For years I have struggled against the things they stood for, but in this case they were right. They took the brown bags out of the election process.
If you look at the United States, and I have raised this in committee before, you see that senators spend half their working day raising money. We have, in this particular set-up, the ability for Canadians to choose to fund a party with their votes. It's a Canadian's choice. Canadians understand that. As Mr. Julian has indicated, this helps the participation factor.
For whatever purposes--I'm not going to start maligning your purposes, but I certainly question them--that we would want to interfere with the ability to encourage Canadians to take part.... True, they should hold us accountable, absolutely: they should ask us why we perform the way we do, whatever that is, following an election, and they can use the fact that they spent some of their money and they made their choices. But to turn around and say that we're going to take this out of the structure and put our democratic processes at risk of slipping backward into those days when the brown bags were there and when influence peddling in one form or another was there....
Even though it pained me deeply to agree with the Liberals, all joking aside, that was one of the best moves that was ever made in this country and I applaud them for it. I think we are making a huge mistake here.