I have been listening very carefully to the remarks made by the hon. member who just sat down.
Throughout his remarks, he spoke of cancellation: cancellation of contracts, cancellation of agreements. I have some difficulty understanding that Bill C-22 is in fact a piece of legislation which cancels something since, in law, in Quebec as everywhere else in Canada I suppose, nothing leads to nothing. It is clear that if something is null it was nothing to begin with, and cannot lead to something.
Bill C-22 declares that the agreements are null, and that they are nothing, but on the other hand, the government wants to breathe life into that nothingness, so to speak.
With Section 10, indeed, they want to compensate friends of the government that might have benefitted from this whole scheme. That is my first question.
The hon. member who just sat down said that he does not understand much of what the Bloc Quebecois is saying, that it is using the piece of legislation we are currently considering, to address the issue of lobbying. Since this morning, I have the feeling that the Liberals understand what they want to understand and prefer to ignore what is not convenient for them. There has been some strange goings-on with regard to this whole scheme. We do not say so; it is the Nixon Report that says so. There have been some very unusual dealings in this matter by friends of this government as well as friends of the previous government.
I doubt that any future legislation on lobbying will prevent the sort of thing that happened last fall. Any such new legislation, should the Prime Minister ever introduce it, will hopefully regulate the activities of lobbyists. As for the past, I am surprised by the attitude of the Liberals, who are saying: "We are cancelling all that, we want to do it in a hurry, but we do not want to harm anybody, we do not want to tarnish anybody's reputation". I find such remarks outrageous in the face of a project such as this one on Toronto airport, where just about the whole investment by Canada would have been handed over to some people, if they had been allowed to do as they pleased. That is all I had to say about the matter. I would like the hon. member to tell me, if he can, whether we are dealing with a cancellation or with the legal recognition of a valid contract, the main players of which are about to be compensated?