Keeping that in mind, Mr. Bergen said you are not trying to deal with the public office holders but are just monitoring the lobbyists—and the rules are there for that.
The question that has been asked by members, to which I think we would like an answer, concerns the following—if I could refer to what the Speaker says in the House all the time—that you cannot do indirectly what you can't do directly. We can't quote a member's name directly to him, which means that you also cannot read from an article using their name. It's matter of being direct or indirect. So here's the question.
Do we have a loophole in the system that would allow someone, whether paid or unpaid, to go to a person who has influence over a minister but not have an obligation to report? It's bypassing the obligation to register because it's not a direct communication. If I'm going to someone who's not a designated public office holder, is there this loophole where they can in fact go through someone else? For example, if Mr. XYZ, who has a company and wants to get a grant for a client who has a project, goes to the assistant of a minister, whom he knows personally, and that assistant then goes to the minister and says, "Yes, I can take care of it"—and that happens—that seems to me to fall through the crack. And if the employee in the minister's office knows this person and knows they're not a registered lobbyist, there's no obligation on them to report that someone lobbied them, directly or indirectly, on a matter.
Do you understand what the question is?