Mr. Chairman, I'm certainly not going to be commenting on specific facts or otherwise of a specific case; however, in law there is a distinction between retroactive application and retrospective application.
Retroactive application occurs when, after the fact, you change the rule for some past period that has already gone by. In the example before us, it would be to say that for any member who served on the current Prime Minister's transition team, anything they did between the date they commenced serving on that transition team and the date when this law comes into force, if it involved lobbying, would be illegal, because it would breach the ban on lobbying and would thus be an offence under the act.
Retrospective application is different. It's not retroactive. What happens in a retrospective application is that you are identifying people—in the past, yes—and are saying that a new law now applies to that group of people; however, its application only commences on the date on which the law comes into force. So any activity that was undertaken between the time they went onto a transition team until the time the law comes into force is perfectly okay, if it involved lobbying, as no lobbying ban applies to that time period.
However, after the law comes into force and into the future, if they engage in lobbying activity that violates the ban, that would create an offence. That's the distinction between retroactive and retrospective.