Or to a golf course, as my friend said. Money could go from a member of Parliament to a group that has a family member on it and benefit a family member or a friend.
We do not want to encourage that. Let us not use scarce economic resources for things that could be blatantly political or personally benefit members of Parliament. We do not want to see that happen.
Every day in question period we get up and ask questions about instances where money may have gone in some cases to benefit government members, either politically or in some cases I am afraid to say directly. We are concerned about that and we do not want to create more opportunities for that to happen.
In the last budget we saw spending go through the roof. We saw all kinds of new spending initiatives and things that were questionable. We know there are many areas of government where there is inadequate spending. I think of the Canadian military as an example. A lot of people would argue that we have not kept pace with the demand for spending when it comes to things like pursuing criminals.
Therefore, if we are going to talk about spending extra money why do we not talk about reallocating money in some cases and not pursuing crazy ideas like this one in this case.
Politics is always about a choice. What we would effectively be doing is making a decision not to spend this money on issues such as health care, criminal justice, increasing support for the Canadian military, or a hundred other things that are important to Canadians. Instead, we would be making a decision to spend it in a way that would give political incumbents an opportunity to ensure that they stay where they are as incumbents, by taking this money and spreading it around potentially for political ends. We do not want to encourage that.
We already saw that in the new changes to the Canada Elections Act and what the government was proposing with respect to campaign financing. We do not want to see more protections for incumbency. In fact, what we want is different ways to encourage people around the country to run against incumbents to ensure that we have lots of competition and new ideas coming forward. It seems to me that this is another way of guaranteeing incumbency and we do not want to encourage that.
In summary, there are a whack of reasons why we oppose this. They include potentially using this money to benefit sitting members of Parliament politically, using it to benefit them personally, and using it to benefit their family members and friends personally. It would give the appearance to the public that this might happen, that there is a greater concern for giving members of Parliament some fund money than there is to ensuring that we actually have enough money to fund those things that are very important to Canadians that show up in the polls week after week.
For those reasons I will recommend to my colleagues that we oppose Motion No. 393.