Mr. Speaker, I congratulate my hon. colleague on a very thoughtful speech and agree with him 100% that regardless of what my colleagues in the Conservative Party say, every Canadian knows why former prime minister Harper called an excessively long election campaign. He was pressing his advantage as the party that had the most money to spend. He was using the bully pulpit of the bank account to try to gain an advantage in our democracy by spending more money than the other parties had. That was the only reason we had a historically long election campaign. I congratulate the government on closing that gap. We have minimum election campaign periods, so it only stands to reason that we should have maximum ones as well.
My question is about the financing of elections. It is my view that democracy is a fundamental matter of public importance and that our democracy should be publicly financed, not privately financed. I know that when Jean Chrétien brought in what I thought was incredibly wise electoral reform in this country, giving Canada the best system in the world, we had a per-vote subsidy. The Conservatives removed that per-vote subsidy, and that damaged the public financing of our system.
Does the member agree that there is a case to be made to restore the per-vote subsidy on the supposition that the rebate is to pay for the election just had, but the per-vote subsidy is to allow parties to be funded for the elections to follow? Does he agree that it is a wise move, and could he explain why it is not part of this electoral reform bill?