Mr. Speaker, I am proud to rise in the House to address a few brief points on Bill C-2.
In particular, I would like to acknowledge the cooperative work that has been done by all parties. This bill is a complex bill with a very broad scope. It very clearly is a significant step forward. I believe the bill will have some significant impact on improving accountability across the whole of the federal government.
It is important to recognize that in a minority government situation all political parties have an added responsibility to be cooperative. We saw that cooperation to a significant degree as this bill worked its way through the House. I cannot say the same for the other place, but I will come back to that in a minute.
I particularly want to acknowledge the work that our member for Winnipeg Centre, his staff and several of his colleagues within our caucus have done on this legislation. Their contribution was quite significant. I also want to mention in this regard, in some of the underpinnings of this bill, some of the actual sections of this bill, Mr. Ed Broadbent, the member for Ottawa Centre in the last Parliament, who I believe contributed a great deal of thought to the issues of accountability. He made some very significant proposals that found their way into the bill.
I do not want to take up a lot of time, but I do want to speak negatively about the role of the other place. There was an extensive amount of delay by the Senate in getting this bill into its final form. At one point, the Senate sent back 150 amendments. In spite of its claim that these amendments were substantial, the vast majority of them were technical or of no particular meaning. The House sent back 50 amendments to the legislation, which the Senate accepted, and we are now down to this one amendment, which really is a mechanism on the part of the other place to protect itself.
I have serious doubts that this process is democratic, especially when an unelected body is forcing this kind of an ethics office. This is going to be very expensive as opposed to the alternative of sharing an ethics office. There is no real sense of the type of mandate the Senate's ethics commissioner will have. I have serious doubts as to whether its ethics office will be as effective or as efficient as it could be had we shared an ethics commissioner. This proposal, which the House is being forced to accept, is not to the Senate's credit at all.
As I think the House has heard from several of the other members who have spoken, this is not the end of what we have to do. This bill, as I said earlier, is certainly a significant step forward. It covers off a lot of issues that should have been addressed in the past. As the President of the Treasury Board mentioned in his speech, we have to remain vigilant. This is not the end.
My party has raised serious concerns, unsuccessfully so far, with regard to political financing. What we see is a travesty, a major loophole in political financing in this country that will allow individual leadership candidates to borrow large amounts of money with no particular assurances that the money will ever be repaid. They will be allowed to take on a debt, fully expecting it will probably be forgiven, being somehow of the opinion that it is not a political contribution. This stands out.
We believe there are some serious faults with this legislation around access to information. We also feel there should have been stronger whistleblower protection. We will continue to watch these areas. Other parties have expressed concerns that the bill does not encompass enough points. We will all be watching that.
There is an automatic five year review in the bill, but I do not think we should be limited by that. If we see apparent faults in the legislation, this House should move rapidly to plug those holes.
Let me finish by thanking the other parties for their cooperation on this legislation but also recognizing that the law can only do so much. As individual members of Parliament, our personal integrity and ethics are ultimately what will guarantee that Canadians have representatives and a federal government that are truly accountable and do not breach the law or ethical standards that we are expected to meet. That falls on each member of Parliament. I urge all of us to take that into account.