Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak in support of today's opposition motion by the member for Timmins—James Bay, because it identifies an abuse of the public trust, which, unfortunately, is part of a much larger pattern by the Conservative government. In this case, we are talking about the use of government planes to transport Conservative Party fundraisers around the country.
Let me be clear. I am not disputing the use of government jets to transport the Prime Minister, his family, his security detail, or even public servants assisting the Prime Minister with government business. To me, the line is crossed when party fundraisers are flying on government jets. As we have now learned, that was a regular practice for the Conservatives. In particular, the flight logs reveal that Mark Kihn, who lists his job as a fundraising projects manager for the Conservative Party, has been a regular passenger, travelling with the Prime Minister on government jets every year from 2007 to 2012.
While this may seem to some a narrow issue for an opposition day motion, it tries to shine a light on a failure by the Conservatives to recognize the importance of respecting the line between the public interest and party interest. On those grounds, it is clearly wrong to use government jets to transport Conservative Party fundraisers.
As I said at the beginning of my remarks, this example illustrates a larger pattern by the Conservatives, which is to seek every partisan advantage for themselves, whether by using their majority to change the rules or by running as close to the line as possible when it comes to the existing rules. We have certainly seen this in Bill C-23, where the Conservatives have included a provision exempting fundraising expenses from election spending limits. Spending limits, as many will know, were introduced in Canada in the 1974 Election Expenses Act in an attempt to level the playing field for elections, so that those with the most resources would not automatically win elections.
Public support for spending limits as an essential part of electoral fairness has always been and still remains very high. The comprehensive Canadian election study conducted in 2000 specifically asked about this and found that 93% of Canadians supported spending limits for candidates and political parties, but what this motion points to is an attempt to get around those kinds of spending limits by using government resources for partisan purposes. Both the transport of Conservative Party fundraisers on government jets and the attempt to undermine spending limits in Bill C-23 violate the fundamental sense of electoral fairness that is an essential part of our Canadian democracy.
These attempts to skirt the rules on election spending limits are not new for the Conservatives. In fact, they began with the first omnibus budget bill. In that bill, the Conservatives used their majority to eliminate public funding for political parties. Normally, in seeking to change fundamental rules in our democracy, we would expect the governing party to consult widely and seek the broadest support for changes to the rules. We would expect this in Bill C-23, and we have not seen it. We would certainly expect them to hold those kinds of consultation and not to sneak in changes through what should have been a technical budget bill.
As in the case of Bill C-23—