Mr. Speaker, the hon. member is finding occasion to jump to his feet, but there are no points of order here, just the facts. If I was not telling facts, I guess he could get up on his hind legs and say something about it, but the truth is as the courts said: convicted, criminal activity, Liberal Party fundraiser. Maybe that is partly what drives this. People just say that enough is enough, they have had it up to here and this is another example.
I raised another example in the House where a corporation sent a memo to their employees. It said that it was hereby asking all of them to give $1,000 each to the Liberal Party of Canada. By doing so, they would get money in return. They would get the big refund cheque from the government. In exchange the corporation would top their salary up by $1,000, so they would get not only the salary back, they would also get the government rebate. They would be money ahead and the Liberal Party would prosper. The corporation said this was better than it giving a single large donation on behalf of the corporation because it could not get as many rebates from the government.
This bill would legitimize that. It would make it easy. Rather than circumventing the Canada Elections Act, the Liberals would just change the Canada Elections Act. Maybe that is what started it all off.
The first example that I know of for sure was in Quebec and central Canada where local federal party organizations were asked to approve federal grants into a riding. I am not talking about MPs or elected people, which would be bad enough one way or another. I am talking about a federal Liberal political organization approving grants to spend taxpayers' dollars.
I could talk about what goes on in my own riding where there is an organization called FLAG, federal Liberal action group. Its job is to ride herd on us opposition members, which I do not mind, except it is interesting that when projects come up, when infrastructure ideas come forward or whatever, it is told it better get the local Liberal constituency association involved or else it may not get approved.
We can only hope that the transparency in this bill would help to eliminate some of that. There are parts of this bill of course that are supportable. However, in summary, the problem with it is that the bill would force Canadians to support political parties whether they like to or not. Right now, if people do not like a political process, do not like politics, hate politicians or whatever, they can stay home, they do not have to vote, and they do not have to support it.
I do not approve of that because there is value in supporting the party of one's choice and always voting always. However, this bill would force all Canadians, whether they like it or not, whether they vote or not, and whether there is even one person in the system they support, to support political parties financially.
We say that the bill is fundamentally flawed for that reason. It should not come forward. The government will force this through. It will go to committee and the Senate. It will never see the light of day before the next federal election because this is a political game being played on that side of the House among themselves. This thing will not to come through in its current form and I make that prediction fairly fearlessly.