Mr. Speaker, I am glad to enter the debate tonight on Bill C-24. It seems a little ironic that again, as we approach the summer session, we are debating another bill that has a huge impact on the way political parties conduct themselves. It reminds me of the MPs' pay raise that we dealt with a couple of short years ago which we rammed through just before we closed for summer break.
We have to wonder why we are discussing a bill, which would have such a dramatic effect on the way political parties conduct their business and receive their funding, in the last week and a half or two weeks of the sitting of the House with closure over our heads as to how much debate we might have.
The bill, of course, is a response to a perception. We have heard a lot of members use that language tonight: a perception that maybe something is wrong in the way that huge corporate and union donations are made to political parties and whether that might influence government decisions. We might wonder where people get this perception from.
Certainly we know that the outgoing Prime Minister, who has benefited all the way through his career from corporate donations for his party, now seems determined that his successor, be it the member for LaSalle—Émard or one of his colleagues and competitors, will not benefit in the same way. Perhaps that is part of a legacy that he is trying to leave behind.
However where did this perception come from? We have to wonder why Canadians have become so cynical.
In the short time that I have been in the House there has been a neverending stream of very bad news coming out of the government regarding dollars: the sponsorship programs for advertising, Groupe Everest, Groupaction, huge government contracts for advertising for very questionable venues, some of which never even happened; and huge awards to companies that make big donations to a political party, in this case the government side, of course the government having the power to administer public funds.
Let us look at a paper that I was reading on the way in. It is from a couple of days ago. The headline reads “Refugee board member tied to bribe scam”. Is it any wonder that Canadians have lost confidence in the way the political process works in Canada and the influence the government comes under?
If that is not enough, in this morning's paper we read that the son of the former public accounts minister, the minister who was shipped off to Denmark, may be appointed as an advisor on Canada's behalf to the Vatican, if I understood that right, and maybe I did not. The son of the former public accounts minister worked for a printing company that received contracts from these same sponsorship and advertising companies that received large government grants and then money goes to family members or into funds that go back to the Liberal Party.
We know the governing party is not the only party that has been guilty of this. I think the government before was also quite well-known for a similar process. Therefore this bill is an attempt to assure the public that something is being done to rectify this situation.
My concern is that it is a nasty piece of business that will in fact put the taxpayers on the tab to support political parties that they may not endorse. While we respect all members in the House as having honourable intentions, we have had some very bad examples of integrity not being followed through. I think when the hon. member for Elk Island spoke a few moments ago he talked about integrity and the fact that people either had it or they did not. I think the language he used was that putting this kind of arbitrary limit on how much one could be bought for would probably not have the desired outcome.
However something that I have noticed since I have been in the House is the disturbing trend that I see in so many of the bills that come before the House, where the language purports to do one thing but in reality the effect of the bill will be something else, such as the child pornography bill that we dealt with recently in which the government said that we would be taking away artistic merit.
In my part of the country on the west coast we had the John Robin Sharpe case. People were outraged that a man was in possession of vile images of children being abused sexually. The judges refused to deal with it because of artistic merit. Now the government has moved to correct it because the public was sensitized to artistic merit.
However, it replaced the artistic merit defence with the defence of public good. This will sadly allow lawyers to make the same argument that a man who is abusing this graphic material which depicts the abuse of children is somehow satisfying himself and therefore not acting out his feelings on somebody, and that maybe there is some public good in that.
I do not think it is good enough. The government says it will get tough on the people who commit these crimes by increasing maximum penalties. We all know that the courts hardly ever impose maximum penalties. If the government were to get tough it would increase minimum penalties. What is wrong with the picture when the song says we are doing something but the reality says the same things will go on under different labels?
The Prime Minister said not long ago that he defended the interests of his riding all the time and he has nothing else to say about it. It is the role of a member of Parliament. He did not deny calling the head of the federal Business Development Bank of Canada in 1997 to press for a loan of nearly $1 million for a hotel owner in the Saint-Maurice riding, a Shawinigan accountant who recently pleaded guilty to fraudulently syphoning money to an off-shore bank account in the Bahamas.
Then there was the Grand-Mère fiasco and François Beaudoin of the Business Development Bank of Canada stating he followed the normal stages for a loan authorization, but without the intervention of the federal MP the project would never have been accepted. We know that the Prime Minister, in his famous story about the Grand-Mère, had shares that he sold but for which he never received any payment. He had an interest when he was lobbying for the inn next to his golf course. It seems kind of funny. If somebody sold an asset for $300,000 and seven years later had not been paid, did they really sell anything at all and indeed did any transaction take place regardless of what was written on a piece of paper that was handwritten and not witnessed?
We have a Youth Criminal Justice Act and frankly, I see the same problems there as I see in Bill C-24. The old law was dysfunctional, but the new law will be no better. In fact, it is likely to make things even worse because there are no provisions to notify the public of dangerous young offenders. There are no provisions to assist young people under 12 who get into trouble with the law. It does nothing for victims' rights.
People are frustrated when they see a message that says we are going one way and in reality it does not seem to pan out.
We are debating Motion No. 11 in Group No. 2. It is a motion that authorizes a review of the act to assess the impact after the first election. I suppose it is a good idea that we should assess the impact of Bill C-24 after the first election. The problem is that all of a sudden we have the taxpayers on the hook to replace the money that people formerly gave voluntarily to the party of their choice.
It is interesting that the first contribution from the taxpayers is due in January 2004. That is very convenient because the governing party has a substantial debt right now that it wants to look after. There will be another donation some months later, in April. That will put a lot of money into the coffers in preparation for the next election. It is based on the percentage of the vote in the last election.
Taxpayers should not be on the hook to support a party to which they may be opposed philosophically. It does not matter which party it is. I am sure there are members opposite who feel as badly about supporting some of the parties on this side of the House as some of the people who support us would feel about supporting government members on the other side. People should be free to give where their heart is and to the party they support, but they should not be forced to use their tax dollars to support political processes that they may not endorse.
