The parliamentary secretary yells out the Fraser Institute, but the Fraser Institute solicits for donations quite extensively for the work that it does, so I am not sure we can compare it directly with academics.
In any case, the academics who came before us claimed to know what was good for taxpayers and supported the idea that political parties should be funded by taxpayers, but I am not sure these academics really know what is good for the average taxpayer because they do not actually pay taxes.
I know many of them would take offence to that by brandishing their paycheques and saying “Look, there are deductions there, I do pay taxes”. However the fact is that professors, publicly paid workers, people like myself, members of Parliament in this place, do not pay taxes because the money we receive in our paycheques comes out of this big pot of taxpayer money. We take some money out and we put some money right back in. That is not paying taxes.
The people who pay taxes are the private sector workers, the people who create the wealth in this country, and it is the deductions from their paycheques, it is the corporate taxes from the private sector that goes into the big pot from which we take our salaries. Those are the ones who are paying taxes.
When these academics come along and say that they pay taxes and they think it is a good idea that taxpayer money should be used to fund political parties, I think they have a conflict of interest.
In fact, I have always thought it would be a good idea if public sector workers did not pay any taxes at all and were only paid the net amount of their paycheques. Therefore professors, members of Parliament and public sector workers would only get the pay that comes in their net paycheque. They would pay no taxes and they would not have to file tax returns.
We can only think how much money the government would save every year if none of the public servants had to file tax returns because we were not playing this silly game of pretending that they pay taxes when they do not.
I do not think the government's side has consulted with real taxpayers, the people who create the wealth in this country, who actually will be paying the cost of Bill C-24.
If the government would have given us this summer to go back to our ridings and talk to the people in our ridings about the cost of this bill, I think there would have been a huge public uprising against it, and by the time we returned here in September the Prime Minister would not have been able to get his pet project through this place because there would have been too much public reaction.
On Tuesday, as I mentioned, less than three hours after we had begun this debate, the government House leader was up on his feet moving an end to the debate.
The fact is that Bill C-24 was the brainchild of the Prime Minister. It was clearly for him the most important piece of legislation on the agenda. That is incredible because we have issues like SARS, mad cow disease, youth crime, the definition of marriage and enormous budgetary overruns with the gun registry, into which we keep finding new amounts of money disappearing but for which the government failed to tell us. We also have the issues of corruption and bribery charges at Citizenship and Immigration, the need to establish a national sex offender registry, which has been dragging on for years and years, and an urgently needed revision of the Indian Act.
All of those things were taken off the table so the Prime Minister's bill, forcing taxpayers to pay for the day to day operations of the political parties, could be rammed through the House.
The bill will soon be in the other place. However, once it receives royal assent, the voters of Canada will have been placed in the position of having to pay to vote in a federal election. This will not be handing over cash to the poll clerk at the polling station. They will not have to pony up with their credit cards or open their wallets and bring out a toonie. It will not be by direct payment at the polling station but it will be via a raid on the public treasury by the government subsequent to election day.
For each and every vote cast, $1.75 will be taken from taxpayers to be shared among the major political parties based upon their percentage of the vote.
What that means, if we use the year 2000 election figures, is that the Liberal Party will receive more than $9.5 million from taxpayers starting in the year 2004 when this bill comes into force.