Mr. Speaker, my friend from Vancouver seems to like to change the subject, as the Liberals do on this matter. I can understand why they do not want to talk about the loans and the mortgaging of their leadership candidates to wealthy and powerful individuals.
The reality remains that the Prime Minister, in his leadership campaign for leader of the Conservative Party, disclosed all the contributors. It was all publicly disclosed. It is a matter of public record.
In fact, in researching this the other day, I even read an article in which I saw that all of his contributions were small contributions and he ended up without a debt. Yet there was another competitor for that leadership contest at the time, the member for Newmarket—Aurora, who apparently financed her campaign almost entirely herself, so again, it is the influence of the wealthy and the powerful that we sort of want to get away from in this process. We have done that effectively on contributions now so that the kind of thing that happened with the member for Newmarket—Aurora will not be able to happen again.
We also want to ensure that we do not have wealthy, powerful individuals getting control over leadership candidates by making them loans when they are desperate, at the worst time, during a leadership campaign, and thereby being able to exercise undue influence.
There is a question we have to ask ourselves in this House. What is the situation when we have a political leader who owes half a million dollars to a handful of wealthy, powerful individuals?
I can tell members that the Prime Minister does not owe any money to anybody. Nobody has a claim on him. Nobody has a claim on what he does on policies.
I am not sure we can say that about the Liberal leadership candidates, who gathered up almost $3 million in loans from wealthy private individuals. That includes the Leader of the Opposition, who, according to his public disclosure today, owes half a million dollars.
I want to be clear, though, that none of those things are illegal. Everything they did was entirely legal and proper. What we want to ensure is that it does not happen again and that it will not be legal in the future.