Madam Speaker, I am equally sure that this is simply an attempt to stop me from getting my points across. I understand that because they do not like to hear the facts.
What are they opposing? Let me talk about third party spending on elections. We know the Reform Party would love to give a blank cheque to Charlton Heston and the NRA out of Washington, Dallas or wherever to ride into Ottawa on horseback, shooting their pistols in the air, and let them spend whatever they want.
On the other side of the coin I am not sure Reformers would want to see money being allocated to a third party group like the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. I suspect they would not want to see that organization being given this kind of power.
What is fair in an electoral process? What is fair is that there are registered parties. There are registered candidates. For all the disagreements we have in this place, I personally have nothing but the utmost respect for anyone who stands for elected office for any party at any time. It takes a lot of courage. It takes a lot of commitment. It is not just for a Liberal. It takes a lot of courage to run as a Reformer in Canada. Let us imagine running in Ontario as a Reformer. It must be sort of like the appliance guy with the loneliest job in town. They have trouble getting their deposits back.
I respect the fact that the candidate who ran against me for the Reform Party came out more than the Tories did to the all candidate meetings to put forward his viewpoints, his ideas, what he believed in. He is a man in the community. I might even convince him to vote for me one day. I suspect he votes for my wife because he lives in her municipal riding, so he has some common sense.
Why should someone with an axe to grind, a third party that does not have the commitment or dedication, be allowed to have blank cheque to influence the outcome of the election or to be manipulated perhaps by a party that knows it does not have support in a certain region, whether it is Atlantic Canada, Ontario or the province of Quebec? Maybe they want to manipulate the voters through advertising. Does that work? I ask members to use the analogy of why tobacco companies advertise to try attract young smokers to their products. It is because it works. The reality is that advertising in politics works as well.
It is a very serious issue. It is not like we are saying they cannot have a say. They can spend up to $150,000 across the nation. I do not think that is unreasonable. They can put their viewpoints across. They can attend all-candidate meetings. They can go to the candidate of any party they want and demand that the person explain why he or she believes in whatever the issue happens to be. This is the democratic process. This is not a government and this is not a country that will tolerate the ability of any special interest group to hijack the agenda during an election campaign. That is very important.
I want to deal with another issue that members talked about, the appointment of the Chief Electoral Officer. Let us be clear. In this case a resolution is required of the House, not of the Senate, to approve that.
There is much about democracy in the bill. If the opposition thinks it is democratic for us to be sitting here tonight voting on 67 nonsensical amendments which they want to put forward, keeping members of parliament in this place until two or three o'clock in the morning, I do not call that productive. I call that destructive democracy. It will not improve the bill and they know it.
They have had every opportunity to have their oar in the water. We should support the bill. We should pass the bill. We should stop the silly political games that are being played opposite.