Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to be here in the House to discuss Bill C-29, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act (accountability with respect to loans).
We of course as Liberals certainly support the spirit of this bill, but as with most of the government bills this session there are a number of problems. We can see this simply by the fact that there are a number of amendments that have been made to the bill.
The Liberal Party has always supported carefully identified limits and in fact, as many have said in the House already, the Liberal Party of Canada brought in the largest reduction of allowable political contributions in Canadian history and included a huge decrease in what corporations could donate.
As members from different parties have mentioned, I too believe that members of Congress are in an unfortunate situation. They can only sit for two years before the next election and in that time they have to raise millions and sometimes tens of millions of dollars. Some of the members had other problems with that. I do not enjoy fundraising as it is, but the problem I have is when are we going to do our work if we are trying to raise tens of millions of dollars within a two year period.
A lot of our efforts, as all members of Parliament know, are so overburdened with things to do to help our constituents to improve laws, to attend committees, to meet with organizations that want to influence us on a national level in Ottawa, and then we go back on the weekends and hear all the same things from organizations in our ridings.
If we are going to give a fair hearing to all of these people, look at legislation carefully, prepare for our committee work, prepare for our caucus meetings, and then in a two year period have to raise tens of millions of dollars on top of that, something will be lacking.
Therefore, I certainly think the system we have is very good in that respect which is one of the reasons we limited contributions so much in our system. We support that direction in electoral reform.
Along those lines we want to eliminate any undue abuse of loans that could pervert that system. The problem is that the Conservatives are suggesting that the current legislation allows loans to be written off without consequence. This is absolutely false. Loans cannot be used to avoid donation limits and they cannot be written off without consequence.
There is also another similar point about where the proponents of the bill are misleading Canadians about the current state of the law concerning political financing. The Conservatives are suggesting that the current law allows loans to be made in secret and that Canadians are kept in the dark.
The truth is that under the law that is currently in place the details of all loans including the amount of every loan, in the name of every lender and every guarantor, must already be publicly disclosed.
Therefore, we have to be careful that we are not just writing redundant legislation that is already covering elements that are already in place, elements of course of transparency and accountability that I am sure every member of the House would like to see.
Another element that has been raised during the debate is the philosophical question as to whether it would give financial institutions the final say in who runs as opposed to Canadians. This has been raised by several members in the House and some of my colleagues. I think each member of Parliament will have to think philosophically about that situation where loans only come from those particular institutions.
Of course we all want to ensure transparency and that there is no undue access by any particular groups of people or organizations, and we want to be absolutely sure about that. However, we also do not want to restrict the rights of Canadians to access the democratic process, to take part in it, to show that they are serious, and to contribute toward what they believe in. We certainly need to get a balance in those areas.
I want to talk about the two amendments. In a bill related to accountability and the democratic process, the committee democratically approved these amendments but now the government is trying to withdraw them.
The first amendment I want to speak about would have the Conservatives changing the contribution for a leadership campaign. It is presently $1,100, a very tiny amount. We can well imagine the costs for leaders as these campaigns sometimes take several years.
However, the costs for a candidate are very high. We want to be fair to Canadians from all parts of the country and we do not want to discriminate against rural Canadians. We want to allow candidates to get across the country, but the costs and expenses of their travel, their team and the preparation of policy and promotional material, and all that is involved in preparing for debates, all of that is very expensive. So a contribution of $1,100 is not going to go very far.
The present proposal and existing law allows $1,100 per year of a campaign. Usually that would be two years or three years until the contribution has been paid off and it is not an excessive amount of money.
The Conservatives are trying to withdraw what the committee has done and only allow a contribution of $1,100 for the entire lifetime of the campaign and of the process no matter how long it is. Of course, we disagree with that as do some others.
We also have a problem with the second amendment and speakers from other parties have spoken about problems with this amendment as well. The Conservatives are trying to suggest that if a candidate runs up some debt then his or her party or the local association, if there is one, would have to pay that debt.
Really, I cannot imagine many people seeing the sense in allowing other people to run up debt. If I were to run up a debt and then tell the Conservatives they would have to pay for it when they had nothing to do with incurring that debt, that is not the way the system should work.
There could be candidates who go out and incur debt that no one knows about and that puts the onus on people who did not even know the debt was incurred to repay that debt. Or, an organization that is thousands of miles away and would not have any idea that the debt was being incurred would ask the candidates to repay such a debt.
I am not sure that would withstand any type of court challenge related to fairness. We cannot go along making loans that people do not know about and then asking them to pay for it. That is why there has been so much objection to that amendment.
In my last 30 seconds I want to emphasize a point regarding accountability. When the government is putting a whole bunch of conditions on people and government programs, then the clients who really need that money do not have a bureaucracy to make all these overzealous rules and meet these conditions are really being harmed by that mismanagement of government.