Mr. Speaker, indeed we will not because I am talking about electoral financing, which is what the motion concerns. The hon. member may have missed the point since he got on about young offenders and so on. I am trying to address my remarks to the subject matter of the motion which is, after all, electoral financing, but that may have escaped him. His remarks seemed to be all over the place.
The other thing he should know is his colleague and our very good friend, the hon. member for Edmonton Southwest, introduced a bill dealing with electoral financing which is currently being studied by the procedure and House affairs committee which I have the honour to chair. I know the bill is going to come up next Tuesday. It is going back on the agenda for consideration in the committee.
Does this bill abolish public financing of parties? No, it does not. It eliminates funding for parties that get less than a certain percentage of the vote but it will continue it for everybody else. I believe there has been some agreement reached between the hon. member and members of the other parties which improves the situation somewhat. However, I do not know what the final result is and I would not presume to discuss the final details of the bill not knowing them.
I think the hon. member for North Vancouver ought to be aware that the policy of his party which he spouted with such apparent sincerity is being ignored quite blissfully by the hon. member for Edmonton Southwest in the bill he has presented to Parliament and which now he is pressing my committee to report back to the House on so he can pass it.
I hope the hon. member for North Vancouver is here in the House to support his colleague's bill when it comes to a vote. It is a votable item and he will have that privilege. I am looking forward to seeing what he says because here he reads the policy on the one hand and he will get a chance to vote for the policy by voting against his friend's bill. We will see what happens then.
The Liberals on my committee are supporting the bill as are the members of the Bloc Quebecois. They have good sense. The hon. member for North Vancouver would do well to learn from his colleague, the member for Edmonton Southwest, and scrap the ridiculous policy he says his party members have voted in. I find it quite extraordinary. Let me turn to the motion before the House.
The Canada Elections Act provides for the reimbursement of a portion of election expenses incurred by registered political parties. Specifically, a registered party is entitled to a reimbursement of 22.5 per cent of the expenses declared in its return provided it spends at least 10 per cent of the election limit.
Some of us have criticized this because we feel it encourages parties to spend money in order to collect the reimbursement. If they do not spend up to 10 per cent of the expenditure limit they do not get any reimbursement. Therefore they must spend like crazy to get there. It can be a fairly substantial limit, as hon. members know. They then get back 22.5 per cent of their expenses so that once they hit the limit it is basically a 75 cent dollar they have put out.
There is no limit on the amount that can be contributed to a registered political party but there is a limit on the amount that can be spent.
The Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing recommended that registered parties receive at least 1 per cent of the votes cast in an election before they are entitled to any reimbursement and then receive 60 cents per vote received for a maximum of 50 per cent of election expenses. They could not get more than 50 per cent of their expenses back under this system.
In the last Parliament we had a special committee on electoral reform which considered the matter but did not agree with the Lortie recommendation. I was a member of that committee. I believe I am the only one left in the House. The others have moved on to other things.
We reviewed the report and recommended that the 10 per cent expenditure requirement be applied to a party's direct election expenses and that the rate of reimbursement be increased to 25 per cent of direct expenses, a very modest change from the present law.
I do not mind saying the reason we could not agree on anything else was that we ran into a stone wall with the Conservative majority, which saw that its electoral chances were failing. Those members realized that if they went to a 60 cent per vote arrangement, as recommended by the Lortie commission, they would get very little money if their vote fell out the bottom, as the polls at that time indicated they would. That is exactly what happened. Had we had that rule in place the Conservative Party would have been worse than bankrupt. It is in trouble now but it would have been much worse; the rule significantly helped it in the last election.
The hon. member for Edmonton Southwest has proposed a bill that would eliminate reimbursement for parties that gain less than 2 per cent of the national vote. He is going to change that because he has received agreement from the other parties to make changes. I do not know what the changes are so I do not want to go on about his bill.
Now we have a proposal from the hon. member for Gatineau-La Lièvre. I am sure the hon. member for Edmonton Southwest, being a generous spirited individual, has looked at other possibilities. I know he has because he has had suggestions made to him in the course of the committee proceedings where he had the advantage of hearing from other members. He said that all makes sense, let us make some more changes. He is making more changes and I commend him for that. I am looking forward to seeing the bill in its possibly final form when it rolls out of the committee possibly next week. If that happens we will all have the benefit of that and perhaps it will make the motion of the hon. member for Gatineau-La Lièvre unnecessary.
However, we are dealing with his motion today. It is not a votable motion despite the efforts of the hon. member for North Vancouver and so we will have to deal with it as it stands. We will have a discussion about it and then go on to something else.
The hon. members opposite, although genuine in their desire for reform, do not agree on how they should go about it. They are making efforts to raise the level of debate by discussing these things and I respect that, particularly by the hon. member for Edmonton Southwest. It looks to me as though he has a speech coming up and I am looking forward to hearing his remarks.
The point is how to solve this problem. I do not know the answer but I do think the Lortie commission report is worth looking at again. The point of it was to ensure parties get reimbursed based on the number of votes they receive. Another possibility is to have a pot such as that suggested by the hon. member for Gatineau-La Lièvre and have a fixed amount of money available in accordance with the limits on election spending and then divide the fixed amount among the parties that participate in the election based on the number of votes they receive.
I believe there is general agreement that no party should get more than 50 per cent of its expenses reimbursed so that it would prevent some party that won more than half of the vote from getting more than half the money available. That strikes me as fair and reasonable.
However, I do not think that is what has been put forward today and we need to look at that kind of proposal in greater detail. We need to look at it with respect to the charter of rights and freedoms because, as we know, there have been challenges to the expenditure limits on parties and on others, third parties in particular not participating in elections.
All those issues will concern the procedure and House affairs committee as it undertakes the review of the Canada Elections Act, which I hope it will be doing soon. No doubt at that time it will consider the very worthwhile proposal put forward by my colleague, the hon. member for Gatineau-La Lièvre.