Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. friend for his work on this file. He has done an incredible job exposing the cash for access situation. I give him a lot of credit for that. It has been a lot of work on the part of the opposition.
To his point and his question, this actually does nothing to change cash for access, and I gave an example. The hon. member reiterated the fact that next week, a week from tonight, the Prime Minister will be in Mississauga. People will be paying $1,500 to be there. Of course, he will get up, make a speech, mingle, but presumably those who go will be people who have business before the government. They are looking to bend his ear. They are looking for influence. They are looking to put their point forward.
The bill would do nothing to change that. All it would do is legitimize and provides cover for the government to continue doing what the Prime Minister said he would not do.
As a new member of Parliament, I have sat down with a lot of members who have a lot of experience. There is a common theme that comes back regularly from those conversations, and it is that one's word is one's word. One's word means everything around here. The Prime Minister put in writing a direction to his ministers, and to himself I would argue, that there would be no preferential access or the perception of preferential access because of political contributions. It took him literally a couple a weeks to break his word.
As I said during my speech, we could go through a long laundry list of broken promises that the Prime Minister made to Canadians during the last election campaign. For a party and a Prime Minister who said they would be open and transparent, nothing could be further from the truth. What this legislation would do is legitimize and formalize cash for access. If anybody complains about this, anybody at all, the Liberals will say that they passed legislation, that they were doing it by the rules and by the law.