Mr. Speaker, I do not recall having impugned the integrity of any member of the House, but there are allegations regarding an employee of the Liberal Party of Canada which are on the record. The allegations are very troubling.
Government members seem to pop up every time a member mentions those allegations. They seem to be pretty prickly about the issue. They seem to be a bit defensive. I can imagine why. It appears to be a replay of the old Mulroney scandals.
We remember when the Liberal Party of Canada was in opposition. You were one of those members, Mr. Speaker, a very vociferous and effective member of that opposition. Whenever there was the slightest hint of wrongdoing by the Tory government, Liberal members were on their feet complaining bitterly about the lack of integrity in Tory party fundraising exercises.
It behoves opposition parties to point out that there are many unanswered questions, one of which came up today as a result of the documents filed by the RCMP regarding the activities of Mr. Corbeil. We discovered, among other things, that the Minister of Human Resources Development notified the RCMP about this potential scandal, about the allegations of the Shawinigan shakedown, a day after he authorized millions of dollars in pork barrel grants for the Prime Minister's riding where that employee of the Liberal Party was operating.
If that is not troubling I do not know what is. It looks like “Shawinigate” to me and it should be investigated very seriously.
Having said that, the confidence of Canadians in Parliament, in politicians and in political parties is in question. I recently read of a poll where 82% of Canadians indicated low or very low confidence in politicians.
I recall the day after I announced my intention to seek election to this Chamber picking up a local newspaper and reading an Angus Reid poll which ranked the respectability of different careers in the eyes of average Canadians. At the top were hard working people like farmers and clergymen. They are highly respected by Canadians. Then it got down toward the dregs of society, with lawyers near the bottom. The second last category on the list, just above arms' dealers was politicians. That is a shame.
All of us in the House, regardless of our partisan affiliation, should have as a common objective restoring the public's trust in the democratic institutions of the country. Unless we do that we will see more of the corrosive cynicism that sees voter turnout rates going lower and lower and volunteer participation in elections diminishing year after year. That kind of cynicism eats away at the guts of democracy and the operation of our political parties. It is a serious problem which strikes at the heart of what it means to live in a liberal democracy.
We support the motion. We think there is need for the reform of electoral financing legislation in Canada.
This is an issue which is close to my heart. It is an issue on which I have focused much attention over the years. When I was in my previous position as president of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation I made a considered submission to the Royal Commission on Electoral Reform, otherwise known as the Lortie commission. In that submission I advocated what I think was a very sensible policy, seconded by the Reform Party of Canada. I would like to read into the record the policy of the Reform Party with respect to the reform of electoral financing legislation.
The blue book of the principles and policies of the Reform Party of Canada states that it opposes any assistance to political parties and political lobbies from public funds, including any refund of candidate or party expenses, government advertising during the election period, the renting of parliamentary staff for reimbursement, tax credits for contributions to federal political parties and the transfer of tax credits to leadership or nomination campaigns or to provincial or municipal parties.
That, I think, is a sensible policy. It is that kind of policy which we are advocating in terms of this motion put forward by the Bloc Quebecois today.
Why do we want to end public funding of political parties? First, there is a very important principle, one which I regret is not shared by other members of this place. The principle is that it is inappropriate in a democratic society, one founded on the primacy of conscience, the rights of conscience and the rights of individuals, to coerce people, sometimes against their will, to fund partisan activities, to fund the promotion of political ideas and programs which they do not themselves hold, which is precisely what the system of public financing of political parties does today.
This principle was best expressed by Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the greatest intellectual father of liberal democracy who said in the preface to the Virginia statute on religious freedom that “to compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is both sinful and tyrannical.” Strong words from one of the seminal thinkers of modern democracy who said an idea that was enshrined at the beginning of the American constitutional experiment that individuals ought not to be coerced against their will to fund and promote activities which they do not themselves support.
I and my constituents and I am sure many millions of Canadians find it profoundly abhorrent that they are forced by the long arm of the state, by the coercive power of government, to hand over the fruits of their labours to support the promotion of ideas which they find abhorrent.
I understand that there are a plurality of political views in this country which we ought to respect. But if people really believe in the policies of a particular party they ought to be able to support that voluntarily out of their own cheque book rather than reaching across to unsuspecting taxpayers and forcing them to fund activities of parties.
I know there are Canadians who are deeply opposed to the policies of the Reform Party. I think there are a few on the opposite side of the House. I do not think they should be compelled or forced to advance our party's program.
Let me anticipate some of the objections to our argument against public funding of political parties. Some say that this is merely a means to open up the floodgates to all sorts of corruption, vote buying and influence purchasing on the part of corporations and major donors.
Let me point out one thing to the House. The Reform Party acts, it does not just talk, it walks the talk of integrity in fundraising. I refer to the 1996 statistics for fundraising for the various registered political parties which tell us that the Reform Party had by far the highest percentage of funds raised from individuals and the lowest percentage of funds raised from major corporations. Of the contributions made to the Reform Party, 68% of the nearly $5 million in contributions came from individual donors, as opposed to nearly 53% for the Tory Party and 43% for the Liberal Party.
The Liberal Party which claims to be the spokesmen for the poor, the under trodden, the great voice of compassion and equity, where did it get its money? It came from its big corporate friends on Bay Street. Whereas 12% of Reform contributions last year were corporate contributions, get this, 55.4% of the Liberal Party's contributions came from corporations.
My question for the members opposite and for the Government of Canada is why can they not raise money from individuals to support the activities of their party? Perhaps it is because individuals are not interested in buying the kind of influence, the kind of pork barrel grants that we have heard about the past few days. Our friends in the old decrepit fifth party received 46% of their funding from the corporate sector, four times more than the Reform Party.
Contributions sent in to the treasury of the Reform party are an average of $73 as opposed to $190 for our rich friends in the Tory party and $164 for the caviar and champagne set across the way.
As a party supported by the hard won contributions of individual Canadians, we are the only party standing on principle against this rip-off of taxpayers which has constituted $79 million since 1979 that has gone into the coffers of political parties and candidates through candidate reimbursement and registered party reimbursement.
In the 1993 election alone $22,894,443 went into the coffers of political parties and candidates, money that Canadians would rather have in their own pockets to take care of their families and their businesses rather than the salaries and perks of professional political hacks.
How is this whole design of pork barrel support for political parties maintained? It is principally through three different legislative vehicles.
First is candidate reimbursement with which all of us in the House are familiar. Those candidates for registered parties who receive over 15% of the vote are entitled to receive a rebate from the public treasury. It is called a rebate. My constituents think a rebate is getting money back from something that they have contributed to. These candidates are getting money from the taxpayers by law, 50% of all expenses if they win over 15% of the vote.
The political parties, the registered parties who spent more than 10% of their total allowable maximum, get 22.5% of their expenses back from the taxpayer.
Finally, there is the infamous tax credit for political parties of up to $500 contribution. It is a 75% tax credit on the first $100 on a sliding scale up to a maximum of $500.
In every one of our constituencies across the country hard working, compassionate volunteers go from door to door trying to raise money for important social and charitable causes and they are able to offer a bit of a tax break for Canadians. The charitable contribution tax credit pales in comparison to the shameful 75% tax credit that political parties in the House have given to themselves. We stand opposed to that.
Some people will say these subsidies are necessary to maintain the partisan process and that parties and democracy would somehow waste away were we not to maintain this multimillion dollar rip-off for political parties. That just is not true. Canadians are too smart to be bought by votes. It is not necessary to spend money to form government. Our friends opposite do not know that because they are the richest political party in the history of Canada.
Let me bring to their attention the Charlottetown accord debate in 1992. In that debate you had the great parties of the political establishment of the centre left in Canada, the old Tory party, the fifth party, and the Liberal party of Canada, and you had our socialist friends all supporting this massive constitutional amendment against the wishes of ordinary Canadians.
There was one political party that had the integrity to stand up for Canadians and oppose the Charlottetown accord. We were successful against all of the financial odds in defeating that accord. While the other side and their big money-bag men on Bay Street raised $20 million to spend in support of the Charlottetown accord we were able to scratch together a few hundred thousand dollars from our grassroots supporters. David defeated Goliath in 1992 at the Charlottetown accord.
Canadians are not bought by slick TV ads put together by well-paid partisan hacks. They are persuaded by ideas and convictions. That demonstrates that we do not need big money for the democratic process to further itself.
Take for example the election of the Tory party in 1993. The old fifth place party spent $10.4 million in the 1993 election. How many of its MPs were elected then? Do we remember? Two seats. It cost them $35,000 per seat while the Reform Party, the grassroots party, the populist party in Canada spent $1.5 million raised from farmers, homemakers, small business people, retired folks and students, and we had 52 members elected to this place. The per capita cost of those seats was $7,300, a tiny fraction of what the old party spent.
It is not necessary for parties to spend, spend, spend to elect seats. That we know.
Fifty-four per cent of the candidates elected in the 1993 election—we do not have the most recent figures but I suspect they are about the same—already had a surplus in their campaign accounts before they cashed the cheque for reimbursement from the taxpayers. What does that tell us? They do not need the money. They are already raising the money. The other 46% that did not have pre-reimbursement subsidies darn well should have. They should have gone out door to door and raised the money as the members of my party did to run surpluses before receiving that subsidy. It is not necessary to get that kind of reimbursement.
There is something very troubling about this. When I was in my former capacity I wrote to the Chief Electoral Officer to ask if there was any kind of regulation of what happened to the moneys that were received by constituency associations of the various parties from the candidate election reimbursement. His response based on the Canada Elections Act was that no, there was no such accountability. In fact there are hundreds of riding associations for the various parties which receive tens of thousands of taxpayers' dollars out of this reimbursement who have to account to absolutely no one.
We remember in the last scandal-ridden Tory government that members of constituency association executives were flying on all expense paid, first class trips to Mexico to sun themselves on the sunny beaches of Mexico with the tax dollars that ended up in the constituency association accounts courtesy of the Canadian taxpayer. That is how the system works in too many cases.
With all of the rules that we want to build into the system through legislation and regulation our friends in the Bloc and the NDP would like to try to monopolize the political process by forcing every dollar to be funded by the taxpayer with pages and pages of regulation. That does not work.
What does work is cutting the parties off from the public trough and that is what we propose to do today. That is why we will be supporting this motion.