Thanks, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for being here.
I don't know if you've been following any of the other meetings that we've held on this topic. In questioning, my colleague Mr. Nater discovered a couple of things that would be considered fairly large loopholes—ones you could drive a bus through, essentially. I just want to run the two scenarios by you and get your thoughts on them, as well as—if the committee feels it appropriate to try to find ways to amend the legislation to fix those lapses—how we might approach those. You'd be able to provide some advice on that, I'm sure.
The two scenarios he identified were as follows. The first is in relation to the notice period. It's a five-day period, but this loophole was identified. Let's say the Prime Minister was going to be attending a function and didn't seem to know he would be there until maybe an hour or two beforehand, and that change was suddenly made. That takes away that notice to the public, but it would still comply with the law because after the five-day period it could be amended without any real consequence, I guess. What could we do about that?
The other scenario is this idea of the $200 limit. What would stop the Prime Minister from attending an event where the ticket price was $199 and then later on, at the event, everyone who attended just happened to give another $1,351, so they ended up giving the maximum contribution? They were not required to do that to attend the event, but they all somehow just happened to do it.
I suppose there is a possibility you could actually mix those two things, and it would be even more of a loophole.
I want to hear your thoughts on whether you see those things being problematic, and if we were looking to try to fix those loopholes, what we would do to fix them.