Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for the question.
We share the same concerns about having topical, constructive debates to help us move forward to resolve certain problems. We can and must improve many things together. I am talking about things that affect our constituents, everything from rail safety, protecting dairy farmers, and public transit, to our aging infrastructure. We can and must do better for our constituents.
As far as the scandals and stories about election financing are concerned, our system is much better than the one in the United States thanks to the limits imposed under the Canada Elections Act, not only on election spending, but also on donations to political parties. Removing the ability of labour groups and corporations to make donations to political parties helped clean up fundraising a bit.
That being said, we could improve things by restoring the public funding for political parties that was abolished by the Conservatives. It used to be there, but the Conservatives cancelled it. This would reduce the pressure on political parties to constantly do fundraising and might prevent such gaffes as the one recently made by the Minister of Justice.
This would put all parties on a level playing field and would improve the quality of our democratic life, which would reduce the pressure to do more fundraising all the time. This would benefit our entire democratic process.