Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the comments of my colleague across the way on this issue. I had not anticipated participating in this debate. I thought your remarks, Mr. Speaker, summed up the situation as it has been presented over the past number of days in the House. Members of Parliament from all parties raised the issue of 10 percenters and franked mail going into neighbouring ridings.
My colleague from the Liberal Party raises these issues and says that we want to ensure we do not have a situation where partisan mailings go in. As we pointed out in the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs as we deal with these one by one when they get to committee, which I sit on, the reality is that this has been happening for quite some time.
Another reality is that all parties do it. An additional reality is that one of the few tools open to the opposition parties to offset the tens of millions of taxpayers' dollars that are spent every year advertising the supposed good works of the Government of Canada into all of our ridings is for us to offset that in a small way by either direct mail or 10 percenters, and getting communication pieces into Liberal held ridings.
The member can stand and try to narrow the debate down to the use of 10 percenters or franked letters. I agree with him that we cannot have a situation where it would be illegal for me as a member of Parliament to respond to a Canadian citizen who writes me a letter by sending a franked response. I must have that right. If a citizen from the hon. member's riding writes me a letter, I must be able to respond. Otherwise, obviously I would be accused of ignoring the concerns that he or she wrote to me about. We are in complete agreement on that.
We have information that the Liberals are using virtually pallets full of negative partisan material that they are franking into ridings. I suggest that the hon. member communicate his concerns not only to this side of the House but among his own colleagues as well.
The government uses millions and millions of dollars to advertise what the government does. I think every Canadian is well aware of who the Government of Canada is at the moment. It is the Liberal Party of Canada. Certainly, they have become more aware of it because of the sponsorship scandal. What is the sponsorship scandal all about? It is about advertising.
We have an interesting situation. The government is caught in a scandal of monumental proportions that came about because it spent millions upon millions of dollar advertising. In this particular case it was advertising Canada in Quebec trying to buy Quebec votes. To get the truth out to Canadians, the opposition from time to time must send a counter, so to speak. We must send out our views to Canadians to get the message out unfiltered.
We certainly cannot rely on the government to do that for us. It has a pretty partisan agenda of sending out its message and costing millions of taxpayers' dollars to get its message out about all the supposedly great and wonderful things it is doing for Canadians. We have very few resources to get our side of the story out. I would like everyone to bear those remarks in mind.
The last point I want to make is that quite frankly twice during my hon. Liberal colleague's remarks he said that the use of franked mailings for political self-promotional items and 10 percenters was, in his words, “a wild west show”.
I notice that he did not say a wild east show. He did not say a wild central Canadian show. As a western member of Parliament, I take exception to that because once again, it is a Liberal trying to denigrate western Canada by this being a plot of the west and that is not the situation. All four political parties use these communications pieces and I just wanted that on the record.