Exactly.
The question now is on this whole issue of unpaid loans becoming deemed contributions. There was some reliance from the minister in his testimony last session on the fact that a provision in Bill C-21, which says that a loan becomes an unpaid loan when it's been written off by the lender as an uncollectable debt and then it kicks over to the EDA being responsible, would more or less be pro forma.
That's exactly what banks would do, and therefore a bank would never really end up in the position of potentially being found to have committed an offence under the act. They wouldn't actually have a deemed contribution because they would always use this mechanism.
I notice in your remarks you said:
…according to the information reported by candidates after the 18-month statutory period, none of the $2.6 million in unpaid loans was written off by a creditor.
I'm wondering if there's some serious tension between what the minister was telling us about the likelihood of banks simply using this writing-off provision and Elections Canada's experience with the fact that this doesn't seem to happen very often. Is there any tension, or are we talking about two different actors?