All right. Thank you. I don't actually want more time. I just want to make sure that we all get equal time.
I was interested in your comments, Mr. Lavigne. I've had a very similar thought: that if it becomes the established practice that such leadership debts are allowed to exist forever, then naturally one could start gaming the system pretty easily, and I think that would lead to a situation in which, at least as far as leadership contests go, big money would be back in the saddle.
The question then becomes how one deals with such debts. There are different ways, I suppose, that one could deal with them. The trouble is, I can see different problems with them.
One way is that you simply make it that the person who is the contestant is required to pay the loan back at a certain point. But if you are Belinda Stronach, to take a real example from the past, being saddled with $300,000 to $400,000 worth of debt that you have to pay back to the Receiver General is not really a problem.
You could try billing it to the party—that thought has occurred to me—but you could then get frivolous candidates. I suppose the party could have some sort of right to refuse frivolous candidates. The danger there is that this is abused in another way to keep out legitimate candidates that the party establishment doesn't want.
So I'm interested in your thoughts and the thoughts of all the people on the panel as to how, at a practical level, one deals with this problem without introducing the possibility for a different form of abuse.
Maybe we could start with Mr. Lavigne, because he has obviously put some thought into it, and then go from there.