With respect to the question of retroactive application--and I suspect, Mr. Chairman, that the committee may chuckle when I say this--it's not that it's retroactive in its application, it's retrospective, and there's a key difference from a legal perspective. At least one person chuckled, so I was right about that.
There's a key difference between retrospective and retroactive. It certainly means that it will apply to people who are no longer on a transition team, but it's not retroactive, in that a retroactive application would mean that the activities they've been carrying out since they left the transition team to whatever point in time this law comes into force would be suddenly illegal, and that is not what this does.
At the time the provision comes into force, it would be any future activity of that individual who violated the ban that would trigger the offence provision under the Lobbyists Registration Act. It would not be anything that they have done between the time of the transition to the point of coming into force--and I want to make that point clear. That is the distinction from a legal perspective between what's meant by a retroactive application and a retrospective application.