Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to enter into the debate at this stage of Bill C-2.
Let me start by laying the foundation of the remarks that I hope to make. I firmly believe that if we did nothing else in this 39th Parliament other than to pass the federal accountability act and give meaning and substance to the clichés of transparency and accountability, we would at least be able to say that we spent our time well and we would have something to show the Canadian people.
I start my remarks with that note because I can say without any fear of contradiction that the federal accountability act is in a very fragile state as we speak. We run the risk, and I believe due to political mischief, of losing the federal accountability act, this great project that we undertook many months ago. At that time we cautioned that if we did not move swiftly, with a collective will and with some cooperation, a project of this magnitude is fraught with pitfalls and could easily collapse under its own weight or fall vulnerable to political influence and political mischief that have nothing to do with making the nation-state of Canada more transparent or the system accountable.
The debate will become very complex as we debate 154 amendments from the Senate. A comprehensive amendment from the Liberal Party has just been moved, as has a comprehensive subamendment from the Bloc Québécois. Let us bring this back to basics.
What we started back in April with Bill C-2, the federal accountability act, would have given us for the first time ever comprehensive whistleblower protection. That alone I would have voted for in Bill C-2, just to be able to have done that one thing in this 39th Parliament.
The public appointments commission, the PAC, alone would put an end to patronage. Imagine, on behalf of the people of Canada, putting an end to pork-barrel patronage in the 39th Parliament. We could tell our grandchildren that we did something in this Parliament if we could deliver on that one chapter of Bill C-2 alone. It would be spectacular. It would be sensational. Those things are at risk as we speak.
The parliamentary budget officer, the director of public prosecutions, all of these worthy initiatives that are not very controversial and have broad support from all the political parties, are now vulnerable. They could crash and burn as we bicker and toss back and forth between the Senate chamber and the House of Commons amendments on the most minuscule, trivial, virtually meaningless things.
Let us strip it down to basics. The one thing that is holding up the bill right now is whether or not a single ethics commissioner would administer the two codes of conflict of interest for this chamber and the Senate or if there would be multiple ethics commissioners. We are debating how many ethics commissioners can dance on the head of a pin. That is really what the whole thing boils down to. All of these wonderful initiatives will fall by the wayside if we cannot agree to something that silly.
To hear the senators tell it, it would be a constitutional crisis if there were two ethics commissioners. Constitutional crisis is a phrase that is tossed around in modern day Canada, saying constitutional crisis is the last refuge of a scoundrel in Canadian terms. It is a smokescreen to stall and delay the important reforms that Canadians expect, Canadians demand and which Canadians sent us here to put into place.
People tuning in or trying to weave their way through this quagmire that is the federal accountability act and all the amendments, subamendments and compounding amendments, should just remember that we are trying to implement whistleblower protection. We are trying to implement a public appointments commission so we cannot make political patronage appointments to unqualified nephews, et cetera. We are trying to put in a parliamentary budget officer, and we are hung up on things like how many ethics commissioners shall administer our codes of conduct. It is so petty that a lot of people would not believe that we could be tripped up so readily, to have such a noble pursuit held up, intercepted and sabotaged by such trivial arguments.
I am very proud of the role that the New Democratic Party has played in trying to make sure that at least the key elements of this bill are salvaged and come to possible fruition.
I should pay tribute to the contribution of my former colleague, the former leader of the New Democratic Party and member for Ottawa Centre, Mr. Ed Broadbent. In the 38th Parliament it was Ed Broadbent, in coming back to the House of Commons after many years of doing other work, who recognized there were enormous gaps and lapses in the ethical standards and conduct of the Parliament that he left those many years ago. He put in place a seven point ethics package. A great deal of the elements from Ed Broadbent's recommended package of reform for this House of Commons found its way into Bill C-2.
It was a natural match. For those who may think it is strange bedfellows to see the NDP in support of an ethics package put forward by the Conservative government, we did not find it to be contradictory at all. Nobody has a monopoly on ethical standards. We were pleased to see some of the things that were suggested and recommended by Ed Broadbent in Bill C-2, so we could say that we would support it.
I honestly think sometimes that we in the NDP over here in this corner are wearing blue helmets, like peacekeepers, in this initiative. We are the honest brokers in this. There is politics being played over there. There is politics being played over there, and yes, there is politics being played by the federal government in trying to achieve secondary objectives with Bill C-2. We in fact have a sincere and genuine interest in trying to fix the things that are broken so that we can be proud when we go home and tell our people what we did for them when they sent us to Ottawa.
Let us be clear. The power to kill Bill C-2 rests totally with the backrooms of the Liberal Party as we speak. It is the Liberal Senate that has been holding this bill up unreasonably. I heard comments from my colleagues. Maybe they did not notice but the Senate had this bill for months and months. It heard the same witnesses that we heard, asked the same questions that we asked, endless and needless hours of study that we believe was designed to stall this bill until the Liberal convention was finished. They were hung up on how the election financing changes would impact the Liberal leadership convention. They pretty much served notice that they were going to sabotage and undermine the bill when it was introduced in April, at least until it got past that hurdle.
I am asking them now to stop their delay and stalling tactics. They got away with it. They managed to delay implementation of the bill until their convention is over. The implementation date is January 1, 2007. They should stand down on that issue because the undemocratic and unelected Senate did not just amend the federal accountability act, it took it hostage. Today we are debating the outrageous ransom demands that still threaten to kill Bill C-2 unless we give in. Well, we have given in on a great deal, incidental issues that simply do not weigh enough to justify blocking the passage of the whole bill.
Now we are saying that it was the rudderless Liberal Party that allowed those rogue senators to run amok, as it were. It would be interesting if some of the Liberal leadership hopefuls would show some leadership and maybe intervene at this point and rein in their rogue senators, those senators who have blocked this bill and still threaten to kill it.
Let us not kid ourselves. If we send this bill back to the Senate again and the senators still do not like it--let us say it still calls for separate ethics commissioners--they have the ability to debate it endlessly, send it back to committee, make more amendments and send it back to the House of Commons, until we reach an absolute impasse, a logjam. If we delay it much further, we can all acknowledge we will be at the polls sooner rather than later. This entire project could collapse and I do not know how it would ever get rebuilt.
It is really only in minority parliaments that we can do these kinds of comprehensive amendments. I do not like our chances of getting a sequel, bill C-2 the second, through in a majority parliament, whether it be a Liberal majority or a Conservative majority. Maybe if it was an NDP majority government this initiative would survive. We would be proud to make it our first bill in an NDP government.
In much of what the Senate did, and my colleagues in the Bloc should be very sensitive to this, the Senate exceeded its place in the Constitution. It is supposed to be a chamber of sober second thought. It is supposed to watch for constitutional or legal errors that may have been made by this chamber. It is never supposed to interfere with a piece of legislation from the elected chamber to the point where it would be a serious policy shift. It is not supposed to undermine the government's initiatives or the initiatives of the elected chamber.
Many of the amendments that the other place put through did all of these things. Many of the amendments that it put through are spurious, mischievous, raise constitutional problems and some of them are simply in error. I will point out some of those should time permit.
I know that I am speaking broadly and in general terms. I will narrow my remarks to the amendment moved by the Liberal Party. I can support half of what the Liberals put forward as an amendment to the motion put forward by the government and I will have to reject the other two. Let me speak specifically.
Part A of the Liberal amendment speaks to the Senate ethics commissioner. It brings back the notion that there should be separate ethics commissioners, one for the Senate and one for the House of Commons. I do not care. It is not that important to me. I am not going to jeopardize the success of this whole project arguing how many ethics commissioners can dance on the head of a pin. I do not care if we have 10. I will recommend that the NDP vote in favour of this amendment that the senators have their own separate Senate ethics commissioner. I do not buy their line that it is a constitutional crisis, but I do firmly believe that if they are going to get stubborn and ruin this whole project, the senators can have a separate ethics commissioner.
Part B argues that the Wheat Board should not be subject to the Access to Information Act. I also will vote in favour of this. I support this, notwithstanding what went on at the committee meeting on C-2. Since that time the government has launched a full-blown attack on the Canadian Wheat Board. An absolutely mad crusade has begun to undermine the important work of the Canadian Wheat Board and I will not be a party to it.
I will officially state that I will not support anything that will undermine that great prairie institution the Canadian Wheat Board. I will proudly stand in my place and vote in favour of the Wheat Board. I will not participate in this lynch mob mentality, tactics that Mussolini would be proud of, in trying to undermine the Canadian Wheat Board, denying its members even the right to vote. Their statutory guaranteed right to vote on their own future is being denied to them by the Conservative government. I will not be a part of it. I will not be a party to it. I will support the Liberals' amendment regarding whether or not the Canadian Wheat Board should be included under the ATI provisions of the act.
Part C deals with internal audits and papers. It says that the Liberal Party believes that internal draft documents should be subject to access to information as well. I would only ask that my Liberal Party colleagues look at what the Auditor General had to say about that. She does not believe this is a good idea. She specifically spoke to this at committee not only once, but twice. She feels it would be a serious error if all of the working documents and draft notes dealing with an audit were subject to access to information requests because much of her work relies on the free communication of background information. People would bury that information and would simply not have it available if they were worried that it would become public. This is a bad idea. I wish my colleagues of the Liberal Party would reconsider this. We will vote against this one which amends Senate amendment 118.
Also, on Senate amendment 119, the Liberal Party would have us introduce the concept of a public interest override within the context of the Access to Information Act. The NDP will not support this either. There is good background for that. NDP members are not being stubborn.
We believe that if the public interest override were introduced to the bill as contemplated by Senate amendment 119, it would put the public interest override in the hands of the head of the institution and not in the hands of the Information Commissioner. It actually would weaken the Access to Information Act and the discretionary authority of the Information Commissioner. Again, I do not think the Liberals thought this through, but I wish they would reconsider. The NDP cannot support this at all.
The last element of the amendments put forward by the Liberal Party deals with convention fees. This has been the second source of mischief that has delayed and stalled this bill, the first being the dual ethics commissioner and the second being the whole sensitive subject of convention fees, election financing limits, et cetera.
NDP members read the current Elections Act the way we always have. We have no conflict. We have no misunderstanding. We do not believe it should be changed or altered in any way. We believe the election financing limit should be $1,000 per year and that convention fees should be viewed as political donations and should be treated that way, just like we have always treated them.
I know that the other parties are having problems, partly due to their own greed. When a party charges $995 for a convention fee and the donation limit per year is $1,000, that party is going to run into trouble. NDP convention fees are $135, with an early bird fee of $95. We in the NDP do not have that problem, so I would advise the parties that are having difficulty fitting in underneath the new election campaign donation limits to look inward, to have a look at themselves in the mirror. That may be where they find the problem, not within the Elections Act.
As far as the subamendments that have been put forward by my colleagues from the Bloc Québécois are concerned, I know that Bloc members are not big fans of the accountability act. It is no secret that the Bloc Québécois will do better in the next federal election if the federal government is still corrupt. Those members do not really want the federal government to be cleaned up, because they have to be able to point to a corrupt federal government to justify voting for the Bloc Québécois. We in the NDP do not buy into that and will not support that. So the Senate ethics--