Mr. Speaker, it is always a pleasure to rise in this place to speak on behalf of my constituents in Calgary Rocky Ridge.
I have followed the debate on the bill throughout the morning. I have listened to various interventions by members of all parties. We have had some great discussions and some interesting points have been made.
I will take a minute to review how we got here.
In 2015, the Liberal Party ran an ambitious campaign. It ran an idealistic campaign in an attempt to capture the imagination of Canadians. It was the third party in the House. When being a third party in the House, perhaps it puts pressure on itself to promise a great many things to try to regain the support of Canadians, which it had not enjoyed for some time.
Many bold and idealistic promises were made. The Liberals conveyed to Canadians an impression of being different, different from their former selves in the scandal-ridden governments they had in the past, different from a current government that had been in office for 10 years, and it worked. They managed to get elected on the strength of those idealistic promises.
The Liberals promised many things during the campaign. They promised to be the most open and transparent government in history. They promised a deficit of only $10 billion, which would be spent explicitly on infrastructure to stimulate the economy and would immediately return to balance. We know what has happened with that promise. They promised electoral reform. They promised reform to the access to information system. Many promises were made that were thrown out the window fairly closely after the election.
On the business of being the most open and transparent government in history, the Prime Minister, shortly after his election, put out a 90-plus page document, the Prime Minister's statement on “Open and Accountable Government”. In this document, as has been recounted by others this morning, he promised, among other things, to hold his ministers to the highest possible ethical standards. In his document and in his mandate letters that he made public, he said that there could be no preferential access given to ministers by the wealthy or well-connected. He said that there would not even be the appearance of conflict of interest or preferential access. He said that his ministers were to be held to these standards and that their ethical responsibilities would not be fully discharged by mere compliance with the law.
What has happened since then? Almost immediately, the Prime Minister and his party, to raise funds, started to hold cash for access fundraisers. We know they have held fundraisers with Chinese billionaires. We know they have held cash for access fundraisers with pharmaceutical lobbyists and firms that are in litigation with the government. We have media reports of lobbyists hosting cash for access fundraisers in private homes, in contravention of the Lobbying Act.
We have heard these events not only are not open to the public, but they are by invitation only and secretly distributed, using Internet protocols to bury search results that attempt to look for these events. We have heard of the Minister of Natural Resources meeting with energy lobbyists. We have heard the Minister of Finance characterizing a cash for access fundraiser as part of his pre-budget consultation process.
There has been, more or less, a year of this. We spent the better part of the first year of the Liberal government being in office uncovering these events. Here we are today, in the final days of our sitting, when members are getting ready to spend the summer in their constituencies and time with their families, rushing through a new bill.
Many Canadians may be wonder why we even have this bill.
The bill purports to increase openness and transparency. It was touted by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Democratic Institutions this morning as a new, much-needed reform. What created the need for this reform? There is only one party that has an ethical fundraising problem, and it is the Liberal Party.
Why do we even need a new bill at all when it is the conduct of one party that could simply choose not to sell access for cash? We would not need to be here debating a bill at all if Liberals would simply not do it, but this is the essence of how they raise money. The bill would not create increased ethics in fundraising. It would create a system where conflict of interest is, indeed, open and transparent, that the Liberals can openly and transparently engage in conflict of interest by shaking down supporters, stakeholders, and lobbyists who do business with the government at $1,500 a pop.
The new minister came to her job in the wake of the unmitigated disaster of her predecessor's failed electoral reform agenda, a broken promise, much like a series of other broken promises I mentioned already. With the reset button being hit on her department, we now have this bill before us, which, as I have said, merely gives cover to the Liberals' practice of raising cash by selling access.