This is one of the more interesting pieces of the legislative proposal: that for any registered party, the debt from the campaign succeeds ultimately to the riding association if it is not paid. This is a practice that applies, for example, in Ontario under their electoral law right now. That's how they operate, and it seems to have functioned very well.
You wouldn't need to have a penalty. It actually creates an avoidance of having to have a penalty, in that the debt continues. These riding associations don't cease to be riding associations at the end of the campaign the way a candidate ceases to be a candidate. You don't have this end date of four months or eighteen months or whatever it will be after the campaign for them to pay the debts; they will carry those debts. They will have to report them every year in returns and report progress on paying them back to the bank, if they haven't paid them back to the bank. Interest will continue to accrue in accordance with normal commercial terms. So those obligations ultimately survive, and if they become deregistered or decertified, they become the obligation of a political party.
In this kind of cascade of guarantees you create a situation wherein people cannot engage in the practice of making loans with the objective of their actually being converted into contributions. It means that those loans will have to be ultimately returned or paid back at some point in time by some entity related to the party.
Some people think that's a little difficult for a riding association, but I look at how it has worked in practice in Ontario at the provincial level. You're going to have tensions one way or another, and all of us who are in political parties know this. When somebody wins a nomination or gets appointed as a candidate and the riding association doesn't like them and doesn't want to free up the money, you have one kind of problem. Sometimes it's the other kind of problem: when a candidate spends too much and you have an overhanging debt. But those tensions are part of the difficulty of people having to assume responsibility, and we think people should assume responsibility for their debts.