Madam Speaker, I want to make a few comments on what I have heard in the last hour. The member who spoke before me talked about the sort of indicting nature of this correlation between corporate donations and the Liberal Party. I guess this is the danger with statistics.
If we were to look at the funding in political processes in modern democracies, what we would find is that the party in government receives more corporate donations. It is not getting money because the party is of any particular stripe but because it is perceived to have its levers on the power mechanisms of the machine. I do not think it is necessarily a fair comment to say that the Liberals are getting this corporate money simply because they are Liberals. In the brief periods in the history of this country when the Liberals have not been in government, the governments of the day received equivalent shares of this corporate money.
I think this underscores what the bill is trying to do. The bill is trying to take that element out of the equation because, real or perceived, I think it has no value being there.
I am going to speak a little about the concept of what we are trying to accomplish. Certainly this piece of legislation needs to be vigorously debated. I am glad to see that it is.
I was fortunate enough to attend business school in the United States. One of the courses I had to take in the United States in business school was a course on government relations, or lobbying. Let me say that the relationship between business and government in the United States is a much more sophisticated and complex arrangement than what we have here. I honestly say that we have something worth preserving here. We do not have public policy influenced to the same extent by political action committees and by funding through what is called the black money or the dark money or the grey money in the American political system. I think we can agree that what we are trying to accomplish is to take that out of there.
The thing that seems to be sticking in the teeth of the Alliance is that we are going to transfer this to the taxpayer. I do not see the problem in that because we are representing the taxpayers.