Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you, Madam Chair, and through you to the member. We worked very hard at consultation generally with stakeholders, and in particular with political parties or people who had political experience. Our advisory board, made up of seven people, was mandated to choose people who

Procedure and House Affairs committee  That is a key question. Fundamentally, it's a question of the moderators. We had determined that it was very important for the Commission to have final responsibility for choosing the moderators. That meant holding broad consultations. Journalistic independence was then considere

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Mr. Cormier, do you want to answer that question?

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It's an interesting comparison.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  That's a key question. It's why we decided we should focus our efforts on making sure, in choosing the moderators, that they have certain very important qualities.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  That's such an important question. We've consulted a lot on that, and we've tried to capture some of that consultation in our report. In particular, the widespread work of the Canadian elections study group, led by the University of Toronto but with people across the country, tri

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Really, that's quite fundamental. As you can see, we've spent a fair amount of time in our report trying to understand that. What are the qualities of the best kind of moderator? Of particular interest, the experiences of other jurisdictions are very helpful, underlining the impo

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It's specifically production, yes.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  That comes within the purview, as Chantal has said, of the allocation we make to the debates production team to carry out the debate. What we have funded is looking at traditionally what the debates production team, usually led by CBC/Radio-Canada, does as traditional debates, an

Procedure and House Affairs committee  That's really a very important question. This has been an iterative process. In the two exercises we've had, we have gotten greater familiarity with what makes for the best public interest in debates. The debates production team had the responsibility for choosing the moderator

Procedure and House Affairs committee  We're suggesting that the final choice for moderation should be the commission. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  That would include some of the research capacity we bring on and the consultation we do. It would include the continuation of our information technology set-up and using our website, in particular, to broadly develop what it is we're working on and what the best practices are for

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Can you ask the question again? How much it is for the...?

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Go ahead, Chantal.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Let me come back to the earlier question, which is a very important one. One of the exercises we will do is work during that period with the request for the debates producer and team and not leave that to the actual election period. In working with that chosen debates production