Thank you, Madam Chair.
Mr. Mayrand, in your opening statement you said these rules have been put in place in recent years to avoid undue influence of single large contributors. As an elected person, everybody influences me to a certain extent. What is perceived as undue influence is what I would call reasonable influence and unreasonable influence.
I'd like to give you a bit of a scenario. Let's say a political party was holding a convention and all of a sudden a certain sector of the economy put in huge amounts of money to sell advertising and to really support the convention. Would you not think that was unreasonable influence on the people who are going to be making policy decisions on behalf of Canadians?
I think that's the issue here, and I think if you don't address that issue you're going to open the floodgates. If the NDP were allowed to get away with having this influence of unions on their policy-making ability in this place, then you're opening the floodgates for every sector to come forward and support political parties at these conventions. I think that is not the intent of the regulations that were put in place. They were put in place to get rid of that type of undue influence.
So what would you say is reasonable influence and unreasonable influence?