Mr. Speaker, that is right. I thought it was clever that when someone criticized the $1,200 child care money the Conservatives said that at least they were not trying to shake down $5,400 from kids, that they were giving money to kids.
The other aspect to election financing reform that we have an opportunity to do something about is an amendment that we put forward dealing with these huge Liberal leadership loans. These leadership loans are tantamount to a corporate donation. If one does not repay these loans after 18 months they are treated as a donation. If one is only allowed to donate $5,400 a year but one loans somebody $100,000 and, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, one does not repay it, it is then treated as a donation. That is corporate sponsorship. It is deliberately circumventing the donation limits of the Canada Election Act and it is wrong. It means that some people are getting disproportionate influence through their donations than others. We want that curbed.
We have one classic example of a member, who actually crossed the floor from the Conservatives to the Liberals, having a loan that after 18 months would have rolled into being considered a donation. She would then have found herself in violation of the law and would simply have taken out another loan to pay off the first loan and rolled it over. I do not want to use the word useless but that is how flawed our election financing laws are. They are easy to circumvent. People are taking steps to circumvent them.
On these corporate leadership loans, one was given to the member for Kings--Hants from the head of a fishing company who in fact was the leading advocate and champion for the income trusts situation. We do not have to be a rocket scientist to connect those kinds of situations.
We have a unique opportunity to deal with the stated priorities of Bill C-2, which includes the access to information reform, a new public appointments commission and to do away with the patronage. I will stop for a second and restate how passionately I feel about this. The governor in council appointments used to be done from a single desk in the PMO. The main qualification was the colour of the membership card that one had in one's pocket. Everybody knows that. Let us not kid ourselves.
The reason we do not need to study some of these things to death is that they are so blatantly obvious. It was just the way Ottawa ran for years and years. This public appointments commission would be a merit based process, an objective transparent process where these 3,500 GIC appointments would be filled based on one's merit or skill and not on one's membership card and the ruling party of the day. That is critically important, as is cleaning up the whistleblowing and lobbyist registration.
It is ambitious. When it was first introduced some said that it is too ambitious. I myself commented that it looked as if it was designed to fail because it was so huge and such an ambitious undertaking. Maybe that is something a newly elected government will do. Once it is two, three or four years into being the government it knows the complexity of these things to a greater degree. It is an ambitious thing but it is a good first project.
Now we are seeing that it is achievable. Yes, it is challenging and, yes, we are burning up a lot of hours in committee. Those who would accuse us of fast-tracking it in committee are not counting the number of hours that we are in session. Yes, it is a small number of days but when we are meeting six, eight and nine hours a day, we are compressing six months worth of committee time into a few weeks.
Normally committees sit two hours a day twice a week, which is four hours week. We are sitting 24 hours a week, which is a six week sitting in one. I will challenge anyone who stands up and says that we have fast-tracked this to the point where we have jeopardized the integrity of the bill because it is simply not true. I would accuse them of having some other motivation in making that accusation.
One of the reasons we need to deal with this before the end of this particular session of Parliament is that we do not need to give the enemies of transparency and accountability time to regroup, time to sabotage and time to undermine our activities because villainy wears many masks and none so dangerous as the mask of virtue.
I do not trust some of those people. I am talking about people not just in other parties who may have ulterior motives. There are people who would rather see the federal government maintain the status quo of corruption, lack of transparency, et cetera, for their own narrow partisan purposes at everyone's expense and, I would argue, at the expense of the nation state itself, not to overstate things.
There are others within the permanent government, within the senior bureaucracy, who are no great friends of transparency and open government. In fact, it is contrary to everything for which they stand. A certain culture evolves. It was the culture of secrecy that allowed corruption to flourish in the Liberal years, was it not? The Liberals could not have operated in the light of day. If sunlight is a powerful disinfectant it would have exposed the rot that was taking place year after year within the sponsorship scandal.
The sponsorship scandal was not limited to Quebec. Winnipeg, Manitoba was cheated by the sponsorship scandal as well. Chuck Guité delivered $2.3 million to the Pan Am Games in 1999. Do members know how much we received? We received $600,000 while $1.7 million was hived off as production costs by a Liberal advertising firm. No one ever found out what those production costs were but I say that was the Liberal Party of Canada's take of that $2.3 million. I accuse them of that. I will say it inside the House and I will say it outside the House. The vice-president of sponsorship for the Pan Am Games, who is now a sitting Liberal Senator, worked directly with Chuck Guité to rob our sponsorship of the Pan Am Games of $1.7 million. I defy them to show me where that money went.
It was not just Quebeckers who were outraged by this and who should celebrate putting a stop to it. Winnipeg, Manitoba fell victim to Chuck Guité and Compass Communications, the Liberal Party of Nova Scotia, the president of the company, the fourth largest beneficiary of sponsorship contracts. It is not as though we do not have Liberal advertising companies in Winnipeg. We have plenty that are plugged right into the Liberal Party, but this contract had to go to this out of town contractor because it would play ball with graft, fraud and corruption.
I am speaking on behalf of Winnipeggers when I stand in the House, and it is an honour to do so. On their behalf I send the very clear message that I am willing to roll up my sleeves and do what I can to ensure this bill is a success and that it does not fall victim to the enemies of transparency and accountability. For those who would seek to carry on with the status quo, they are jeopardizing the very integrity of the nation state of Canada. Do they realize how much harm they did and how critically important it is to now show some contrition? Jimmy Swaggart even showed some contrition when he prostrated himself before his followers and said that he had sinned, that he was wrong. I want to see that from the Liberals, the televangelists' style. They know how to apologize. I want to see a real apology from the Liberal Party of Canada for jeopardizing the nation state of Canada.