Madam Speaker, there are a few bills that are very important for most members of Parliament to speak to, and certainly this bill is one. Unfortunately, the government House leader has chosen to cut off debate simply because the Prime Minister has his legacy in mind and particularly wants the bill passed before the House rises for the summer.
I for one am scheduled to be here until a week Friday. I intend to be here until a week Friday unless the government decides to cut the session short for whatever reason.
We have time to get into the bill. We have time to get onto the record the items that are of concern to our constituents, yet the government has chosen to move forward with closure.
With respect to Group No. 2, Motion No. 11, which we are currently debating, we do support the fact that there should be a review of the act to assess the impact after the first election.
Clearly, we should get as close as we possibly can to reviewing the bill and the impact it will have on politics in Canada and on Canadians in general, but I would suggest that if we were not under this closure by the government, if we had not been shut down, we would have been able to bring out all the issues, or at least most of the issues, that show the bill to be, frankly, in contempt of the people of Canada.
Let us take a look at the stated reason of the Prime Minister for the bill in the first place. The stated reason for the bill is that the Prime Minister has been caught doing a tremendous number of things, first by the National Post when it was governed by Conrad Black. We all know the relationship that is not there between the Prime Minister and Conrad Black. Many events have taken place around the government, for instance with the former public works minister who is now in charge of our embassy in Denmark. These events are all things for which the Canadian public has a right to know and indeed for which the Canadian public has an extreme distaste. These are things that are very sorry, very sad and certainly put the honourable profession of being a politician into serious question and into great disrepute.
Because of the actions of the Prime Minister and his cabinet, we now have this bill. That is rather ridiculous. If the Prime Minister had not undertaken the kind of questionable activity in which he was involved and if he had kept proper control over his front bench, over the cabinet, over the government of the day, the Canadian public would not be questioning this.
What is his solution? His solution is to dig deeper into the Canadian taxpayers' pockets.
As the political system presently works, a number of rebates are available to people who choose to contribute to my campaign, to any other member's campaign or to a recognized political party. Through those rebates and tax credits, the people of Canada are currently providing about 60¢ of every dollar that political parties spend. Sixty cents of every dollar that political parties spend currently comes out of taxpayers' pockets as it is. Therefore the Prime Minister's solution to his questionable ethics and his questionable activity is to dig deeper into taxpayers' pockets and go after 80¢ on the dollar.
Now that is bad enough, but what is worse, which to me is the nub of the issue, is that the financing of political parties will be based on the number of popular votes that they received in the last general election.
If we were to go back to 1988 and 1989, when the Reform Party first came on the scene, and then we fast forward to 1993, when the Reform Party at that particular point had so few votes, where would my party have had the resources to fight against the well financed Liberals and Conservatives? We simply would not have been able to do it.
We are now in a position where, if the bill passes, a party like the Reform Party, coming out of whatever jurisdiction in Canada and following whatever interests the party may have, will not have access to all the largesse that is being provided by the bill out of taxpayers' pockets. In other words, we now have a closed shop situation.
The member across asked where we got the money. I will tell him where we got the money. We got the money from people $1, $5, $20 at a time who were really concerned about the way in which the government of the day, the Conservatives, were completely mismanaging and completely out of touch with the people of Canada.
The people of western Canada, in particular, voted very strongly for the Conservatives, both in 1984 and again in 1988, to maintain the Conservatives in power because they believed, unfortunately falsely believed, that the Conservatives would be paying attention to the concerns of the people west of the Manitoba-Ontario border. They did not and, as a consequence, many people, $1 at a time, $5 at a time, $20 at a time, ended up contributing large amounts of money to the Reform Party. Hence, we had the ability to fight the election in 1993, 1997 and again in 2000. My point is that the bill would stop another reform party.
Perhaps there are people in the House who would jokingly, or even with a pointed joke, ask what the problem is with that. The problem with that is that it is a case of freedom of speech. If I, as a small “d” democrat, believe that the people of Canada should have people who are representing their views, their wishes, their desires and their direction, then I must also expect that there will be some in the community who will oppose my point of view. That is what democracy is all about.
Now, however, to repeat, as a result of Bill C-24, fundamentally new political parties in Canada are not welcome. There is no place for them because there is no way for them to function. There is no way for them to get their message out. There is no way for them to compete with organizations like the Liberals have with all the political staffers.
Where does the money come from for them? Where does the money come from for the computer programs that they run with? Where does the money come from for the storefronts or for the offices? Historically it has come from 60¢ on the dollar from the Canadian taxpayer and 40¢ on the dollar from their supporters, many of which are the large corporations, which is fine. Now we have reached a point where 80¢ will come from taxpayers and only 20¢ from volunteers.
There is another smaller problem but, nonetheless, a serious one. I would be hard-pressed to find anyone in my constituency who had any appetite for supporting the BQ. Conversely, I rather suspect that my colleague from the Bloc Quebecois would tell me there are very few people in his province who would be interested in supporting my party, which is fine. Those are the choices. At least they were the choices up until Bill C-24.
Under Bill C-24, people in my constituency in the Rocky Mountains will be obliged to pay for the Bloc Quebecois. Conversely, there will be people who feel very strongly about certain issues and oppose the Canadian Alliance Party with all their might. That is democracy. However those same people will be compelled to pay support to the Canadian Alliance.
This bill, although it had questionable intentions to begin with, has gone downhill from that point. In fact, this bill is just fundamentally anti-democratic.