Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to comment on what my hon. colleague from the Liberal Party has just said. I was absolutely bowled over by my colleague's eloquence and her enthusiasm. I was particularly fascinated when she waxed eloquent on the beauty of the parliamentary and electoral system that is ours.
I would, however, just like to point out to you, and my hon. Liberal colleague, that no one on the Bloc Quebecois side has ever disputed the democratic system, the parliamentary system under which we are operating at the present time. She devoted the bulk of her long speech to that aspect, when no one over here has ever questioned that part of her speech.
What we did say, precisely, was that we had concerns about the way political parties were being funded. In this connection, I am still amazed that the Liberal government chooses MPs from Quebec to oppose this motion on public financing of political parties.
You know, sometimes when I am sitting here in the House of Commons, I feel as if I were on Mars. If I were in the Quebec National Assembly, sovereignists as well as federalists would agree unanimously on the value of public funding of political parties.
I am outraged to hear my colleagues from Quebec questioning the worth of the Quebec law on public funding of political parties when all parties in the National Assembly regard this law highly.
My colleagues see the mote in the eye of the Bloc Quebecois and are horrified. The Bloc received 27 contributions in 1993 from businesses. In contrast how many hundreds of contributions did the party opposite receive from business? The federal law as it stands permits this.
The Bloc Quebecois set itself strict rules in keeping with the law on public funding of political parties. So, how do these 27 small contributions stack up against the hundreds of thousands of dollars contributed to the party opposite, which is giving us the lesson today? Consider the beam in your own eye instead of looking for the miserable mote you might find in ours.
When political parties receive hundreds of thousands of dollars from corporations, can we reasonably expect that the day the president of the corporation shows up on the doorstep of the Prime Minister he will be turned away? When the individual who contributed $100,000 to Liberal Party coffers knocks on the Prime Minister's door, he will be heard.
This form of funding, where businesses can fund political parties and where no limit is set, opens the door to corruption and to influence peddling, and this is what we have seen in the past two weeks.