Mr. Speaker, given that I have very little time, I cannot address every aspect of this very important bill. I will simply mention the highlights, particularly the part of this bill that most interests me, that is, how we treat public servants who denounce corruption.
The accountability act will clean up the way political parties are financed. Donations from corporations, unions and organizations will be banned. Individuals will be allowed to donate no more than $1,000 each to parties, candidates, riding associations, and leadership candidates.
This will make party financing more transparent and level the playing field for all Canadians who wish to donate to political campaigns. Unions, businesses and the very wealthy will no longer be able to decide which party has a richer war chest.
Even more important, these changes will prevent scandals like the Liberal sponsorship scam from being repeated. No governing party will ever again be able to give taxpayers' money to its friends in the business world in return for kickbacks in the form of political donations.
The accountability act will also entrench the conflict of interest code for public office holders in law and create a new conflict of interest and ethics commissioner to administer those rules. The Prime Minister will no longer be able to overrule the Ethics Commissioner. Ministers will have to put their interests in truly blind trusts. We will no longer see a situation in which a Prime Minister or a finance minister can discuss his shipping business with the people managing it, or sell it to his sons and pretend to be uninvolved.
This bill will enable ordinary citizens to participate directly in the accountability process. Under the act, the public can provide information to the Ethics Commissioner through members of Parliament.
The accountability act will prevent ministers and their aides from leaving government to immediately take lucrative jobs lobbying their friends who remain in government. It will require lobbyists to register their lobbying efforts and prevent them from collecting so-called success fees.
This bill will help Parliament scrutinize the government's financial management and budgeting process by establishing a budget authority to provide independent financial analysis, information and advice to parliamentarians. Canadians have seen in recent years how governments can hand out money with one hand while picking taxpayers' pockets with the other. Canadians are fed up with their money being concealed and shuffled around in a political shell game.
The budget authority will also have a mandate to estimate the financial costs of proposed programs. Maybe if we had had an independent body like that a few years ago, the true costs of the Liberal rifle registry would have been known ahead of time and the whole fiasco would have been prevented. Instead the registry went ahead and ended up costing a thousand times what it was supposed to cost. This must never happen again.
The accountability act will also give Parliament a voice in the appointment of officers of Parliament. We will thereby put an end to preferential treatment for friends of ministers in the public service hiring process.
The bill would also allow the Auditor General to audit organizations and individuals who receive taxpayer money. Wherever public money ends up, the Auditor General would be able to follow it and shine a light on how it is being used. Gone are the days when the hard-earned money of Canadian taxpayers was simply syphoned off into oblivion, never to be heard from again.
The accountability act would also strengthen the audit functions within departments and create tougher penalties for fraud involving public funds. At the same time, it would create a director of public prosecution, independent from the political system, who would decide when to prosecute criminal offences under federal laws.
Canadians were disgusted with the lack of charges laid and the lenient penalties handed out after untold millions of dollars of their money were stolen through the Liberal sponsorship program.
There are many other concrete ways the bill would keep governments honest and transparent but I want to finish off by focusing on one area with which I have been deeply involved: assisting and protecting public servants who have the courage to come forward to expose corruption.
I was sickened to see the way the previous government treated our public servants. As a retired public servant myself, I know very well the depth of professionalism and the quality of people in Canada's public service. I was shocked to hear the Liberals repeatedly blame public servants for the massive kickback scheme that filled the Liberal Party's coffers with taxpayer money. I was heartbroken by the way the Liberals repeatedly and systematically ruined public servants who had the courage and the integrity to blow the whistle on corruption and abuse within their departments.
The bill the Liberals introduced in the last Parliament to address this issue, Bill C-11, offered nothing for public servants. It contained no independent process to receive and investigate whistleblower complaints, no penalties for punishing whistleblowers and no new process for whistleblowers to report reprisals. In fact, it actually added insult to injury by shielding internal audit information from access to information laws and allowed the Prime Minister and his cabinet to arbitrarily exempt government bodies from its provisions.
The Conservative members in the government operations committee, sometimes with the support of the NDP, fought tooth and nail to address some of the shortcomings in the Liberal bill. At the end of that long battle the House passed a bill that was still very weak but at least we could say that it was slightly better than the status quo.
Now that we are in government, we Conservatives will provide strong, meaningful support to our honest and courageous public servants. Never again will public servants like Allan Cutler have their careers cut short and their lives derailed because they exposed corruption and saved taxpayers money.
The accountability act is the toughest anti-corruption law in Canadian history. For example, the bill would bring in a corruption watchdog to protect whistleblowers against bullies; end the revolving door between lobby firms and ministers' offices; give the Auditor General the power to shine light in every dark corner in her hunt for waste and theft; and ban big money and corporate cash from political campaigns. By moving from a culture of entitlement to a culture of accountability, we are fixing the system for all Canadians.
I recognize the importance of allowing Parliament to fully study and debate all bills, and I realize that the bill is a very thick document, but I hope my hon. colleagues opposite will treat the accountability act with the urgency it deserves so we can get on with restoring the public trust that has been so badly damaged by the scandals of the past government.