Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for South Shore for his question. First, with regard to why I did not talk about the 2000 election campaign as opposed to 1988's, the member is correct. The point I tried to make was that in regard to the 1988 election campaign I think there is a general consensus that there was a lot of interest from people who were proponents of reaching a free trade agreement with the United States. They, and they being largely corporate Canada, were putting a lot of time, effort and particularly money into the campaign to ensure that the government of the day would be returned and free trade would become a reality.
In fairness, in the 2000 election campaign we did not have those kinds of issues, but the point still remains that proportional representation would have been helpful in both elections because we did elect a majority government with a minority amount of the vote.
With regard to the thrust of the member's question on individual donations, yes, I think obviously we are going to continue to have fundraising. Individuals, if they are so inclined and so endowed, will be able to contribute up to $10,000 a year. The point is that a corporation, a trade union or an organization will be prohibited from donating to any political party, but they will be allowed to make a maximum aggregate donation of $1,000 to a candidate or to a constituency, a New Democratic Party or a Progressive Conservative Party constituency.
That, as I tried to indicate in my speech, is a bit of a gift to some of the Liberal backbenchers. When the bill was floated, we will recall that the president of the Liberal Party said it was as “dumb as a bag of hammers”. Other people have been complaining about it too. I think this was a bit of a gift to them to try to alleviate some of their concerns with the bill. Fundamentally what the government is saying by introducing the legislation is that trade unions, corporations and organizations will not be able to donate money to political parties themselves, that only individuals will, and that is worthy of support.