Mr. Speaker, the legislation is supposed to address these issues but, frankly, it contains loopholes we could drive an official languages commissioner through. There are gaps in it with respect to what is still allowed.
Fundamentally, the bill is about reporting, not stopping the practice of people paying money for access, and we object to that. We object to the fact that someone who is involved in lobbying the government can pay $1,500 to get preferential access to the person he or she is lobbying. The bill has some mechanisms for the disclosure of that, but it continues to fully allow that practice to take place.
Instead of proceeding in the direction the Liberals have proposed, we are asking them to align themselves with the practice under the previous Conservative government, and also to look deeper into these questions of what a just approach to this issue looks like, aside from the rules. What is just and fair vis-à-vis the common good in giving people equal access to government. We have not seen that under the Liberal government. We have not seen a proper set of rules, nor alignment with rules nor the kind of disposition and character we would expect to align with the kind of decision-making we want to see in our country.