlene Jennings. I don't always agree with Ms. Jennings, but it's rare that she's completely dead and utterly wrong. Just because this is a televised meeting, I think it's important to the debate and the quality of this debate that we all come from the same base level of information.
We should make it clear that Bill C-24 allowed $5,000 for individual donations and $1,000 for corporations or unions. My problem was the way in which they calculated what constituted a union. That was the point I was making.
The second point I would make is that not everyone has convention fee problems. We're having our bi-annual convention in September of this year, and the delegate fees are $90 if you pre-register and $135 if you pay at the door. So you're the architects of your own problems if you have delegate fees of $700. It's elitist anyway, and you should probably reconsider that as a party policy. We shouldn't be crafting legislation to suit bad elitist practices. The inverse should in fact be true.