Someone suggested that the dinosaur connection is to the Conservatives, and I would point out that the Liberals at the time closely resembled trilobites.
At that time, the dinosaurs who ruled were the vast institutions, companies that could contribute large amounts of money, phenomenal amounts of money, federally regulated companies, like the banks, for example, that would donate massive amounts of money to parties and expected preferment in return. It was an inherently corrupting system, though I do not think the people who engaged in it were intentionally trying to be corrupt.
I was one of the participants in that system. I can remember setting up fundraising dinners, for which companies would buy tables. All the parties did this. I am happy to say that Jean Chrétien, to his everlasting credit, changed the way this worked in 2004. He introduced a $5,000 limit, which took effect in that year.
When the Harper government came into power, it lowered that limit to $1,000 per year and, additionally, all forms of corporate and union donations, which had been capped by the Chrétien government, were banned entirely. That number has since drifted up to $1,500, and my colleague from Laurentides—Labelle explained exactly how it would escalate in the future.
The combined effect of limits on donation amounts and bans on corporate and union giving was to change the fundraising incentives for our parties fundamentally. Instead of pursuing a small number of donors with a large number of dollars each, we now had to pursue a large number of donors with a small number each, that cap being, depending on the year one looks at, somewhere between $5,000 under Chrétien, $1,000 under the initial Harper rules, and the $1,500 that prevails today. Compared to infinite, these are very small numbers, and the effect has been enormously beneficial on the politics of our country.
We have a much cleaner democracy and a populist fundraising system. The Conservatives have done the best at the populist fundraising in dollars measured, but we can see the Liberals are figuring this out, too. It is having an effect not merely on the way they raise funds, but on the way they engage in policy to make themselves attractive to people who might potentially make donations. Those people are not the executives of giant companies; they are the people who make donations of $1,000 or $1,500 and, in some cases, $40 or $50.
I thought the old system turned money into a kind of poison, but with the caps that exist today, it is a very different thing. When we pursue donations, we are pursuing donations from people who are typically our own voters, and sometimes they can be outside of our riding, but they are people who feel strongly. We all get one vote. If I feel strongly about an issue, but my colleague does not feel so strongly about it, we both get one vote and are equalized out. However, donations allow for a bit of variation, up to $1,500 worth. They do not allow for someone, let alone a company, to have $100,000 or $1 million worth of variation, which was possible in the past, but they do allow people to follow up and show the depth of their commitment, which is entirely reasonable, I submit.
Now, that is the issue of caps, but the issue of the per-vote subsidy needs to be addressed. It had a very specific purpose when introduced. It was introduced to allow the parties to adjust. If we were going to a small per-capita amount, we were eliminating the giant amounts of money from banks, Bombardier, airlines, and federally regulated companies that wanted very specific benefits in return for their donations. They got rid of the system that used to exist when Brian Mulroney was in power. I remember, as a Reform Party researcher, looking this up: x amount would be given to the Conservative government of the day, and a smaller amount, over and over again, one donation after another, somewhere between one-half and two-thirds of that went to the Liberal Party. One was the bribe to get the policy one wanted and the smaller amount was the bribe to be quiet about that first bribe. This was a terrible system, and it is gone now.
Transitioning from that system to $5,000 per capita, at the time, was something that could have left parties in the lurch. The solution was the per-vote subsidy to allow parties to have time. However, what was intended to be temporary became permanent, in part because it had the effect of rewarding the party in power disproportionately.
If party A winds up winning more votes than party B, it gets paid more. This is not a level playing field. It was a danger I expressed back when Paul Martin was prime minister, and the expectation was that he would win 250 seats of the 300 in the House when he was described as a juggernaut. I said the Liberals could wind up getting, say, 50% of the votes, which is half the per-vote subsidy, and the other parties would be splitting their half among themselves and would not have been able to conduct campaigns. This would lead to an inertia where all the serious politics is essentially about which internal faction of the Liberal Party one supports, because they would always be in power, and if in the next election they won 55% or 60% and then 70%, we would be on our way to a one-party-plus state, as Stephen Harper described it at the time in a paper he published.
I was always adamant that we must get rid of the per-vote subsidy because it had that pernicious effect, potentially. In fact, if we look at the history, the per-vote subsidy, which was opposed by my party, had the curious effect of giving far more money to my party, which won the next few elections and then got rid of the per-vote subsidy. Bringing it back, I submit, would lead to wildly unfair results being reintroduced. I am very glad to see that gone.
There is another consideration here that needs to be mentioned. There is one party in this place that is absolutely, critically dependant upon a per-vote subsidy because it has not been able to raise funds, and that is the party of the sponsor, the Bloc Québécois. The system kept the Bloc Québécois on life support, despite the fact that, in the last year, it raised less than the amount that is in my own riding's war chest. This is a problem of that party. It cannot generate enough support from its potential donor base. While I have some sympathy for its members, the job is to make themselves appeal to their potential voters to the extent that their potential voters will give them the funds to follow through. This a reasonable expectation. The New Democrats do it, the Greens do it, the Liberals do it, my party does it, and the Bloc Québécois should do it too.
In conclusion, I do not support the bill before us. I think it contains several bad ideas. Finally, I do think, in general, regardless of the government that has been in power for the last decade and a half, that we have been trending in the right direction, and that makes me very happy, on the whole.