Thank you Mr. Chairman.
Ms. Alepin, it is with great pleasure that I read your brief and listened to you speak. I have long been concerned about the impacts various measures being taken are having on our democratic system. Tax issues have also been of great interest to me for some time now. In fact, I previously spoke with Ms. Carole Presseault, who is a CGA and has lobbied fiercely for the simplification of our income tax statements.
Your brief targets the potentially negative influence big money can have on the democratic process. I found it most interesting. On that subject, you suggest specifically that compulsory disbursement quotas should go from 3.5% to 8% so that taxpayers' donations may be recovered more quickly. Quite recently, an evangelical website which had violated electoral law was discussed in the news. This could be considered a Trojan horse of sorts and one can suppose that the evangelical organization is benefiting from charitable donations.
So could you please explain to us how increasing that quota could potentially reduce a possible attack on democracy? The absolute power to spend is of course a power. So I'm wondering if the fact of increasing the level of disbursements would not end up creating a contradiction with this principle or if on the contrary, the fact of spending accumulated capital more quickly would allow us to fight against this threat to democracy.