Thank you for the opportunity to address this because so far the discussion around individual donations has really been talking about the size of them.

If you limit it to individuals, that means rich individuals who have a lot of money can participate in third parties. What we are really proud of is that we can bring together a lot of people. We represent three million people who don't have to have a large amount of money—and it's all very transparent what we do with our money during elections—and we are able to participate in elections on issues that are important to workers to improve the lives of workers.

We can only do that through our democratic processes. Taking the big money that is secret money out of it—we understand that and we're not opposed to that.

The idea that the money that unions collectively put together and then collectively decide what to do with is wrapped up in this is a kind of an underestimation of the importance of having social dialogue in our society and in our democracy.

That is why we're saying, when we talk about the contributions of Canadian individuals and making it so that unions and our organizations can't do this, that this isn't secret money. We're not funnelling money. We're following the rules. We're taking it there. We have democratic processes. I think it's going to accidentally sweep us into that. It's going to mean the voices of millions of workers, talking on behalf of all workers, can no longer participate in the democracy in a meaningful way.

When we talk about the expenditures, I just want to add that what we have to disclose in terms of the costs is all inclusive. It costs money to participate in elections. These aren't cheap things. We're very proud that we get our stuff from Canada and we make sure people are paid good wages. That means that the expenses are there, but we are collectively able to pay for that under the current....

This change will actually exclude that. We think that it is going to be a problem in upcoming elections if workers do not have a voice.

Transcript

Discussions (0)