Mr. Speaker, to me it seems quite clear. Being accountable for our debts means that we pay them. I think everybody understands that. That is common sense. There may be some other bureaucratic approach to things, but that is a very simple premise.
In terms of public policy and being accountable, I think Canadians want their politicians, their representatives in the House of Commons, to be accountable primarily and first and foremost to the people who elected them, not to people with huge sums of money, who can, with millions of dollars, make loans in excess of the legal limit for contributions to Liberal leadership candidates, effectively mortgaging them.
That happened a year ago in that Liberal leadership campaign. So their first responsibility is not to Canadians and not to the voters who put them there, but rather to the people to whom they owe hundreds of thousands of dollars individually and millions of dollars collectively. That was the situation in the Liberal Party after the last leadership campaign because this law still had a loophole in it, which we are seeking to address today.
When I talk about accountability to Canadians, I think that first and foremost they want to see us get rid of the undue influence of big money in our political financing system. Progress has been made. We have serious contribution limits. We got rid of corporate contributions and so on.
However, as we discovered in the Liberal leadership campaign, there is big money and the Liberal Party members could find a way to play that game in the past under the current law. They did it through large personal loans. We are going to get rid of that and have true accountability, where votes and Canadians matter, not big money.