Mr. Speaker, the major change would be in Motion No. 3, the amendment, where the original wording on page 5, lines 33, 34, and 35, says:
--the Chief Electoral Officer shall inform the claimant, the candidate's registered association or, if there is no registered association, the registered party of his or her decision.
Now the Conservatives have changed it and it says:
[Then the Chief Electoral] Officer shall inform the lender of his or her decision; furthermore, the candidate's registered association or, if there is no registered association, the registered party becomes liable for the unpaid amount as if the association or party had guaranteed the loan.
This is exactly the point where, in committee, opposition parties underlined the fact that even though the association or the party would not have guaranteed the loan, they would end up with the liability. They would end up having to repay that loan which, as I have mentioned before, they had never approved of, or for all we know, maybe never even had knowledge of.
The majority of the committee voted on this and it was agreed that this was unfair for the association and the national parties, and therefore, it was amended in committee, so that this particular debt would not turn back to the association or the party.
The other change done at committee dealt with financial contributions during a leadership campaign. I said at the start of my presentation that this particular piece of legislation is most certainly going to give the Liberal Party of Canada a hard time. We are the party that had a leadership race. We were the party that had to answer to the new law in the sense that we had to disclose all the contributions, whereas the present Prime Minister did not disclose all of the contributions that were received for his leadership campaign.
The Conservative government is trying to force leadership candidates to limit financial contributions to a maximum amount of $1,100, saying that a leadership race is one event and it would limit the financial participation to $1,100 per that event. At committee we discussed this and it was agreed that it would become a financial contribution of $1,100 per year until the debt of the leadership candidate had been fully erased.
Now the Conservatives are reversing the reversal that had been done and they are planning on saying that, no, in a leadership race it does not matter how long it takes to reimburse, there would be one contribution per leadership race to a maximum of $1,100.
These are the two major differences between what the procedure and House affairs committee had worked on and decided back in the spring of 2007. Now the Conservative government is saying it does not care what the majority of the committee decided democratically, it is ready to impose and change it so that it would be brought back to the original version of the bill. I do not think that this is right.