Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to have an opportunity to debate this piece of legislation more officially in the House. We already had a chance to have some back and forth in question period, but we will now have the chance to do that here in official debate in the House of Commons.
There are obviously a number of things I find of concern, but my biggest concern is that the Liberals and the Prime Minister seem to continually try to find ways to damage themselves, to find ways to prevent opposition, and to find ways to tip the scales in their favour. We have seen that a number of times, whether it be breaking their promise on electoral reform or whether it be trying to change the rules of the House of Commons to suit themselves. We see potentially more of that in this piece of legislation as well.
I want to focus on one topic, and it is a topic on which we had a bit of an exchange in question period earlier today. I want to talk about the idea of spending limits. The government is making some changes, obviously, that would prevent political parties from being able to use funds truly given to them by Canadians in a period prior to the election, but it is not doing the same for government advertising and ministerial travel, at least not for the same time period.
I wonder if the minister would commit to making changes to the bill that would line those periods up so that it would not disadvantage the opposition parties in such a way. Would it line those timelines up so that those directives, in terms of the limits on ministerial travel and government advertising, would be the same? I wonder if the minister would make a commitment to make that amendment today.