Madam Speaker, first let me congratulate you on taking on the position of Assistant Deputy Chair.
When we first debated this bill in the House, this party, the former Canadian Alliance, expressed surprise that the government, despite all its resources of lawyers and bureaucrats, attempted to go through the process of changing the 50 party rule. Everybody here knew that it would not pass through the Supreme Court of Canada. We all understood that.
We are still baffled as to why a government, with such resources, would try to ram through such legislation. This is a democracy and political parties are the essence of a democracy. One would think that the government would allow a wide open area where people could, through their political parties, express whatever points of view they had. That is the essence of democracy; however, to bring in this 50 party rule is muzzling dissident opinion.
We pointed this out on many occasions. The member from Vancouver who studied this bill at length with other party members and even our former party, the PC Party, came up with the 12 person rule. This is a more reasonable figure. It allows for the concerns that the government House leader just expressed about the fraudulent use of special interest groups trying to take advantage of the bill that his government introduced recently.
A 12 person rule would have been sufficient. I am sure that if this proposal had gone to the Supreme Court of Canada, it would have agreed to the 12 person rule. Now the government has received a big slap on the hands and it is one person rule. The government is now scrambling and running to do damage control.
It is interesting to hear the government House leader say that it will return to the Supreme Court for an extension of this June 2004 rule. I do not understand that. We have debated this in the House. It is going to the committee and there is no need for an extension. The Supreme Court of Canada has already ruled, so let us go ahead and finish this issue of registration of parties.
He mentioned that there were two pillars to this bill: party registration and anti-abuse measures. Anti-abuse provisions are quite important in any legislation that is put forward. If there were no anti-abuse provisions in a piece of legislation, one would wonder how one would implement those laws.
There are new stringent rules in Bill C-3 coming into play during election campaigns. These came into effect January 1. Nomination and founding meetings of all parties, including ours and the Liberal Party, are all subject to Bill C-3 before the election campaign begins. There are a lot of candidates and people who do not understand the provisions of Bill C-3, including people in my own riding where the nomination meeting took place last week.
I would hope that Elections Canada, which is responsible under this provision, will take these anti-abuse provisions seriously. Without that, there is no point in making bills. There is no point if Elections Canada will not take the complaints that will be coming to it seriously. If it does not, then the whole essence of the bill and what Parliament intended to do falls through the cracks.
I am hoping that Elections Canada will not pass the buck because it does not have the resources to implement the will of Parliament in this case.
Coming back to the anti-abuse provision, I think we have an agreement. I will say that the government is worried to some degree about the abuse. We are all worried about the abuse. We will look at it in committee in order to bring improvements to this, see how we can tighten the anti-abuse provision, and at the same time maintain the essence of democracy, which embodies the free opinions of Canadians.