Right, the middle ground. My friend Mr. Lemieux said it just right. We'd find the middle ground. You know, we've lost the middle ground. We keep going in this tug of war from one side to the other, from one side to the other.
But each time, Chair—I ask you again and I'll try and make it clear—my friends here on this side of the table continuously try to bring it back to legislation. I think if you check the blues of the committee and all of the tapes, we've asked every time if we could just get back to legislation. Could we just get back to what we do?
As I said, we've got three parties on that side that for some reason don't feel we want to move forward in this debate and instead want to talk about their election financing in-and-out scheme, mud-slinging exercise. That's where they want to go with this.
And we've even offered to compromise on that. As I've stated, we offered the give-and-take. I guess we give, they take. But we keep asking if we could please just talk about it all. I grow tired.
Sometimes my kids do this to me too. If you ask dad for something 33 times, on the 34th time he might give in. It's kind of happening on the other side.
We keep wanting to talk about the in-and-out, but we keep saying, “Well, let's just talk about everybody. Let's just throw the books open and see if there is something in the election laws that we would like to see changed.” As I've pointed out today, and I've read into the record even, there is nothing in the law that says that what's going on isn't appropriate. We're saying that everybody is doing it.
So if truly we need to throw open the books, if truly we need to change the election laws, we'll need to throw open all the books to see that you guys are doing that and that's happening here, a similar thing happened over here and that ad buy went that way—is there consensus around the table that we want to change that? Is it not something we want to have happen in the next election? Okay, we'll write that legislation. We have great researchers and great legislative writers in this room. They do a fantastic job.
If the will of this committee is to change something in the Elections Act, let's get at it. Let's do that.