Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak today on Bill C-24, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act.
On the surface, it is a bill that professes to end influence peddling in Canada and I could support it, as could any member in the House. However, the fact of the matter is that this is not what the bill is about. The bill has some serious deficits of which the Canadian public should be well aware because it is their money that will be used to fund us as political parties, instead of in other ways.
The first aspect of the bill deals with corporate and individual donations to parties and candidates. The bill limits funding to political parties by corporations to $1,000 a year and by individuals to $10,000 a year. I do not have any problem with that at all. In fact, putting limits on individual and corporate donations is a good thing. But where does influence peddling take place? It takes place underneath the table. The big chunks of money that we find from organizations like Groupaction and others come in under the table and amount to the tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars that are given to political parties in Canada today. Therein lies the challenge.
Producing transparency in the manner in which individual corporations are able to provide moneys to political parties will remove the ability to have influence peddling. I would suggest that what the government could do is adopt what the European Union has done, and that is the “publish what you pay principle”. Not only would I say publish what you pay, I would say “publish what is received”. If we could do both of them, influence peddling would be severely limited in Canada. That is a good way to end it.
To register constituency associations and to put more transparencies in place are good parts of the bill, but where I have serious problems is in using public moneys to fund political parties, and really, if this part of the bill were removed I would stand up and support the government on its bill.
In our system today, after an election parties are refunded from the public coffers 22.5% of the amount of money that they have actually spent. In the bill the government proposes to increase that to 50%.
Second, the government also proposes to increase the tax credit from 50% to 75% of donations. When individual organizations like the Canadian Cancer Society, the Heart and Stroke Foundation and so many others are starving for money and indeed when there is more reliance placed on them to raise their own funds, would it not be right for the government to increase the amount of money that it allows individual charitable organizations, regardless of what they happen to be, so that they would have the same charitable deduction as political parties? Why not do that? That would be a very good and progressive move on the part of the government: to make individual charitable deductions the same whether one donates to a political party or to a charitable organization.
The other aspect that we take umbrage at is the annual allowance. What I think the Canadian public will find very interesting is that in the bill the government proposes to allow the taxpayer to give political parties $1.50 for every vote they have received in the last election, for every single year. Let us look at the facts in the last election. For the Liberal Party, that would mean $8 million every year. My party would receive $4.9 million and the Bloc Québécois $2 million per year of taxpayers' money. In total, almost $19.3 million of the taxpayers' money would be going to us as political parties every single year.
These days when there is so much competition for moneys for health care, defence and a whole host of issues that help the people of our country, surely the government would take it upon itself to say we should not be funding Canadian political parties with taxpayers' money. A better use of the people's money is to put it into health care so people can get their health care when they need it, or to put it into social programs for the poor and underprivileged when they need it, or into housing or aboriginal affairs, or a host of issues that affect the poorest of the poor, because $19.3 million of the taxpayers' money is nothing to sneeze at.
I would support the bill if the government removed the public financing of political parties and took it upon itself to be innovative. I would ask the Minister of National Revenue to please give charitable organizations the same tax write-off as would be given to political parties. It is the right thing to do.
On the issue of a vibrant democracy, it is sad to say that a justifiably cynical public is moving away from political structures and into alternative structures to try to get what they want. That has happened because there has been a defanging of the country's political institutions.
MPs cannot represent the public who sent them here in the manner in which they should be. We need the power to represent our constituents and to do what they want. It is sad that in 2003 that is not the case and as time passes, it is becoming worse. Politics has become a cynical game fuelled by the taxpayers' dollar. The problems of the nation are merely the backdrop upon which the game is played for the maintenance or acquisition of power. That has to change.
Whoever sits in the prime minister's seat and chooses to do this, chooses to democratize Canada, chooses to democratize this House, will have a legacy that will live far beyond that person's years. Whichever leader chooses to do that will have put something in the history books that he or she can be proud of and that will serve the Canadian people very well for years to come.
There are things such as empowering MPs and changing private members' business. The rules are crafted by this House, by your office, Mr. Speaker, to go into the standing orders. In the waning days of December before the winter break, the government chose to renege on its promise. It chose to end the hard work of changing private members' business, that small island of opportunity where MPs can innovate. It chose to kill it and it has gone back to the dark days of private members' business being a farce. That has to change.
With respect to committees, the public and others who have been involved in committees must sigh and shake their heads at how disappointing the experience has been. Committees could be a vibrant place where members from all parties could put forth their individual expertise to deal with issues and offer solutions to help the government to better our country.
Committees are basically a make work project for MPs. We study issues. We often study the studies and then we go back and study them again. Legislation is reviewed which is a good thing.
However, there is a dominance of the party in power. The parliamentary secretaries sit on the committees. The government controls the committees with an iron fist. The original intent of committees as a place where MPs could actually have a vibrant discourse with each other and come up with something good, productive and effective is absent.
Many committees do good work. Even when that good work is done, the committees put together documents that get a day of interest in the media and then they are tossed on a shelf to collect dust. I am sure that somewhere in Ottawa there is a large warehouse where those studies are collecting dust.
We do not need more studies. We need action. We are not lacking in solutions. We are lacking in the political will to implement solutions. We need to deal with issues. We need to put people to work, to shorten waiting lists, to give people health care when they need it, to clean our environment, to help aboriginal people, the most dispossessed people in our country. That is what we need to do. We do not need to root around for more solutions.
There are numerous people outside and inside the House with umpteen constructive solutions that only need to be applied. The government does not need to apply them on a national scale. If the ministers applied them as pilot projects, imagine what we would see. We would see success and sometimes we would see failure, but surely where there was success we could share it with people from coast to coast and adopt that for the betterment of all Canadians.
I close by saying that the government has a grand opportunity to reform our system to make it more transparent and to democratize the House for the betterment of all Canadians.