Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes. Just for precision, in the pre-writ period, it's issue and partisan advertising, and in the writ period it's only partisan advertising.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I understand the commingling issue. Ultimately, it would be up to the commissioner of Canada elections to determine whether or not he or she felt that what was being proposed—in your case that the money was just dislocating—was in fact occurring or was foreign money flowing into

Procedure and House Affairs committee  My role is to talk about the bill as it is. I would tell you that it does make some important steps forward by creating the pre-writ period, by establishing the limits, and by expanding the scope of the activities that are covered by third parties, and also requiring the bank acc

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It has to be made available on the Internet site. It also has to be submitted to Elections Canada. In what needs to be there, there are some requirements of how and what information they collect, how the party is endeavouring to protect personal information. A statement is also r

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Assuming the legislation passes, what would change is in the past the commissioner of Canada elections had a pretty stark choice. For instance, if you didn't close the bank account on time, they had the choice of taking you to court or encouraging you, but had no proportionate in

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think the use of AMPs would ease the relationship—

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Okay.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  First off, I don't think I could convince you—

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I said, I don't think I could convince you, if you were from that—

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Let me just play it through for you, because it's a serious question. What is being attempted here, and what makes us.... I would compare the Canadian political system with what we see south of the border and say that we have a superior system in Canada, in part because we have

Procedure and House Affairs committee  They would be wrong to do that.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  You've come to the crux of the issue. In that moment of an election period, which is not a long period in the length of our democratic society, we're trying to preserve a little extra space for the political parties by providing some restrictions to the amount of partisan adverti

Procedure and House Affairs committee  During the writ period it is, but during the pre-writ period it's just partisan advertising. We're doing it for a limited amount of time in order to have the democratic debate that we need to elect a view.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes, indeed.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  If you had $100,000, that's fine. You could spend $100,000.