That is my final answer. I doubt that I will prevaricate any further, and let me provide one compelling reason why.
I do not know if you know this, Mr. Speaker, but you will be shocked. Talk about an inherent conflict of interest. Senators are allowed to sit on boards of directors of companies and some sit on as many as 10 or 12 boards of directors and get paid for each one. How can they objectively deal with legislation? Some of them would have to recuse themselves from everything if they sit on the board of directors of Onex Corporation. Onex Corporation has everything in its portfolio. Senators would never be able to legitimately, objectively adjudicate and vote on any single thing. They could not even phone out for pizza because Onex Corporation, in fact, owns a whole bunch of pizza parlour chains. That is one problem.
The other thing is senators take fees for speaking. Can anyone imagine the audacity of being appointed for life a sinecure of $150,000 a year, plus travel, plus expenses, and yet when they speak somewhere, they charge a big, fat speaker's fee? That offends me. That offends the sensibility of any thinking democratic Canadian, I would think.
Also, many senators engage in purely partisan political work. Let me give an example. The head of the Conservative campaign for my home province of Manitoba was a senator, Don Plett.
If you are wondering about relevance, Mr. Speaker, I am giving my reasons why Bill S-7 should be marched down the hallway back to the Senate and presented to the senators. I am tired of getting marched down there to ask them to give royal assent to our legislation. Let them traipse down here for a change, and I will give them a piece of my mind. In the meantime, if we ever do go on another parade, we should pile up all these pieces of legislation that originated in the Senate and bring them back to them. They can keep them down there.
Another thing that bothers me is why senators would use public money to buy Obama's database. They spent a couple million dollars to buy the best political database in the world, a voter contact system. It is the best in the world, and we know this because we tried to buy it ourselves. However, we cannot buy it, because if it has already been licensed to one person or one party in a country, it will not be sold to another party. The Liberal senators used their budget to chip in and buy a database for the Liberal Party. Why would senators need a database? They are not elected. They do not to contact electors. Why are they spending public money to buy a database? Again, it offends the sensibility of any thinking Canadian.
The last thing I will say in preface to my remarks on the bill is what is really crazy. The entire Conservative war room is on the public payroll. The Conservatives appointed their party president, chief fundraiser, campaign manager and communications director to the campaign to the Senate so they could all operate on taxpayer dollars. It is not just their salaries, it is their travel privileges and their staff. They have become an organ of the Conservative Party of Canada.
The same is true of the Liberal Party. I know who the chief bagman for the Liberal Party is. I know him well. He does not apologize for it. He comes from Manitoba. It his job to raise money for the Liberal Party, but now he is paid for by the taxpayers of Canada. The Liberals do not have to pay him a salary anymore to do that; the taxpayer does. That is such an egregious abuse of any of the original intent forming the Senate of Canada as a chamber of sober second thought, et cetera.
Manitoba used to have a senate. We got rid of it back at the turn of the last century. Other provinces used to have senates, and they got rid of them too. We do not need a senate anymore. We do not need it, and not only is it not serving any useful purpose, it is counterproductive to the democratic process, because those guys are interfering. When Senator Don Plett comes to Manitoba and is paid full time to run the Conservative Party election campaign in the province of Manitoba, does nobody see what is wrong with that?
It just rubs salt in the wound to have to stand in the House of Commons and deal with legislation coming from the Senate. Nobody elected the senators to make legislation. Nobody gave them a mandate to create legislation. Why the hell is it coming to us in the form of Bill S-anything? We should make it abundantly clear that we will not tolerate it anymore. That is my view.
I see that I only have one minute left to deal with the substance of the bill. The main message that I wanted to convey today is how chronically disappointed I am in the system. It is broken down to the degree that the government of the day has to slip things through the Senate at its convenience.
I believe that the opportunism of raising this bill at this time speaks to the very worst of neo-conservative fearmongering of politics. It trivializes the tragedy of Boston and it does a disservice to the important debate that we need to have regarding the first duty of any government, which is to keep its citizens safe. This is the wrong way to go about it.
The Conservatives are probably feeling quite sheepish that most of them are better members of Parliament than that, having to be put in the situation of promoting this bill at this time and in this context.