Mr. Speaker, it gives me a great deal of pleasure to speak today in opposition to the Lobbyists Registration Act.
When American President Calvin Coolidge was governor of Massachusetts prior to becoming president, the local Polish community wanted him to appoint one of theirs as a judge. There was one lady in particular, a lobbyist, who came to see the president on a regular basis. She pestered him again and again but she could not get him to make the appointment. She showed up at his office on a regular basis and could not get him to make this appointment. Finally an entire delegation of notables descended on him in his office. They came to see him to try to persuade Mr. Coolidge to make this appointment.
When they arrived at his office, Mr. Coolidge sat and stared at the floor. After an uncomfortable silence he said "New carpet". The whole delegation hastily agreed it was a wonderfully new carpet and that he had gotten his money's worth. After a while he said "It cost a lot of money". The delegation again assured him that it was a very beautiful carpet and that indeed he had gotten his money's worth. Finally he looked up at them and said "She wore out the old one trying to get you that judge". They left.
The same Calvin Coolidge wrote in his memoirs that when one is in politics, nine out of ten people who come to lobby you want something they ought not to have. "If you just ignore them", he said, "after three or four minutes they will run out of things to say and they will leave".
If Mr. Coolidge were still in office, we might not need to register lobbyists. We might not need this act. If Mr. Coolidge were still in office, we might not need an ethics counsellor. Old Silent Cal was his own ethics counsellor, and he sure knew how to deal with lobbyists.
Calvin Coolidge did not think that it was the business of government to seize property from the average citizen and redistribute it to the shrill. Unfortunately-I say that judiciously-we have made much progress since then. Now our governments dispose of huge sums of money. Our federal government spends $160 billion a year, and that means that anyone can get very rich on even a small amount of it if they manage to persuade government to dole out the favours.
There are a lot more plums to be shaken from the tree of government. Our governments now relentlessly regulate the economy. If you can get a regulation changed in your favour it means more to you than making a better mouse trap, hiring a better employee, or finding a new and better way of doing an old task. We have seen that with the recent changes to TV regulations. Even when the policy change is a good one, we have to worry about how it was done. Government simply has too many favours at its disposal.
When people lobby government, they almost invariably want something they can get by going to Canadians and asking them for it. They can come to my house and ask me for donations for the various enterprises for which they are looking for funding. They can go to other Canadians, but most Canadians probably would tell them to go play in traffic. What do they do? They come to Ottawa to lobby government for the funds they are looking for.
If we substitute the word "force" for the word "government", we can see how government can achieve what these people are looking for, because government has the means and the power to force people to give up part of their incomes through taxation and take that money and redistribute it to these people who come lobbying in Ottawa.
We have swarms of lobbyists trying to influence government. That means we need laws to regulate them. Unfortunately, this bill does not do the job. This bill does not define lobbying strictly enough and enables people to lobby in everything but name.
It is even worse when we come to ethics counsellors. It is a shame that we need them. I would much rather have politicians who know right from wrong. I lament the day that we went from morals to ethics. It has all been downhill ever since.
If we are to have an ethics counsellor, let us have one with some independence. Let us have the ethics counsellor who is described in the red book, who reports directly to Parliament. Let us have an ethics counsellor who can tell the Prime Minister "No, you are wrong", without fear of getting fired from his job. Let us try to swat the swarm of flies buzzing around Parliament Hill picking up scraps off a bloated budget and carrying them off.
Let us not forget that the reason we have people seeking unseemly favours from government in unseemly ways is that government has become too big. Let us not forget that government has the power to reward friends and supplicants in a way it simply should not. Let us work on putting government back in its box.
Let us remember that if men were devils government would not be possible, but if they were angels it would not be necessary. Let us remember that political philosophy should be occupied not with the question "Who gets to the front of the trough?", but with the question "How can government be strong enough to protect the lives, liberties, and property of its citizens without being strong enough to menace them?" Then we would not have to worry about who the cabinet is meeting with today, who the Prime Minister is related to, or any other questions. That would be real lobbying and ethics reform.
Let us defeat Bill C-43 and get on with that.