Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to speak today on this group of amendments, among which we find Motion No. 11. We should put this debate in context.
We have a bill before us that will finally make improvements in the way political parties are funded. The hon. members in the Bloc are particularly proud of this result. I am speaking of those hon. members who, in previous years, systematically introduced bills in order to try to clean up political party financing at the federal level, since we have some expertise in Quebec, gained in the past 25 years. In fact, we proposed the measures the government is now supporting.
This is not the only item in this file, but it is an important one if we wish to avoid scandals in the future such as those involving HRDC or sponsorships. or all sorts of situations where there have been very close connections between businesses and government contracts. Government money was going to the companies who, it just happened, were making almost identical contributions to the Liberal party of Canada. This kind of situation should be under somewhat more control with the bill before us.
This is important, particularly when the next Prime Minister of Canada, the member for LaSalle—Émard, seems in no rush to move toward democratization of political party financing. His approach is to try to stop this bill from getting through, because he himself has a corporate background. He has on several occasions tabled obstructive measures to prevent any improvements to political party financing. We have also seen his behaviour in such instances as the way the EI fund surplus was handled, and the approach for paying tax for the group, or holding company, for which he is ultimately responsible, even though he made sure it was in trust during his time in cabinet. He still had influence and that is still seen today. He is quite reluctant to see this bill passed. But in fact it must be.
I am in favour of the amendment before the House, because I believe that it is important for all current legislation to have a provision, when new approaches are introduced, to assess them after a time and make the necessary corrections. I must admit, however, that I do have one fear. If that reassessment were done under the member for LaSalle—Émard when he is Prime Minister, he will certainly be sorely tempted to revert to corporate funding and hidden slush funds. He has no interest in seeing the provision continue and expand.
In fact, we have seen past results. The present problem of governmental credibility has a lot to do with the laxity of the federal government which we have seen perpetuated throughout all the years this government has been in power. Scandal has followed scandal, and the federal government has opted for referring the demands for investigation to the RCMP. They are not necessarily the ones acting in bad faith, but the result at the end of the day, whether it is the Human Resources Development scandal or the sponsorship scandal, is that there are maybe 10, 15 or 20 RCMP investigations under way and none of them ever comes to an end.
Is this bill before us not one that would correct part of the problem? Obviously, it will not prevent situations from happening anyway, if a government has questionable practices or members of cabinet whose practices are questionable. There is one such situation which has been going on for quite some time.
The Canadian ambassador to Denmark, Mr. Gagliano, is still making the headlines regularly because of past actions of his and because he put in place a system which was even described as a tightly knit in the internal control report. In other words, a system with many connections between the minister's office, his relatives and the Liberal Party of Canada. This is an aberration and we definitely do not want anything like that to happen again.
We are debating a proposed amendment which will ensure that once the report provided for at section 535 with respect to the general election following the coming into force of that article has been tabled, the committee of this House to which the report is referred for consideration also considers the impact of the party financing provisions of the existing legislation which came into force at the same time as that section.
In other words, as of January 2004, we will be subject to the bill we are debating, which was improved in committee and should ultimately produce some interesting results. After the election and a few years of practice, we will be able to determine whether some minor changes would be appropriate. This is our challenge, as parliamentarians, and everything must be done in a manner consistent with the spirit of the act per se.
We should not be presented with changes designed to take us back to approaches of the Liberal Party of Canada such as slush funds. It is imperative that the spirit of the act be respected when we make these changes to the act.
The Bloc Quebecois therefore supports this amendment. We also believe it is important that we act as watchdogs. When the committee assesses what has been done, it will not be a matter of simply checking whether, technically, the act was enforced properly, but also ensuring that the act does not contain any loopholes making it possible to circumvent it or provisions which have proven to be unacceptable in practice.
In the past, the government often had its own interpretation of how to do things. For years, the issue of the ethics counsellor was dragged out, even though the Liberal government had guaranteed, back in 1993, that there would be an ethics counsellor who would report to the House, and that there would finally be some degree of transparency. After many scandals, we finally managed to get some changes. Today, we are just starting to see the benefits of these changes.
The same applies to funding of political parties. It is important to make sure we have the best legislation possible.
I would like to digress briefly. Earlier, in response to a member from the Canadian Alliance, the member for Chicoutimi—Le Fjord said that nothing prevented us from dealing with the main issues while examining this bill. Among those he neglected to mention, there is the whole softwood lumber issue. This is remarkable, because if any region has been hit particularly hard hit by this crisis, it is the Saguenay—Lac-Saint-Jean, the Lower St. Lawrence, the North Shore and Abitibi-Témiscamingue. These regions are going through very hard times.
I believe that indeed we can debate the financing of political parties but at the same time this kind of issue can be dealt with. It is not a valid argument. I only wanted to remind the member for Chicoutimi—Le Fjord that he had forgotten to mention the softwood lumber dispute, which is quite a problem in his riding, in his area. It must be resolved as early as possible to everybody's advantage.