Mr. Speaker, it might just help to step back and mention for a minute what it is we are here to talk about. Really, what we are here to talk about is how it is that the government intends to implement and enforce the very same rules that the Prime Minister sent out to his ministers when he appointed cabinet.
We have heard from some Liberal members that somehow they do not think that putting it into law is the best way. If they have an alternative, let us hear it, but right now, we have a situation where ministers of the crown are obviously not following the rules set out by the Prime Minister. If the Liberals have a great idea on how to see that policy actually enforced, let us hear it. In the meantime, writing those rules into the law and allowing the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner to enforce those rules seems like a pretty good idea, and we certainly have not heard anything better from members opposite today.
To give hon. members a sense of what those rules are, may we step back and say something about the context into which the new government stepped in October? We really just have to name some names in order to get a sense of what Canadians were feeling about the standard of ethics in politics in October 2015, when we were talking about Dean Del Mastro and Mike Duffy. There were a lot of names on the tip of the tongues of Canadians that suggested to them that the ethical standard in Canadian politics was not high enough.
In came the Prime Minister, if we listen to him, on a white horse, and he would make things better. He went so far as to say in his instructions to ministers:
Moreover, [ministers] have an obligation to perform their official duties and arrange their private affairs in a manner that will bear the closest public scrutiny. This obligation is not fully discharged merely by acting within the law.
He went on in annex B of that same document to flesh out what exactly he meant. He said, “In order to ensure that there is no differential treatment or appearance”, and that is really the crux of the matter, because it is not just whether there is differential treatment.
According to the Prime Minister, the issue is whether there may even be the appearance of differential treatment, and he himself said, as I quoted just now, that merely acting within the law would not be enough to meet the bar he was setting just over a year ago, so he said:
In order to ensure that there is no differential treatment or appearance of differential treatment for individuals, corporations or organizations because of their financial support of politicians or political parties, Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries should adopt the following best practices
What are those best practices that this motion simply calls on the government to enforce by allowing the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner to enforce?
First, it says that “Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries should not seek to have departmental stakeholders included on fundraising or campaign teams or on the boards of electoral district associations”, so when we hear that the chair of Apotex is organizing a fundraiser for ministers of the crown, I think that is a pretty obvious contradiction of the guidelines that the Prime Minister set out and that we are simply asking to have enforced.
It says that ”Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries should ensure that the solicitation of political contributions on their behalf does not target: departmental stakeholders, or other lobbyists and employees of lobbying firms”. When we find out through The Globe and Mail and others that there have been confidential websites set up and that people are getting access to those websites to buy tickets to those fundraisers by invitation, that is clearly not meeting the standard set out by the Prime Minister in these guidelines.
It makes us wonder. If the Prime Minister is not willing to police his members, who would? The Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner is an obvious choice, and this motion simply calls on the government to allow the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner to go ahead and do that work that the Prime Minister has decided he will not do, because he is not enforcing his own rules.
As I say, any time Liberals want to chime in and say that they have a better mechanism to ensure that this document and instructions on open and accountable government are actually followed by ministers of the crown and not just talked about, let them put them on the table, but we have not heard anything from them, and we have been debating this all day.
The other notorious thing about what is going on, in my view, about these particular fundraisers that we have talked about—because it is a problem—is that they do create the appearance of preferential access when people are paying $1,500 to get into an exclusive night with the Minister of Finance.
Incidentally, there is this idea that somehow a little old lady from Elmwood—Transcona who takes Handi-Transit to sit in the back of an open house, and leaves without talking to the minister, is the same as a high-powered corporate executive paying $1,500 to get into someone's private residence with only 14 other people. That there is no difference between those interactions with the minister is laughable. Shame on the members who have been getting up today to insinuate that somehow those two situations are not significantly different for the purposes of influencing ministers. That is just totally ridiculous.
When they pay that $1,500 to get into that privileged night with the minister, as advertised, then what? Well, at tax time they get about $650 of that back. So that is really nice. If a person has the $1,500 to fork out now—and this is a cash flow issue—then that person gets the preferential access, but the very same people who did not have the $1,500 are the ones who are going to pay almost half of it back to that person later.
Therefore, Canadians perversely are being made to pay for preferential treatment for high-powered corporate executives. I think there is something shameful about that, and it has not gotten enough attention. They are not actually paying $1,500 out of their own pocket. They are paying about $800 out of their own pocket, and the rest is coming out of the pocket of Canadian taxpayers.
I referred earlier to Dean Del Mastro and Mike Duffy. We have heard as kind of a defence from the Liberals that it seems to be that they are not like Dean Del Maestro; they are more of a Mike Duffy. Duffy went through court, and it ended up that he did not break any rules, according to the law. We have that from a judge, and so there was no problem. We know that Dean Del Mastro was bad and he went to jail, but the Liberals do not have a problem as they are really like Mike Duffy. They have this kind of strange Duffy defence.
I can tell members that, given the last five years of Canadian politics, for the government to get up and think that an acceptable defence is to say not to worry, because it is just like Mike Duffy, I think is pretty pathetic. However, that is what we have been hearing all day. I am at a loss on that.
I think there is another elephant in the room here. Actually one of the Liberal members earlier raised it as a bad thing, but I have always believed in a per-vote subsidy for political financing. That came in under the Chrétien Liberals. When they said that corporations and unions would not be able to donate, they recognized that political parties were going to have a harder time raising money.
Therefore, the Liberals brought in public financing so that, based on the support that political parties had, they could expect to have some money to fund their activities, so that parties would not be in a position where they were prostituting their ministers of the crown for money. When we create that kind of imperative to have politicians spending all of their time raising money, certain governments get into political hot water, because they start to use all the tools at their disposal to raise that money, whether it is right or wrong, and that is what we have been watching.
I dare say that, if the Liberals put their focus on bringing back reasonable public support for political party financing, then they may not have to be in the embarrassing position of having to defend ministers who are doing cash for access fundraisers. As far as I am concerned, that is part of the debate and where it ought to go.
I think it is an embarrassment to Canadians that ministers are out parading around asking for money for attention. Frankly, I think that if they are not ashamed of it, it is an embarrassment to the Liberal Party. They should care more, frankly, for their own brand. It is an embarrassment to Canada. It is an embarrassment to the Liberals that they are out doing this. They could bring in a proper political financing regime in Canada like the one we had.
What we are hearing from Liberals when they attack the political financing model is that they think Stephen Harper and the reforms he brought to political financing in Canada were better than Jean Chrétien's. If that is what they think, let us have them get up and say it again, that they are on team Harper when it comes to electoral reform, that they are disowning the actions of previous Liberal governments, and that if they had to choose between Stephen Harper's electoral reforms or the Chrétien Liberal reforms, they would be voting for the Harper reforms. Is that how far we have come? Is that what the last election was about? I do not think so.