Bill C-33 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts

This enactment amends the Canada Elections Act to
(a) remove limitations on public education and information activities conducted by the Chief Electoral Officer;
(b) establish a Register of Future Electors in which Canadian citizens 14 to 17 years of age may consent to be included;
(c) authorize the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration to provide the Chief Electoral Officer with information about permanent residents and foreign nationals for the purpose of updating the Register of Electors;
(d) remove the prohibition on the Chief Electoral Officer authorizing the notice of confirmation of registration (commonly known as a “voter information card”) as identification;
(e) replace, in the context of voter identification, the option of attestation for residence with an option of vouching for identity and residence;
(f) remove two limitations on voting by non-resident electors: the requirement that they have been residing outside Canada for less than five consecutive years, and the requirement that they intend to return to Canada to resume residence in the future; and
(g) relocate the Commissioner of Canada Elections to within the Office of the Chief Electoral Officer, and provide that the Commissioner is to be appointed by the Chief Electoral Officer, after consultation with the Director of Public Prosecutions, for a non-renewable term of 10 years.
In addition, the enactment contains transitional provisions and makes consequential amendments to other Acts.

Extension of Sitting Hours

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

Madam Speaker, moving a motion to extend the sitting hours of the House is not a great way to close out the last session of the 42nd Parliament of Canada. We are not opposed to working late every evening. We want to work and make progress on files.

Once again, we take issue with the means the government is using to get all members to work a little harder because the session is ending and these are the last days of this Parliament. The other items in the motion do not concern the extension of sitting hours. We take issue with the government's approach, which prevents the opposition from doing its job properly. It is handcuffing the opposition and moving the government's agenda along as quickly as possible, not based on what parliamentarians may have to say, but on what the government wants.

This is not new to us, given how the government has handled the legislative process throughout its mandate. The government has been unable to advance a decent legislative agenda. I am the opposition agriculture and agri-food critic. I spoke to my predecessors, and we have been waiting for the Minister of Agriculture to introduce a bill to improve the lives of Canadian farmers since my appointment two years ago.

When I look at all the agriculture documents and bills this government has introduced since it was elected in 2015, it is clear to me that the government has achieved nothing. Absolutely no legislation was proposed to improve the lives of Canadian farmers.

However, numerous bills were introduced. Now, the government is saying that the situation is urgent and that we must move quickly and pass this legislation. A number of bills were not passed by the government, and now time is of the essence.

Of all of the bills that were not passed, some never even moved forward. We have, for example, Bill C-5, introduced on February 5, 2016; Bill C-12, introduced on March 24, 2016; Bill C-27, introduced on October 19, 2016; Bill C-28, introduced on October 21, 2016; Bill C-32, introduced on November 15, 2016; and Bill C-33, introduced on November 24, 2016. The Liberals have had four years to move these bills forward.

All of a sudden, the government claims that these bills need to be passed urgently. After the vote this evening we will debate Bill C-81, which was introduced on June 20, 2018. It has been nearly a year. We are being told that this bill is urgent and must absolutely be passed, but the government was unable to bring it forward earlier.

If this is so urgent, why did the government not bring up this bill more regularly in the House? Why did we not talk about it on a regular basis? All of a sudden, we need to pass it quickly because the Liberals have realized that they are going to run out of time. The government was unable to manage the House. It was unable to give parliamentarians an opportunity to do their work and to speak about important bills. The Liberals have realized at the last minute that they have forgotten this and that. There is an election coming up in the fall and now parliamentarians have to do the work to pass this or that bill.

The government chose to impose late sittings on the House for 18 days while also moving a time allocation motion, which means that we will not even have the chance to talk about it for long. If we refer to the Standing Orders, the government could have extended sitting hours for the last 10 days of the session, as provided for in our normal parliamentary calendar. That is what it could have done, and it would have been entirely doable.

I would like to talk about one of the Standing Orders. Even though the standing order that governs the extension of sitting hours in June has been in effect since 1982, it is not used every year. In some cases, special orders were proposed and adopted instead, usually by unanimous consent.

Parliamentarians are here to represent the people in their ridings. According to the Standing Orders, anyone who wants to change the rules to move things along has to seek the unanimous consent of the House.

Unfortunately, this government does not really seem to care about unanimous consent. It does not really seem to care what the opposition thinks or has to say even though, just like MPs on government benches, we represent all the people of our ridings. The least the government could do, out of respect for Canadian voters, is respect people in opposition. We have a role to play.

Unfortunately, our role is not to agree all the time and say the government is doing a good job. On the contrary, our role is to try to point out its failings so it can improve. Basically, the opposition's role is to make the government better by pointing out its mistakes and bad decisions so the government can reflect on that and find better solutions for all Canadians. However, the government does not seem willing to take that into account.

On top of that, there are two opposition days left. I mentioned the negative effects of the motion. The government is proposing to extend the hours in the House, but what it failed to mention is that it is going to deny the opposition the opportunity to have two full opposition days to address situations that are very troubling to Canadians.

For instance, during a normal opposition day during which we might hear from a number of stakeholders, we could have talked about the canola crisis, which is affecting thousands of canola producers across Canada. This crisis, which involves China, is costing Canadian canola producers billions of dollars. For all members who have canola farmers among their constituents, it would have been an opportunity to express the concerns of their fellow citizens and farmers in their regions. Perhaps we could have convinced the government to take action, such as filing a complaint through the World Trade Organization to condemn China's actions or appointing an ambassador, for example. As peculiar as it may seem, Canada currently has no representative in China to speak with Chinese authorities.

We could have had such a debate here in the House.

The one thing that the members across the aisle seem to have forgotten is that members of the House are not the government. The government is the ministers, the cabinet members. In this chamber, people have the right to speak their minds in the hope of swaying the government.

It is true that the government is formed by the party with the most members elected to the House, but it is also up to backbench members of the ruling party to try to persuade their government and speak for the people they represent, such as the farmers in their ridings. Sadly, the members on that side of the House seem to be divorced from reality. They seem to be blind to the government's desire to crush Parliament, to crush the MPs who are trying to do a good job of representing the constituents of every riding. I think that is a real shame.

We have absolutely nothing against extending the sitting hours of the House, but if it is intended to cover up the government's mistakes and its inability to properly organize the work of the House, then I think that is disgraceful.

The government is using this kind of motion to not only make us work more, which, as I mentioned, we agree with, but also deprive us of our last remaining tools, like the voting marathons everyone remembers. We held those voting marathons to make the government realize it cannot do whatever it wants in the House of Commons. The House of Commons is not the tool of the government. This motion to extend the sitting hours also prevents us from using that tool, which was a powerful means for us to send the government a message.

After making such grand promises of transparency and openness, this government has failed spectacularly to deliver. Sadly, its latest motion on the rules of the House just proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it has no respect for the work of the House. It saddens me to see a government ending its term on such a sour note.

Elections Modernization Act

[Alupa Clarke, Conservative, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I had the honour and privilege to be chosen, among the 338 members of Parliament, to speak today on the last day we will be sitting in this building, the Centre Block, in the House of Commons, in our wonderful Parliament, in our great federation.

Before I go any further and talk a bit about Centre Block, I should say that I will be sharing my time with the excellent member for Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, one of my esteemed colleagues, whose riding is quite close to my own. We share a border, between Sainte-Brigitte-de-Laval and Beauport. I am very happy to work with him on various issues that affect our respective constituents.

I would like to wish a very merry Christmas to everyone in Beauport—Limoilou who is watching us right now or who might watch this evening on Facebook, Twitter or other social media. I wish everyone a wonderful time with their family, and I hope they take some time to rest and relax. That is important. This season can be a time to focus a little more on ourselves and our familes, and to spend time together, to catch up and to rest up. I wish all my constituents the very best for 2019. Of course we will be seeing one another next week in our riding. I will be in my office and out in the community all week. I invite all my constituents to the Christmas party I am hosting on Wednesday, December 19, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m, at my office, which is located at 2000 Sanfaçon Avenue. Refreshments will be served and we will celebrate Christmas together. Over 200 people attended the event last year. I hope to see just as many people out this year. Merry Christmas and happy new year to everyone.

Today I want to talk about Bill C-76. I think this is the third time I speak to this bill. This is the first time I have had the opportunity to speak at all three readings of the same bill, and I am delighted I have been able do so.

This is somewhat ironic, because we have every reason to feel nostalgic today. The Centre Block of the House of Commons has been the centre of Canadian democracy since 1916, or rather, since its reconstruction, which was completed in 1920 after the fire. We have been sitting in this place for over a century, for 102 years. We serve to ensure the well-being of our constituents and to discuss democracy, to discuss legislation and the issues that matter to our country every day.

Today, rather ironically, we are discussing Bill C-76, which seeks to amend the Canada Elections Act. This is the legislation that sets the guidelines, standards, conditions and guarantees by which we, the 338 members of Parliament, were elected by constituents to sit here in the House of Commons. It is an interesting bill that we are discussing on our last day here, but this situation is indeed somewhat ironic, as my NDP colleague so rightly said in his question to the parliamentary secretary. He asked why, if this bill is so important to the Liberals, they waited until the last minute to rush it through after three years in power. The same version appeared in Bill C-33 in 2015-16, and the Liberals delayed implementation of that bill.

Since we are talking about Bill C-76, which affects the Elections Act and democracy, I must say I find it a shame that only six out of the 200 amendments the Conservatives proposed in committee were accepted.

We have concrete grievances based on real concerns and even the opinion of the majority. I will share with the House some of the surveys I have here. I just want to take a minute to say to all those watching us on CPAC or elsewhere right now, that it has been my dream ever since I was 15 to serve Canadians first and foremost. That is why I enrolled in the Canadian Armed Forces. That is why I dreamed of becoming an MP since I was 15. In 2015, I had the exceptional honour of earning the confidence of the majority of the 92,000 constituents of Beauport—Limoilou. I would like to tell them that, in my view, the House of Commons represents the opposite of what the Prime Minister said yesterday. He said it was just a room.

I did not like that because the House of Commons, which will close for renovations for 15 years in a few days, is not just a room, as the Prime Minister said. I find it unfortunate that he used that term. It is the chamber of the people. That is why it is green. The colour green represents the people and the colour red represents aristocracy. Hence the Senate chamber is red.

I hope I am not mistaken. Perhaps the parliamentary guides could talk to me about this.

It is unfortunate that the Prime Minister said that it is not the centre of democracy, because that is not true. I will explain to Canadians why it is wrong to say that Parliament is not the centre of democracy.

The Prime Minister was right when he said that democracy resides everywhere, whether in protests in the streets, meetings of political associations or union meetings. Of course, democracy happens there. However, the centre of democracy is here, because it is here that elected members sit and vote on the laws that govern absolutely everything in the country. It is also here that we can even change Canada's Constitution. The country's Constitution cannot be changed anywhere else or as part of political debates by a political association or a protest. No, it can only be done here or in the other legislative assemblies of the provinces in Canada. It is only in those places that we can make amendments and change how democracy works or deal with problems to address current issues. Yes, by definition, in a practical manner, the centre of democracy is right here. It is not, as the Prime Minister said, just a room like so many others. No, it is the House of Commons.

Just briefly, before I get back to Bill C-76, I want to talk about the six sculptures on the east wall. The first represents civil law; the second, freedom of speech; the third, the Senate; the fourth, the governor general; the fifth, Confederation; and the sixth, the vote. On the west wall, there are sculptures representing bilingualism, education, the House of Commons, taxation—it says “IMPÔT — TAX” up top—criminal law and, lastly, communications. Those sculptures are here because we are at the centre of democracy. The 12 sculptures represent elements of how our federation works.

With respect to Bill C-67, we have three main complaints.

First, Bill C-76 would make it possible for a Canadian to use a voter card as their only document at a polling station. To be clear, the voter card is the paper people get for registering as an eligible voter. From now on, the Liberals will let people vote using that card only. Currently, and until this bill is passed, voters have to present a piece of identification to vote.

There are risks in letting people vote without an ID card like a driver's licence, health card or passport. First, in 2015, the information on over one million voter identification cards was incorrect. That is a major concern. Second, it is easy to vote with a card displaying incorrect information. That creates a significant problem. It is serious. We need to make sure that voting remains a protected, powerful and serious privilege in Canada.

Our second concern—and this is why we have no choice but to vote against the bill and what upsets me the most personally—is that the government is going to allow Canadians who live outside the country to vote, regardless of how long they have been living abroad. There used to be a five-year limit. In Australia, it is six years. Many countries have limits.

Now, the Liberals want to allow 1.4 million Canadians who live abroad to participate in Canadian elections, even if they have not lived in Canada for 20 or 30 years. They will even be allowed to choose what riding they want to vote in.

Do the Liberals realize the incredible power they are giving to Canadian citizens who have not lived in Canada for 20 years? Those individuals could potentially choose a riding where the polls indicate that the race is very close and change which party is chosen to govern.

Our third concern about this bill is that the Liberals want to prevent third parties, such as labour groups, from accepting money from individuals or groups outside the country during the pre-writ period.

That is good, but there is nothing stopping this from happening before the pre-writ period. People will be able to take in money and receive money from groups outside the country before the start of the pre-writ period.

I thank all Canadians who are watching us for their trust. I look forward to seeing them in the riding next week.

[Anne Minh-Thu Quach, NDP, Salaberry—Suroît, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am still concerned about one aspect of the bill, despite all the time the government has taken to propose amendments to what they had already proposed in Bill C-33 to protect Canadians' privacy.

Even the Privacy Commissioner said that Bill C-76 adds nothing of substance in terms of privacy protection. For instance, this bill still allows parties to sell Canadians' personal information, so it is not covered by the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.

Does my colleague not think that we are moving a little too fast with this bill, considering that the government has rejected some significant amendments?

Also, is it not totally ironic that a so-called electoral reform bill is being rushed through the House of Commons—virtually on the last possible day that Parliament gets to debate in this chamber in 2018—and that it is riddled with so many privacy loopholes?

If we move ahead with this bill, it may not even come into effect in time for the next election. Why not take the time to get it right and make absolutely certain that everyone's privacy is protected?

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Mr. Speaker, we just watched a curious exchange. There was a specific question by a Conservative member about the use of closure on this bill, put to the democratic institutions minister about a tactic that, in all fairness, the Conservatives used with regard to a voting bill in the last Parliament. At that time, the Liberals said it was terrible that the Conservatives were using closure on something as important as a democratic voting bill, a procedure the Liberals are now using and cannot even admit they are doing, in answer to straightforward question. Again, ironically, it is being done with a bill concerning our democracy. Canadians look upon this and scratch their heads and wonder.

This bill comes 750 days after the Liberals first introduced Bill C-33. It is 226 days after Elections Canada gave its own deadline. As the minister knows, many of the things in this bill with merit would not be applied to the 2019 election because it took the Liberals so long to introduce the bill.

I would like to ask the minister about one very specific thing that is not in this bill. One change that New Democrats proposed was to suggest that the reimbursement parties get back from Elections Canada, effectively the voters and taxpayers, for elections expenses should be tied to the effort each party makes to present an equal mandate—in other words, that it be tied to their attempts to get toward fifty-fifty. The Prime Minister made great boasts about 50% of his cabinet being women, and we said that we should extend that to the whole House. As the minister knows, three-quarters of the House remain men. That is essentially the same composition under the Harper government. Therefore, if we are going to change this, New Democrats say that we should follow the money, as is often said in finance and business and politics. Therefore, we proposed what we did.

By the way, when this one proposal was applied in Ireland, it increased the number of women and under-represented groups in the next election by 90%, and the number of women and under-represented groups in the Irish parliament by 40%. We proposed making this change, and the Liberals voted against it.

To my friend across the way and her allegedly feminist Prime Minister, when we propose ideas that would help get more women elected to the House of Commons, why do Liberals vote against those ideas that have been proven to work in democracies around the world?

[David Christopherson]

They handed off their lead to me. If anybody ever needed to know where the expression “politics makes for strange bedfellows” came from, this would be exactly that scenario. I thank my colleagues in the Conservative caucus for an opportunity to jump ahead in the order of precedence.

Let me begin, first of all, by expressing my personal respect for you, Minister. We're in neighbouring cities, and for a while you were our regional minister and you did an outstanding job in that capacity. I enjoy working with you, and everything I have to say is about your government in your capacity as the minister and not as a person or as an MP, because, on that front, you have an impeccable reputation with me.

Having said that, I have to tell you, if the Conservatives had attempted a move like this, the whole country would be enraged, but somehow, because they are the Liberals, it's not as horrible a thing. I have to tell you, this is a disgraceful expression of lack of democracy, again, on the democratic reform file. Let's remember, too, that there's a context to this. There's a history and a pattern.

This government said that the last election we had would be the last one we would have under first past the post. They broke that promise and set that aside. Then they brought in a whole series of draconian changes to our House Standing Orders, moves that Stephen Harper would never even dream of, and they had to retreat on that because of the backlash.

On Bill C-33, we were in the middle, this committee, of doing a major intensive review of the recommendations from the Chief Electoral Officer. That report was supposed to help advise the government, because they had promised that committees were going to matter from now on. We were going to go back to respecting the independence of committees and allowing committees to do their good parliamentary work. That was trounced on by virtue of Bill C-33, the Liberals' major reform bill to the election laws, which was dumped on the floor of Parliament while we were still in the midst of reviewing that report. That lead to a filibuster by a certain somebody that tied us up for goodness knows how long until we managed to get that mess the government caused unravelled.

Now here we are again on a major issue, and I don't disagree with its importance as underscored by the minister and by my friend Madam May, but the process matters. This is a democracy. We spent a lot of time working hard on that report, and two of the key things, the biggest rubs that we had the greatest difficulty with, were how we decide who the commissioner will be and what the criteria would be for who's in debates.

None of us at the committee level—and I'll include my colleagues in the Liberal caucus for this part of it—felt adequate to make that decision as a committee made up of members from all the parties. Now this government has come along and here's its rationale; here's the thing. I claim the reason they had to do this was that they've mismanaged this file so badly that they didn't leave enough time. In fact, we just barely got the last major bill through, again, because of the government's mismanagement. In their own backgrounder for justification for ignoring this committee and running roughshod over democracy, here was their rationale:

In the interest of time, and as a starting point for the upcoming 2019 debates...

It's as if nobody had talked about it yet, as if nobody was paying any attention, and the government went, “Oh, wait a minute. We should do something, and there's really not enough time to do it, so we'll just make that decision.”

This is so important, and I am so profoundly disappointed that the government has been so undemocratic in their approach here and so unilateral.

My only question, I guess, would be, at this point, where on earth do the Liberals—never mind government—get off believing that they have the almighty power and right to unilaterally appoint the commissioner and unilaterally decide who's in the debates and who isn't in the debates?

Where do the Liberals get off believing they have the right to make that decision when we, collectively, at the committee level, which the government was supposed to respect, have said that we need to put it into a process so that it's fair? How do the Liberals justify saying, no, they know better and they'll just set aside what the committee said?

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with my great friend and colleague, the member for Nanaimo—Ladysmith.

I am looking at the clock right now and I see that we have little more than half an hour left in this debate. It is a sad state of affairs for a bill that really covers such an important law in which every Canadian has so much vested, not the least of whom are members of the House, that we have to debate it under the yoke of time allocation.

The rush is all the making of the Liberals. We have heard repeatedly about Bill C-33, the first attempt by the Liberals at amending our election laws. That bill was introduced on November 24, 2016, and it is about as far as it got. It stayed at first reading. The member for Perth—Wellington called it a very unloved bill because it seemed to have been forgotten by the Liberal government.

Bill C-33 languished for many months and then finally on April 30 of this year, Bill C-76 was brought in, which swallowed up Bill C-33 but added a whole bunch more.

Then the sense of urgency came. The Liberals suddenly became aware of the timelines they had to deal with this. The Liberal government has a clear majority. It has commanding control over the agenda of the House. The Liberals came to power with an ambitious election agenda, and they are making us pay for their laggardness.

The bill came back to the House for report stage last week. On Thursday, October 25, the government moved time allocation. We really only had a few days to debate the bill, which started on Wednesday afternoon. On Thursday, the Dutch prime minister was here, so it was not a full day. We debated the bill on Friday afternoon. On Monday, the government decided to debate Bill C-84 and Bill C-85. We had the votes at report stage last night, Here we are on Tuesday, the final day to debate the bill at third reading.

It makes a mockery out of the Prime Minister's promise to treat this institution with respect when he rams the bill through, especially when the amendments that were looked at in committee and at report stage were backed up by such solid evidence. The Liberals have demonstrated time and again that it is their way or the highway.

We have to place all of this within the context of the biggest promise the Liberals made with respect to electoral reform, and that was that 2015 would be the last election held under first past the post. Why does this matter? When the hon. clerks at the table read out the tally of the votes, we do not approve a motion with 39% support, yet that is precisely what happens in this place. The Liberals do have a majority government, but it was elected by 39% of the people.

If we truly believe that every vote should count equally, then the House of Commons should reflect how people voted. I certainly wish the Liberals had followed through on their promise, that they had listened to the evidence that was gathered by the special committee on electoral reform and at least had progressed.

If the Liberals want to see how it is really done, they need to look no further than the province of British Columbia, where a B.C. NDP government, led by my friend Premier John Horgan, who is also a constituent, is following through with a promise.

Right now B.C. is having a referendum on electoral reform. I was happy to cast my ballot last weekend in support of proportional representation. This is a great opportunity for the province of B.C. to lead the way on electoral reform. It is a great way to show Canadians that on this issue, if they want progress, if they want a government that keeps its promise, they will vote NDP. John Horgan and the NDP are showing that.

I want to move on because I do not want to be entirely negative. There are some important things in the bill that we support. Many of the changes in Bill C-76 are just simple reversals of the Conservative bill from 2014.

For example, Bill C-76 would reinstate vouching for identity. It would restore the voter ID card. It would remove restrictions on how the Chief Electoral Officer and Elections Canada could communicate with voters. These are all good things and we support them.

On a personal note, the government has incorporated the idea behind my private member's bill, Bill C-279, which I introduced in 2016. That bill sought to limit the length of elections. I think all members, and indeed Canadians, would be very happy if we did not have to go through a 78-day marathon campaign anymore. Seriously, there needs to be a limit on the length of elections, especially with the changes the Conservatives brought in under its government. It greatly expanded how much political parties could spend every day we went past 36 days. I do not think anyone could argue in favour of Canadians needing 78 days to make their decision. Therefore, I am glad to see there is a hard limit of 50 days on the length of elections.

I am also happy to see that Elections Canada would now be able to access information from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. One of the great things I do as a member of Parliament, pretty much every month, is I get a list of new citizens who recently acquired their citizenship. I get to write certificates, congratulating them on acquiring their citizenship and welcoming them as future electors of Canada. If Elections Canada is able to update its registry in co-operation with another government department, all the better. I think every party in this place wants to see more people participate.

The early registration of teenagers, age 14 to 17, is a great step forward. One of the other things I really enjoy doing as a member of Parliament is visiting all the high schools in my riding. When we make efforts to speak to students, especially grade 11 and 12 students, they are actually a very thoughtful and engaged group. They care very much about their future. They care about climate change, about very progressive ideals. I have really valued my exchanges with them. With early registration as voters, it gives them another impetus to get the buy-in to the system so when they turn 18, they can actually go and cast their ballot.

I was fortunate enough to turn 18 in 1997, an election year, and I got to cast my ballot. I can remember doing that with a lot of pride.

Removing the ban on public education by the Chief Electoral Officer is also a great thing, as well as extending the hours of advanced polls. These are all positive measures in my view.

That is not to say that there are not problems. One of the biggest gaps, and it has been clearly identified by the member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley, who has been doing yeoman's work on this bill on behalf of the NDP, is the privacy rules covering political parties. Every political party in this place gathers a lot of information on Canadians. We know generally how many people live in a household, what their ages are, their genders and, in some cases, what their professions are.

We live in a time now where information warfare is a fact. Hacking is a fact. We need look no further than the examples of the Brexit vote and the recent election in the United States. It would be absolutely foolish of us to pretend it will not to affect Canada. Unfortunately, despite all the evidence that was heard at the procedure and House affairs committee, not only from the Privacy Commissioner but a whole host of experts, the Liberals cynically ignored this important provision. They decided not to strengthen privacy laws covering political parties. Also, nothing was really done with respect to election ads on social media and the Internet.

One of the big things is this. I remember the Liberals amended their own bill at committee to remove the requirement of political parties to keep receipts for their spending. This is the Liberals at committee amending their own bill to take that out. Last night, through report stage amendments, we tried to insert that back in, through vote no. 12. It was voted against. The Chief Electoral Officer has been calling for this since the 38th Parliament. For a party that likes to sing praises of the Chief Electoral Officer, to repeatedly ignore his recommendations and his calls to action on so many occasions makes a mockery of the Liberal statements in this place.

We also tried to move the voting day to Sunday, which I think would have encouraged more participation. On a Monday, I know everyone is entitled to get those hours off, but it sometimes does not always work out.

We tried to be constructive with the bill. Despite the many flaws that exist, we will vote to send it to the other place. However, I will be reminding Canadians of the opportunities that were lost, the opportunities that we attempted to address and the Liberals' flagrant attempts to ignore all of those constructive proposals.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise in debate at this point on Bill C-76. I want to take the occasion to start with a bit of a broad historical sweep, albeit going back just to 2014. It is important for Canadians to know what is being accomplished with this legislation and what remains to be done. It is not perfect. I want to stress that, but I will be voting for it. I am also gratified that at least some of my amendments were accepted in the committee that studied the bill.

I want to go back to 2014, when the current hon. member for Carleton was the minister of democratic institutions. He brought forward a bill in that Parliament, Bill C-23, that was given the unlikely title, given its content, of the Fair Elections Act. I was a member of the opposition at the time, as leader of the Green Party, but I struggled with other members of the opposition, the New Democrats and Liberals, to try to stop that piece of legislation because it clearly had less to do with fairness than with trying to create favourable conditions for the governing party, the Conservatives at that time, going into the 2015 election.

Therefore, it is with a great deal of irony that I have heard a number of times Conservative members say that the Liberals are just trying to change the terms to make them better for their party.

We cannot forget the circumstances in 2014 when the member for Carleton introduced his bill. I hope that this will now be fixed by the changes to Bill C-76.

Going back to what the so-called Fair Elections Act did, it was consumed, as some members of this place still are, with a fiction—and I want to underscore the word “fiction”.

It is completely untrue. I want to stress that Canada does not have a problem with election fraud.

We do not have a problem of people disguising themselves, taking voter cards or any number of things that have been hinted at in the chamber in the last debate on Bill C-76. We do not have a problem of Canadians voting more than once under assumed identities. We have a problem of Canadians voting less than once. That is a serious problem, and that is why we needed the things that the so-called Fair Elections Act got rid of. These were things like being able to vouch for someone and being able to provide one's voter card as a piece of ID when going to the polls.

None of this would have been necessary if it were not for changes that the former Harper Conservatives made back at the very beginning of their first mandate. For the first time, they made it a requirement that Canadians produce a piece of government issued photo ID in order to vote. That, again, hinted darkly at the idea that people were voting more than once because we did not have enough checks on this problem. It was a non-existent problem then and does not exist now. It never existed. That is the evidence of several chief electoral officers, including Marc Mayrand and Jean-Pierre Kingsley, who both testified to the PROC committee that it was a non-problem.

Bill C-23 did a few other things. It took away some of the abilities of our Chief Electoral Officer to speak to us as voters when we needed information. One of those critical moments was, for instance, the election in 2011. The Chief Electoral Officer sent out a press release and got on the phone and radio. Robocalls were going on. Canadians were being misdirected, being told that their polling stations had changed. None of that was true. We had an investigation. I do not think it was ever adequately investigated. We know it took place, but we do not know who did it. That is a mystery that remains unsolved, but I think we know there was a gun lying on the floor, it was smoking, and several people standing around appeared to have used it. We have no conclusion, but we know for sure that voters who did not intend to vote Conservative were being told to go to polling stations that did not exist.

The Chief Electoral Officer then had the power to get on the radio and say “If you get a message on the phone that tells you it's Elections Canada on the line and your polling station has changed, ignore it. We have not changed any polling stations”. That was important.

What Bill C-23 did in 2014 was to take away the ability of the Chief Electoral Officer to do exactly that. It took away the ability of the Chief Electoral Officer to reassure Canadians that their polling stations had not changed.

There were a number of other things that the so-called Fair Elections Act did. One was to say that if there were a particularly long writ period, more spending would be permitted. That meant that the really big parties, like the Conservatives or the Liberals, and this was certainly to the advantage of the Conservatives in that election, could spend more money if the writ period were longer. They spent a lot of money. In that election, they spent just shy of $42 million. The people of Canada gave them half back, because of the way the so-called Fair Elections Act operated to their benefit.

Moving quickly, we had two pieces of legislation tabled in this 42nd Parliament to deal primarily with fixing all of the things that had gone wrong or were perverse under Bill C-23 in the 41st Parliament. In December 2016, we got Bill C-33. I was thrilled to see it, but it never got to second reading. Everything in Bill C-33 was added to Bill C-76, which emerged this year.

Let me just go through the great things that were in the original Bill C-33 and are now before us in Bill C-76. It gave the Chief Electoral Officer back the powers to warn people, to talk to Canadians, and to educate people in a non-partisan fashion. It got rid of the extended period in which parties could get more money out of the whole system. That is now in Bill C-76. It actually shortened up the period and restricted how much money big parties could spend, which means that the taxpayers will reimburse them less at the end, which is great.

The first part of Bill C-33, which has now come forward within Bill C-76, brought back the basics, namely that people are allowed to bring someone with them to the polls to say, “I know Joe. He's my brother-in-law. We live in the same neighbourhood. He's missing a driver's licence because his driver's licence has been taken away from him. I am here to vouch for him.” Students voting at university have a very difficult time proving where they live and thus that they have the right to vote.

Far too many people were denied their constitutionally enshrined right to vote in 2015. The Conservatives said that voter turnout went up. Sure it did. Voters were desperate to get rid of Stephen Harper, and they showed up in large droves. However, the reality is that hundreds of thousands of Canadians were denied the right to vote because of the changes to the Elections Act that we are now getting rid of.

What is also really good and entirely new is the concept that the Chief Electoral Officer, that is, Elections Canada, can go into schools and try to encourage 14-year olds to register to vote for when they turn 18. They can start, right away, knowing that they are registered so that they can begin to think about their civic duty to vote.

The lack of voter turnout among our youngest citizens is a real problem. I would love to see us reduce the voting age to 16. That is not in this bill, but a good first step is allowing Elections Canada to go into the schools to talk to the young people when they are in high school. Their civics education will feel far more real when they are personally registering to vote. It is not that they have the right to vote, but they are pre-registered for when they turn 18 and do have the right to vote.

Bill C-76 does a number of other things. I do not think we will ever do enough to deal with the threats to social media, things like Cambridge Analytica, the way that Facebook information can be mined, the way that Facebook ads can be targeted, and the use of fake news. Bill C-76 attempts to deal with this. I think we are going to have to come back to it and do more. I certainly support what they have done in this bill.

I certainly support having pre-writ election spending limits. This was a big vacuum in our laws. I think it is because the last time we looked at the Elections Act, no political party was spending money pre-writ. They kept their money and started spending it after the writ fell. It was not until Stephen Harper's attacks on Stéphane Dion in January 2007 that we started having attack ads outside of a writ period with no spending controls at all. Now we have spending controls.

What is missing? Here is the big gap. This was our opportunity to put political parties under our privacy laws. This legislation says that political parties must develop privacy policies and table them, but that is a far cry from having them under our privacy laws. It is a voluntary scheme. We need to put political parties under our privacy laws.

Back when Bill C-23 was going through the House in 2014, during clause-by-clause consideration of the bill, I did try to get an amendment passed that would make political parties subject to the Privacy Act. No party supported that then. I really want to thank the New Democratic Party for supporting my amendment, which did not succeed, to set out that parties must adhere to the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, PIPEDA. We did not succeed, but I thank the NDP for being with me on that.

We need to keep working for fair elections in Canada. Bill C-76 gets us a long way toward them.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Mr. Speaker, free and fair elections are a fundamental part of our Canadian democracy. Unfortunately, the entire democratic institutions file has been a failure since the Liberals took office.

One of the greatest promises they made in the last election was that the 2015 election would be the last election under first past the post. There was no asterisk. There was no disclaimer. There was no fine print that said it would be the last election under first past the post unless, of course, they did not get the type of electoral system they wanted that would benefit them, “them” being the Liberal Party.

There was no such asterisk. There was no such small print. Nonetheless, the Liberals walked it back, and they blamed everyone else for their failure. They blamed the opposition. They blamed the committee itself. They blamed the multi-party committee, which came to a general consensus. They blamed that committee, which included Liberal members, for its failure. They blamed the general public for not having a clear consensus on what an alternative electoral system ought to be. However, the failure rests with the Liberal Party. It is, and it continues to be, the Liberal Party's failure.

While the Liberals were failing at the electoral reform committee, they also introduced Bill C-33, which they claimed would implement many of the recommendations from the Chief Electoral Officer following the 2015 election. Here are the facts. Bill C-33 was tabled at first reading on November 24, 2016, nearly two years ago. Today that bill remains at first reading, unmoved and unloved. We have to question the motivation of the current Liberal government in introducing that bill, then allowing it to sit at first reading and never once bringing it forward for debate in this august chamber.

In testimony at committee, when the eminent political science scholar, Dr. Paul Thomas, questioned the very motive of the Liberal Party, he said:

The government's management of this file has been very poor, in my opinion. If [Bill C-33] sits on the Order Paper for 18 months, it says something about the commitment of the government to get this moving ahead

However, that is exactly what has happened. The Liberals introduced legislation for window dressing and allowed it to sit idly by.

There are other failures in the democratic institutions file. Take cash for access, for example, and the ethical lapses of the current Liberal Party when it comes to fundraising. The Liberal government had barely been sworn in when it was already using its ministers to fundraise, using lobbyists who were registered to lobby their own ministers to fundraise from them. Rather than admitting that they were wrong to be fundraising from access to federal ministers, the Liberals tried to legitimize this practice by introducing Bill C-50. Of course, being Liberals, they left a great big loophole, what we call the Laurier Club loophole, allowing their well-funded Liberal donors to continue to have unfettered access to Liberal decision-makers, as long as it happened at Laurier Club events. They might as well have named that clause the Laurier Club loophole, because that is exactly what it is. Rather than dealing with the issue, rather than dealing with the unethical nature of selling access to senior ministers of the Crown, the Liberals simply used legislation to try to legitimize their bad practices.

The Liberals' failures do not end there. The Liberals even failed in the appointment process for the Chief Electoral Officer, the person in charge of ensuring that our elections run smoothly and appropriately, free from all interference.

The former chief electoral officer, to his great credit and foresight, announced that he would retire early from his position. He announced this in the spring of 2016 to allow whoever succeeded him as CEO to have enough time to get familiar with the job and to prepare for the 2019 election. However, at the end of December 2016, when he formally resigned and retired as chief electoral officer, there was no replacement in the offing. In fact, there was no replacement until this spring, nearly two years after Mr. Mayrand announced his retirement.

Even when they finally replaced the Chief Electoral Officer, they could not do it without failing. The media reported that a new Chief Electoral Officer had been chosen on April 4, 2018. They noted that someone had been selected, that the consultation had been done with the Leader of the Opposition and the leader of the third party.

Lo and behold, weeks later, we found out that the original name circulated in both the media and to the opposition was in fact not the new Chief Electoral Officer. Rather, the very competent interim Chief Electoral Officer was appointed as the permanent replacement. I have to wonder how the Liberals could have waited nearly two years to appoint the person who was already doing the job. It is yet another example of the Liberal government's failing on the democratic institutions file.

That brings us to this bill itself, Bill C-76. Both the former and current Chief Electoral Officers were very clear about the need to have this legislation tabled and implemented early so that they could be prepared for the next election. In fact, when the acting, now permanent, Chief Electoral Officer, Stéphane Perrault, appeared before committee, on April 24, 2018, he stated:

When I appeared last February, I indicated that the window of opportunity to implement major changes in time for the next election was rapidly closing. That was not a new message. Both Monsieur Mayrand and I had previously indicated that legislative changes should be enacted by April 2018. This means that we are now at a point where the implementation of new legislation will likely involve some compromises.

What did the Liberals do? They sat on their hands for nearly three years and then finally tabled Bill C-76 on April 30, 2018, the same day the Chief Electoral Officer said he needed legislation fully enacted, with royal assent. The Liberals only introduced it on April 30 and then expected the opposition and the third party to simply roll over and allow this legislation to pass expeditiously.

We cannot ignore the fact that this very debate we are having in this chamber is under the guillotine of time allocation. Frankly, I am shocked, because it was the Liberal Party and the Prime Minister who introduced and supported a motion that would have amended Standing Order 78 so that:

No motion, pursuant to any paragraph of this Standing Order, may be used to allocate a specified number of days or hours for the consideration and disposal of any bill that seeks to amend the Canada Elections Act or the Parliament of Canada Act.

Here we are with a bill that has 401 clauses and 352 pages. It is a bill the Liberal Party itself accepted as being flawed by introducing 65 amendments during the committee analysis, because it recognized that despite waiting nearly three years, it was rushing at the last minute to try to get some legislation on the books, and it tried to correct its own legislation this past summer.

We see that work has yet to be done in the Senate, in the other place. I am intrigued to see what amendments it will be relying on to fix some of the concerns expressed about this piece of legislation.

This legislation is flawed, and we will be voting against it.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

Mr. Speaker, if I recall, the debate was about changing Bill C-33, doing exactly what it is we are doing right now. That is the whole point of this. The point is to walk back what was done by the former Conservative government.

By the way, members of the NDP agreed with what we were doing at the time. I am assuming they are voting for this legislation for that reason alone.

There are so many egregious things that we wanted to fix and it is all done right here in Bill C-76. The whole point of the thing, as I said before, is that it was the making of a solution to a problem that did not exist. Right now, we are working it back because we truly believe it is an inalienable right for people to have access to vote in our democracy if they are above the age of 18 and a Canadian citizen. That is their right.

[Kevin Sorenson, Conservative, Battle River—Crowfoot, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is a real honour to rise today in the House to speak to Bill C-76, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act.

Today has been one of those days on Parliament Hill. We just had a committee looking at parents who have lost newborn children or during pregnancy. As we sat listening to the stories of those individuals, it brought, I think, most of the committee to tears.

However, this afternoon we are looking at a bill to amend the Elections Act. It shows the broad range of things that happen in Parliament. This morning we saw people who were genuinely affected and now we are seeing a bill brought in place that really, for all intents and purposes, will just give an advantage to the Liberal Party.

I should say, though, that I sincerely regret the fact that many of my colleagues are denied a similar opportunity to speak, given the Liberal government's decision to move time allocation on this bill. Having an opportunity with an appropriate amount of allotted time for MPs to express the views of their constituents is a fundamental principle of democracy upon which the House of Commons is founded. This opportunity is being denied.

It is for this reason that we on this side of the House adamantly oppose the Liberals' blatant, disrespectful manoeuvre. Shutting down this debate is disrespectful to MPs and, more importantly, disrespectful to those Canadians who want to be heard on this issue.

I am confident that Canadians will justifiably punish the Liberal government for silencing them on this very important issue of electoral reform. At the very crux of our democracy are elections and how we facilitate those elections is key, and yet Canadians have had their voices silenced on this.

I am equally confident that Canadians will take great exception to the bill before us today, which leaves our elections wide open to foreign interference. It does so to the benefit to the Liberal Party. It is widely suspected that in the 2015 federal election, Liberal candidates defeated their opponents in several key ridings due to foreign interference.

The speed the Liberals are trying to ram this legislation through Parliament a year before the 2019 election clearly shows their eagerness to once again win with just a little extra help. I firmly believe that every vote cast by a Canadian citizen matters. I will therefore continue to work with my Conservative colleagues to keep foreign entities from undermining our democratic institutions, especially through the very fundamental exercise of elections.

As my honourable colleague from Thornhill pointed out last Friday, Bill C-76 would double the total maximum third party spending amount allowed during the writ period and would allow unlimited contributions by individual donors and others, unlimited spending by third parties and unlimited foreign donations outside the pre-writ and the writ periods. Effectively, this loophole would allow foreign charities to give millions of foreign dollars to Canadian charities, and those millions, as my colleagues stated, can be disbursed as Canadian dollars to third party groups to support and oppose parties and candidates.

Canadians deserve to know where the money for elections is coming from and it is up to the Liberal government to ensure that third-party entities are being fully transparent and there is no undue and outside interference. Bill C-76 fails miserably in this regard.

It is also up to the government to ensure that non-resident electors are not treated the same as full-time residents, residents who are impacted in their daily lives by the regulations, decisions and economic realities and red tape of government. The individuals who are living here deal with all of these regulations. Allowing non-resident electors the vote, regardless of how long they have lived outside of Canada or whether they intend to ever return, is simply wrong.

Most non-residents were unable to vote in Canadian elections until 1993, when expats living outside Canada for fewer than five years and who intended to return were granted the right to vote by mail-in ballot. I wholeheartedly agree with the less-than-five-year rule, but obviously the Liberal government does not. Again, I believe that they do not agree because, for all intents and purposes, they are looking for ways to gain an advantage.

As a result, the legislation before us today goes further than simply restoring voting rights to short-term expats, because the Liberals feel it is to their advantage. Under Bill C-76, anyone who has ever lived in Canada would be able to vote. Following the introduction of Bill C-33, Bill C-76's predecessor, as noted in a November 2016 South China Morning Post article, “They would theoretically include most of the 300,000 Canadians who live in Hong Kong, most of whom are returnee emigrants and their children. Huge numbers of Hong Kongers emigrated to Canada ahead of the 1997 handover, but many have now returned as dual citizens.”

The article gives the example that when Hong Kong was returned to mainland China, many people came to Canada and other countries. Now, many of them have returned. The same article goes on to express the divergent views of two Hong Kong residents. One, a civil servant close to retirement who spent 11 years in Canada before leaving in 1995, said:

Having the right to vote is an honour, this will motivate me to pay more attention to their political news because I still have family members living in Canada and I will spend more time over there after I retire.

In that article, he said he would vote in Canada at the time of an election if he were allowed to.

The same article made a comparison with a 39-year-old high school teacher in Hong Kong, who was born in Canada, but who said he would not vote, because he said:

I only lived there for 10 years when I was young. I do not know that much about Canadian politics and have not been following closely of their news, so I believe it would be irresponsible for me to vote.

I would agree with that. It would be irresponsible, as it is irresponsible for the current Liberal government, to lift the less-than-five-year voting restriction and thereby open up the system to abuse. It is irresponsible for individuals who have no idea of the issues, no idea of the candidates and no idea of what is really happening, to put an X when their country and their passion is where they are residing, as was the case with this 39-year-old, for some 29 years.

Another measure in Bill C-76 that would leave the Canadian democratic process open to abuse is the use of the voter identification card as acceptable voter ID. In the last election in 2015, nearly one million erroneous voter identification cards were given out, creating huge potential for voter fraud. I cannot support a bill that has the potential to undermine our highly respected electoral system as a result of voter ID cards being taken as a valid form of identification when we know that out of the 16 million or 17 million people who were eligible to vote in the last election, more than a million of them were given erroneous cards.

What the government is trying to enshrine in this bill works against fair elections. It works against the very principles of democracy. When anyone is willing to take away the rights of someone else to advance his or her own, I would warn Canadians, because if Liberals are willing to take that from someone else, what will they be willing to take from Canadians in the future?

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Mr. Speaker, for the sake of novelty, I thought I would do my entire speech without yelling or screaming, even once. Let us see if that helps to set the tone for the rest of the debate. I thought it was going pretty well until the last intervention and then we sort of went off the rails.

I want to start by dealing with a couple of things that have nothing to do with Bill C-76.

The first is to draw attention to the poppy on my lapel. There has been a developing tradition here the last couple of years where members will be wearing poppies that are different from the traditional ones put out by the legion. Sometimes they are an aboriginal poppy. Sometimes they have some other significance. The one I am wearing is done by the women's axillary at the Perth legion and the funds go directly to the local legion.

I also want to take a moment to deal with a matter that is near and dear to my heart, as I was unable to do so in any other spot. It is the issue of freedom of religion and the right to worship safely and peacefully. I am speaking of course of the tragedy that occurred last Saturday at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I chaired an all-party parliamentary committee dealing with anti-Semitism and, subsequently, along with the Liberal MP, co-edited a book about anti-Semitism. This is the very worst example of anti-Semitism we have seen in recent years on our continent. Like all members, I speak in solidarity with that.

I want to mention one other thing before I move on from this topic. I learned of this tragedy because I was informed of it by an email sent out by an Islamic group called LaunchGood, which raises money to assist people who face tragedies of this sort. Typically, these are tragedies within the Muslim community. A year ago, I and a number of other people, including some MPs, contributed to the LaunchGood effort to raise money for one of the survivors of the Quebec mosque shooting. This time, it is raising money on behalf of the victims of the synagogue shooting. That is indication of the kind of generosity and spirit we see among the great religions of the world and those who truly believe in their faith.

None of that is germane to Bill C-76, which I will turn to now. I will be splitting my time with the member for Battle River—Crowfoot, who like me is a survivor of the class of 2000. His riding name is more appropriate with time, as all of us who have been here since 2000 are developing deeper and deeper “crowfoots” at the corner of our eyes. It has been a great pleasure to serve beside him and the other veterans.

In dealing with Bill C-76, I will delve into a number of the issues relating to the way the government has pushed all too little on the bill until the last minute and now is in a panic to get it done in time to go into effect for the next election. This has been an unnecessary delay. I will return to that theme if there is time.

However, I want to start by talking about an issue that arose today, which is the proposed amendment to the motion before the House. That is the amendment introduced by my colleague and my New Democratic colleague calling for us to return it to committee so we can deal with the issue of by-elections.

There is a by-election under way now in the riding to my south, where my esteemed late colleague Gord Brown served. He sat in the seat near me. He passed away earlier this year. The Prime Minister took the maximum allowed period of time before calling a by-election for that riding. This means that the people in Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes have gone without representation far longer than is appropriate. Shame on the Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister has failed to call several by-elections for several vacancies, including the one in Burnaby South, where the New Democratic candidate is the current leader of the New Democrats, Jagmeet Singh. There can be only one purpose in delaying that by-election. It cannot be because the Prime Minister was caught off guard by this or because there is some kind of impediment keeping him from doing this. The former member for Burnaby South, Mr. Kennedy Stewart, our former colleague, resigned on September 14. However, he made public the letter to the Speaker in which he announced his intention to resign on August 2. He made it clear back in May that he intended to resign. That is now four months in the past. The by-election should have been called immediately.

There can only be one purpose for delaying this by-election. Take account of all the insincere posturing about being a friend of democracy we hear from the Prime Minister of Canada right now. The reason for delaying this by-election is to ensure Jagmeet Singh does not get to take a seat in the House until the last second.

Why would the Prime Minister do this? Because this is an extraordinarily effective tactic for neutering the leaders of opposing parties. We saw an example of just how this works the year I was elected. It was also the year my colleague from Battle River—Crowfoot was elected. We were elected November 27, 2000. The election was called, a snap election, in mid-October of 2000. Our former leader, Stockwell Day, was newly elected in a by-election on September 11, 2000. He came to the House, began speaking here, was beginning to bite and have some effect so the prime minister called an election to essentially neuter him before he could become effective.

The Prime Minister can no longer easily affect the date of the election, but he has the ability to delay and delay the calling of a by-election in order to ensure Jagmeet Singh will meet with a similar fate, that he will be unable to come here, advocate effectively for the causes he believes in and start nibbling into Liberal support from the left, just as our leader has been very effective in doing so from the right. That is an affront to democracy.

I do not care how many sincere looks the Prime Minister gives the camera while he explains whatever his ostensible motivation is. The fact is that he is stripping away a vital aspect of parliamentary democracy. There is a real need to deal with this sort of thing, to prevent this sort of misuse, especially when it comes to the election of party leaders to the House of Commons.

We have always had a practice of showing a kind of courtesy. I thought Jean Chrétien was egregious in his abuse and violation in turning away from that practice when he called a snap election in 2000. However, he really does not hold a candle to a prime minister who seems to simply want to hold off the by-election forever. It is wrong, it is always wrong and it is wrong when the Prime Minister does it.

Let me talk a bit the urgency of getting this bill through and the need to use time allocation. The Liberals introduced legislation dealing with elections changes, Bill C-33, in November 2016. Then they never brought it forward. Over a year later, they came out with the replacement for Bill C-33, containing most of what Bill C-33 contained plus some new additions. That is the current legislation, Bill C-76.

The year-long delay is not the fault of the opposition; it is the fault of the government. The government likes to say that the opposition was constantly filibustering in committee and it could not get anything done. The procedure and House affairs committee, on which I sit, met in the spring to deal with the bill and then it met again mid-September when the House resumed.

An entire summer went by during which this committee did not meet. It could have met. There is nothing stopping a committee from meeting over the summer. Indeed, a couple of years ago, another committee I was on, the committee on electoral reform, met all through the summer. This past summer, a number of committees met. Some of them met several times. This committee could have done that. That is not the fault of the opposition parties; it is the fault of the government.

Going back yet further, the government could have started dealing with this legislation much earlier. Instead, it chose to deal with its electoral reform that would change our electoral system, and there were hearings on it. It delayed that for the better part or a year in order to consume enough time that only one electoral system could possibly be put forward and implemented in time for the 2019 election, which is preferential voting because it does not require redistribution.

At this point, there has been a delay of about two and a half years out of the three years that have gone by so far. All of it is because of the government's own delays. The government has tried to say that it ought to impose closure, limiting debate on a 300-page bill, because we dragged our heels. My response to that is that the government's mismanagement ought not to constitute my crisis nor ought to constitute a crisis for the people of Canada.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Madam Speaker, I am happy to rise here today to speak to Bill C-76, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act. I am somewhat happily surprised to get this speaking opportunity, as we are debating this under time allocation.

The irony is, if it was not so serious, it is a bit delicious debating a bill that would change the rules around our elections, the foundation of our democracy, under time allocation after only a couple of hours of debate on the committee report. It is doubly ironic because the Liberals used closure to limit debate on second reading as well back in the spring. I remember that. Maybe it is a triple irony, because in the previous Parliament, the Liberals used one of their opposition days to debate a motion that time allocation must never be used to cut off debate on any bill that touches on our electoral system, and they have already done it twice here.

The history of this bill, as the previous member touched on, goes back to the time of Conservative Bill C-23, the so-called “Fair Elections Act” of 2014. If there was ever an Orwellian name for a bill, that was it. Among other things, that act made it more difficult for many Canadians to vote and ordered Elections Canada not to educate Canadians about the electoral process.

Both the Liberals and the NDP ran in the 2015 election on a promise to repeal Bill C-23 and get rid of the first-past-the-post electoral system once and for all. What have the Liberals done with regard to the Fair Elections Act? In late 2016, they tabled Bill C-33, and then sat on it for 18 months and did nothing. Then they tabled this bill, Bill C-76, on April 30 of this year, which included the measures of Bill C-33. That is a little late, because the Chief Electoral Officer had given the government a deadline of April 30 to pass any legislation around election changes because they had to be ready for the 2019 election. The government was a bit late with its homework there.

Here we are almost two years after the government tabled C-33, its first attempt at electoral reform, two years after it broke its promise that the 2015 election was going to be the last election run under the first-past-the-post system, and five months past the Chief Electoral Officer's deadline for legislation to be passed in time for the 2019 federal election.

What is in this bill that we have been waiting for all these months and years? To be fair to the government, I will start with some of the good measures we are happy to see on this side of the aisle. In fact, many of them are changes the NDP has been calling on the government to do for some time. It would limit the writ period of any election to 50 days, thus eliminating the chance for another marathon election like the 70-day campaign we had in 2015. That is great news for all Canadians, not just for candidates. I would like to thank my NDP colleague, the member for Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, for suggesting this to the government in the form of his private member's bill.

I am happy to see two parts of this bill that would encourage young people to get informed and involved in the electoral process. Like many MPs, I go to a lot of schools to talk about government and the electoral process. During the Thanksgiving break I spent a whole day at Grand Forks Secondary giving classes on civics, and a couple of classes on biology as well, because I was a biologist in my former life, but that is outside the scope of this topic.

The questions I get asked at school talks are often much more informed than those I get at open town halls. Unfortunately, the turnout for young voters at elections is usually well below that of older voters, so I am happy Bill C-76 would allow the registration of future electors between the ages of 14 years and 17 years. This simple act has been shown in other jurisdictions to increase the proportion of young people who vote after they turn 18.

Unfortunately, the Liberals voted down an NDP amendment to this bill that asked the government to study the possibility of lowering the voting age to 17. We allow young Canadians to join the military at age 17, but for some reason we do not want to give them the right to vote in our elections, to give them a voice for their future in this country.

Second, this bill would remove the ban on public education programs conducted by the Chief Electoral Officer through Elections Canada. Why this ban was put in place in the so-called Fair Elections Act is beyond me. However, I welcome the opportunity for Elections Canada to inform and educate Canadians about the electoral process.

Bill C-76 would also bring back the process of vouching to allow electors without proper ID to vote, as well as allowing the use of the voter ID card for the same purpose. These were disallowed under the Fair Elections Act in an effort that seemed to want to solve a non-existent problem, that of voter fraud, for which there are vanishingly few if any examples of, by creating a much more serious problem that inhibited Canadians, particularly disadvantaged citizens, from voting at all. We should be encouraging Canadians to vote and this will be a step in the right direction at last.

Unfortunately, the government missed an opportunity to increase gender equality in Canadian elections, to increase the number of women running as candidates. The Liberal government talks glowingly about its commitment to gender equality, but does next to nothing in the bill to advance that.

Canada is far behind other countries in gender equity in political representation. My former colleague, Kennedy Stewart, now the mayor of Vancouver, put forward a private member's bill that would have strongly encouraged parties to increase the proportion of female candidates in future elections. Unfortunately, the government voted that bill down and failed to include its provisions in this bill.

There is no ban on foreign third party spending or activity. We have seen evidence of how foreign activity has affected elections in the United States and the UK. We need to ban that from Canadian elections. We hear almost daily stories of election tampering in those areas and others.

Canadians are deeply concerned about privacy issues during election campaigns. Political parties amass huge amounts of personal information on voters, yet there is nothing in the bill that covers this.

The present Chief Electoral Officer, Stéphane Perrault, said in committee, “If there is one area where the bill failed, it is privacy. The parties are not subjected to any kind of privacy regime.”

The Privacy Commissioner, Daniel Therrien, said that the bill had “nothing of substance in regards to privacy.”

No one at committee spoke against more stringent privacy requirements. Everyone was concerned that we did not go far enough.

I will close by bringing up the big thing missing from the bill and that of course is real electoral reform.

The Liberals, the NDP and the Green Party all campaigned on a promise that 2015 would be the last election under first past the post. Over 60% of Canadian voters supported that idea. For many Canadians, that was the most important promise of the election.

Canadians were tired of elections that gave parties with less than 40% of the vote a 100% of the power in a majority government. The Harper government was an example and the present Liberal government is another. Unfortunately, once the Liberals were in power, they forgot about that promise.

The Liberals say they want to increase the participation of Canadians in the electoral process. They say that Bill C-76 is their answer to this. However, the incredible cynicism on their lack of action on real electoral reform has already had a negative effect on how Canadians feel about their elected representatives and whether it is even worth voting in the next election.

I support many of the reforms contained in Bill C-76, but it falls short in so many ways. Like so many bills we see in this place, it is a tentative step in the right direction, but we need to go further.

Let us get rid of big money in elections. Let us ban foreign interference in elections. Let us protect the privacy of Canadians. Let us get back on track to getting rid of first past the post, so every vote will count.

Bill C-76—Time Allocation Motion

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Mr. Speaker, here we are once again with time allocation on an electoral reform bill, on a bill that would change how we run our elections.

I wish I could say I am surprised by the Liberals, but this is yet another failure on their part. They failed when they tried to do electoral reform. When they did not get what they wanted, they left it. Bill C-33, introduced in November 2016, was left unmoved and unloved on the Order Paper for the last two years.

The Chief Electoral Officer and the former chief electoral officer both said they needed legislation passed with royal assent by April 30 of this year, yet this legislation was not even introduced in this place until April 30. This was yet another failure on the part of the Liberals.

Why will they not just admit this is another attempt to game the system in their favour?

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Thank you.

In terms of the scope of the bill, C-76, unlike C-33, is much broader in its approach. There are all sorts of things we're trying to deal with in the way that our elections are conducted.

NDP-23 talks about how it is that candidates are preferred and the reimbursement system, which is also part of our elections act, as well as the way this is managed. How does that fall outside its scope? Our surface reading of this was that C-76 was an overhaul of the Elections Act. How Elections Canada interacts with the parties, reimbursements, going after receipts—all that stuff is within this bill.

This is simply a policy amendment to encourage a policy outcome. In this case, it seeks to have the Prime Minister's self-defined feminism actually happen by having more women present themselves as candidates and hopefully get elected.

I'm trying to figure where you're interpreting that this falls outside of that scope.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

It was introduced on the date by which the Chief Electoral Officer stated that he needed the legislation fully passed, after leaving Bill C-33 unmoved and unloved at second reading during that period of time—

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Minister and your team, for being here.

I'm looking through the amendments that your government has moved to this bill and I'm considering the track that has taken us here. It has been 700 days since you introduced Bill C-33, which was the original effort to get rid of the unfair elections act. It's five months past the deadline that was set by Elections Canada to bring these changes to completion and into law. It more than two years after the broken promise to make 2015 the last election under the first-past-the-post system.

I'm surprised, because I thought there would be more in here on things that your government, and you personally, have claimed to support, and because you seem unsupportive of things that I think would help.

I think of the launch of the parliamentary session. The Prime Minister said to your caucus, “Add women. Change politics is how we will make a better country.”

One of the Liberal fundraising ads said, ”Canada needs more women from diverse backgrounds making decisions in Ottawa. Because when women succeed, we all succeed.”

We have an amendment in here that is based upon a model that Ireland and other countries have used. In the case of Ireland, it increased the participation of women candidates by 90% and helped elect 40% more women to their parliament.

We're ranked 61st in the world right now, Minister. You know this, of course. The Parliament is 26% women, and at the current pace, as the Daughters of the Vote pointed out to the Prime Minister, it will take 90 years to get to equity in our legislature, yet you're planning to vote against an amendment to get us there, an amendment as has been applied in other democracies.

Did you get the IT alert that I received just recently from our IT service department here in Ottawa? It just happened a couple of hours ago. It was an IT alert for a Facebook data breach. You commissioned a report, which was delivered to you by the CSE, and I'm quoting from that report. It said:

...almost certainly, political parties and politicians, and the media are more vulnerable to cyber threats and related influence operations....

The Privacy Commissioner has said that one of the ways to counter those threats to our democracy is to include political parties under privacy rules. The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association just wrote to you and said that the provisions on privacy are so inadequate as to be meaningless, and the current Privacy Commissioner has said that Bill C-76—this bill—has “nothing of substance” when it comes to privacy.

British Columbia has existed under these privacy rules for 15 years. Parties have been able to communicate effectively with voters. Europe has had it for 20 years, and they've been effectively able to communicate with their voters.

We're proposing Sunday voting, which the former Chief Electoral Officer has promoted. In other democracies, it has increased voter participation by 6% to 7%.

I guess what I find confusing about all of this is that I'm trying to match the words and the rhetoric of your government with your actions when we now have an opportunity to do something about it. You've been in office for three years. Here's an opportunity to deal with the rules that guide us as politicians, that guide the electoral process. I would think that one of your fundamental mandates would be to increase the participation of women and diverse voices, yet your party has chosen to protect all incumbents, thereby ensuring the status quo. The status quo should be unacceptable to everybody.

When we have amendments that would help more women become candidates, help more women and diverse voices actually get elected, you want to vote against them. We see the cyber-threats and the cybersecurity issues that your own agency identified after your request to investigate, but this bill has nothing in it to increase protection of data and privacy.

When the current Chief Electoral Officer was here testifying, we asked him what he knew about what the parties gather in terms of the data on Canadians, and he said, “I have no idea.” Your report says that we, as political parties, are vulnerable to attacks and that Canada as a country is susceptible to these attacks. Having watched Brexit, having watched the U.S. elections, we have important and very recent examples of the reasons to strengthen privacy laws, but this bill has nothing in it.

Seven hundred days after introducing the first iteration of this bill, five months after passing over the deadline set by Elections Canada to get us to this place so we can introduce these changes, and after having made so many promises to women and diverse groups to do better, we're offering opportunities to do better through amendments, based on evidence that is in front of us.

Your government claims to be evidence-based. We are using evidence to improve the things that your government and your party claim to want to improve, and you're choosing not to do them. My question is, why?

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

I do appreciate that I have the floor, Mr. Graham. If you want a Simms protocol, I'm always happy to yield the floor for a Simms protocol. The fact is that the minister has indicated she's willing to come back. I will take her at her word on that.

I have a great deal of respect for many Liberals, many on this committee and many who no longer sit in the House. One of those people I have a great deal of respect for is Stéphane Dion. Monsieur Dion said this:

This bill comes after a long wait. It took the government two long years to introduce this bill, as though it cost the government a great deal to do so. This long wait was then followed by a suspicious haste to rush the bill through, to speed up the parliamentary process, as though the government had something to hide. It wants to rush through a 252-page bill that has to do with electoral democracy.

It's interesting that Mr. Dion said this during the debate on Bill C-23 because this is what happened with Bill C-33 tabled in November 2016, which was left unmoved, unloved on the Order Paper, and has never been debated at second reading. Then on April 30, towards the end of the spring sitting of Parliament, Bill C-76 is tabled. It is tabled, I would suggest, with some deal of haste, as Mr. Dion suggested with Bill C-23, and here we are. Here we are facing a guillotine motion with a hard end date. That's the right of the government to do so. That's the right of the committee to agree.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

I appreciate the comments from Mr. Christopherson. I do. I appreciate where he comes from.

Very briefly, on his comment about timing, Bill C-33 was introduced in the House on November 24, 2016, almost 24 months ago. The government had time. A four-year mandate is a lot of time in which to move legislation forward. Here we are, literally in the last 12 months, or even less, because when we adjourn at the end of June, we are done until the election. We are literally in the last eight to 10 months of sitting, and we are dealing with a substantial piece of legislation.

That's unfortunate. It's a big bill. It has things we will support, and it has challenges we won't support. They are hills that we don't need to die on. We recognize that. We recognize that this is a bill that the government has introduced and that you have the numbers to go forward with it.

Mr. Chair, I will leave my comments there for now. I don't know what the protocol is, but I'll leave it to your good graces.

[Stéphane Perrault]

Bill C-33 was much narrower in scope. It did not provide a whole lot of discretion to the Chief Electoral Officer, so what I'm looking at are largely mandatory aspects, and I have no issue with those. There was some discretion but not a whole lot. For example, they were talking about the possibility of doing mobile advance polls for remote communities.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

We're almost two years past when C-33 was first introduced. Imagining a scenario in which this bill had passed in the spring, is it fair to say you would have had that discretion and would have likely implemented all the aspects of C-76?

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Thank you very much. Thanks, John.

I haven't addressed you since your official designation as our Chief Electoral Officer. I want to congratulate you personally. I think you're a wonderful choice.

I'm very worried about timelines. I would have liked to see C-33 move ahead when it was at first reading in December 2016. Now we have C-76. I generally support this legislation. It's in the House. We're going to go to clause-by-clause soon, and then it goes to the Senate and royal assent.

I know you're doing a lot of due diligence preparedness as though this was going to become the law, but I'd like you to give us a sense of when royal assent is necessary so that you can actually be ready for an election in the fall, assuming we stick to our fixed election date under the legislation and don't have a snap election. What's the drop-dead date for royal assent?

[Chris Aylward, National President, Public Service Alliance of Canada]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the committee for allowing us to appear today.

The Public Service Alliance of Canada represents 180,000 members. We are the largest union in the federal public service.

Bill C-76 proposes extensive changes that have a significant impact on our democratic process. We strongly support the amendments in the bill that will remove barriers to voting and make it more accessible.

My comments will focus on changes related to third parties.

Our usual election activity is to inform our members about issues and encourage them to exercise their political rights and to vote. We do this by communicating with them in a number of ways, including advertising. During the last federal election and in a number of previous elections, the Public Service Alliance of Canada registered as a third party.

Bill C-76 has not changed the definition of third party election advertising; however, the definition curtails our right to represent our members' interests during an election period. Messages we transmit that can be received or seen by the public, such as information posted on bulletin boards or included in flyers, are considered to be election advertising if they take a position on an issue that a registered party or candidate is associated with or if the message opposes a registered party.

I challenge you to think of an issue that affects Canadians and our members that cannot be associated with a party, leader, or candidate at some time or another. The vast majority of our members are employed by the federal government and by federal agencies controlled or regulated by the government, and we take on issues associated with registered parties on an ongoing basis. It is our role and responsibility to advance their interests and concerns, and our right to do so has been upheld by the courts.

The existing restrictions on third party advertising, the proposed changes to the election period, and the introduction of new pre-election periods deny our legitimate advocacy role. This is particularly crucial when governments attempt to prevent our members from speaking out on issues and to restrict their political rights and activities because they are government employees.

During the last federal election period, we were in the middle of bargaining with Treasury Board for approximately 100,000 members. When we demonstrated against the government's proposals, Elections Canada advised us that the messages on our picket signs and banners might be considered election advertising under the Elections Act. They were seen as transmitting a message to the public during an election period that could be seen as opposing a registered party or speaking out on an issue associated with a registered party—in this case, the previous governing party.

Bill C-76 proposes to extend similar although not identical restrictions during a new pre-election period. The difference is that advertising during the pre-election period excludes messages that take a position on an issue associated with political parties and their candidates or leaders; however, the restrictions could still be interpreted to put limits on what we can say publicly about positions being taken by our government employers.

I refer you to the landmark 1991 Supreme Court case of Lavigne and the Ontario Public Service Employees Union. In that decision, the court affirmed the interconnected nature of political activity and union interests, or democratic unionism. The court said that many political activities, “be they concerned with the environment, tax policy, day-care or feminism, can be construed as related to the larger environment in which unions must represent their members”. Note that the court said “must represent their members” in this “larger environment”.

We are also concerned about the unnecessary burden the proposed legislation would put on unions to track and report all advertising expenses between elections. PSAC is a large organization, with 15 relatively autonomous components and over 1,000 locals; however, the third party provision treats us as a single entity. We would now be required to monitor all those parts in order to report expenses related to messages to the public amounting to $10,000 or more between an election and the pre-election period.

In conclusion, we ask the committee to review the proposed sections on third party advertising very carefully before proceeding with the bill so as not to affect the legitimate rights of unions to speak out on behalf of their members. We also ask you to consider splitting the bill and moving quickly to deal with the sections where there is general agreement and support, such as the sections that were originally contained in Bill C-33, and spend more time assessing the changes proposed by Bill C-76 before making other adjustments to the federal elections process.

Thank you for your time.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

We do, too.

I'm starting to believe that, as my grandmother used to say, a lack of planning on your part doesn't make for a crisis on mine. I was eight years old at the time, but she had a point that still stays with me today when I look at this bill. With days to study it, virtually every committee meeting we've had has been interrupted by votes. We've rarely gone through an entire cycle, yet I, too, am supporting some of what you've said here. I'm in support of some of what I'll call the enfranchisement pieces of the bill.

There are a number of questions outstanding, particularly around privacy, the loophole you talked about in commingling, and some of the pre-writ conversations we've had as to whether they're fair between the government and non-government parties.

I'm wondering if the bill needs to be split. I'm wondering if we need to expedite the pieces that there has been some dispute about but more of a consensus around—the Bill C-33 components. There have been a lot of questions about the second part, the third party, the commingling loophole, and the lack of privacy restrictions of parties. What do you think of that suggestion?

[Dr. Paul Thomas, Professor Emeritus, Political Studies, University of Manitoba, As an Individual]

Thank you very much. I have submitted a brief to the committee, and it has been translated and circulated. I will try to stay strictly within the five-minute limit and make five brief points in five minutes so the chair doesn't have to bring down the guillotine on me.

The first point, and an integrating theme of my brief to the committee, is that Bill C-76 is an excellent illustration of how technical and complicated election law has become in response to changing social, technological, and political activities within Canada and elsewhere. Under those conditions, Elections Canada needs a very diverse and flexible set of policy tools in order to plan for and execute elections. In other words, unlike the traditional Canada Elections Act, which is very detailed and prescriptive, we need a future act that grants broader authority to the professionals within Elections Canada. Bill C-76 goes some way in this direction. It grants the CEO of Elections Canada more authority to conduct the operations of the election, it grants the commissioner administrative monetary penalties, and it makes use of written interpretations and opinions, and so on.

Second, overall, this bill is worthwhile. I endorse it in general terms. I endorse the features that are brought forward from Bill C-33 that made changes to the more problematic features of the so-called Fair Elections Act. I like some of the new features that are included within the bill, such as the creation of a pre-writ period ceiling on party and advocacy advertising, tags on all advertising, and so on.

Then I shift in my brief to three concerns I have. The greatest disappointment for me is the failure to bring political parties under the provisions of the privacy acts in Canada and to provide a route to address privacy concerns through the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. This bill essentially says that the parties will be left to regulate themselves with respect to privacy practices. Not my preferred one, but a second-best solution would require the Privacy Commissioner, not Elections Canada, to give the parties' privacy policies and practices a Good Housekeeping seal of approval. On the second part of that concern, another option I would suggest is that annually the parties publish online a statement of what has gone on with respect to their privacy activities, including the education of their members and staff, and so on, on any privacy complaints that have come up.

My fourth point has to do with the flow of foreign money and foreign influence into Canadian elections. As I read the bill, and I'm not a lawyer, there appears to be a loophole in the bill that allows for the commingling of foreign and domestic funds, including the support to advocacy groups, third parties as they're called in the bill. I don't see any easy fix to this problem through legislation or regulation, but I note the provision in the bill for a prohibition on collusion. It may be over time, through the operation of the collusion clause, that precedents will develop that will restrict but probably not eliminate completely the potential for foreign influence in Canadian elections.

My fifth point and final concern has to do with the pre-writ period beginning on June 30. The point I'm making there in the brief is the need to align the timing of restrictions on partisan and advocacy advertising with the ban on government advertising that currently flows out of an administrative policy statement. It is not based on legislation. That ban requires the ads to stop 90 days before voting day. The two periods should be aligned so that you set up a situation where the government is, in effect, in a caretaker situation and any benefit that might come to the governing party from government advertising would be eliminated.

My final observation is that this bill should have been proceeded with much earlier, or an earlier version of a bill, perhaps. It has been left late.

I know the professionals at Elections Canada do their utmost to execute the provisions of the bill, but we have to get into the habit of treating these deadlines for planning an election more seriously.

Thank you very much. I look forward to questions.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

She means the CEO's report, not Bill C-33.

[Filomena Tassi, Liberal, Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas, ON]

I thought the 30 hours was to the end of today. It's actually to the end of Thursday; by the end of Thursday we will have had 30 hours. I'm not making the point to end discussion. I'm making the point to say that a suggestion that we haven't had witnesses or listened to witnesses in a robust way I think is misrepresentative, particularly in light of the fact that Bill C-33 is also in this bill, which we also spent numerous hours on.

I'd like to get a response from the clerk, not right now, but maybe the next time we meet, as to how many hours of witnesses we heard there. I want to make that point. I don't want to drag this out. I don't want it to be misrepresented that we haven't heard from witnesses.

[Filomena Tassi, Liberal, Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas, ON]

As of Thursday, it will be 30 hours. I don't know what it was with Bill C-33, which is included in this. I would like the clerk to tell us.

[Filomena Tassi, Liberal, Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas, ON]

Could we just recap?

Although the suggestion is that we haven't studied this, I feel like it's all that I've studied for months and months. Can the clerk confirm that we've had about 30 hours of witnesses? Do you have the number? That doesn't include the next few days of witnesses. It's in addition to that. For Bill C-33, we studied for....

I'm just concerned about it being suggested that we haven't studied this sufficiently. I am happy if there are witnesses who want to come forward soon, but I don't appreciate the comment that we haven't studied this. I feel that we have studied it. We have 30 plus hours already and we have another—

[Justine De Jaegher]

Again, we really wanted to emphasize that the elements featured in Bill C-33 are again featured in this bill. We're leaving some of the other areas up to other experts that you'll be speaking to.

[Justine De Jaegher]

We're generally supportive of the legislation, including those changes. The one area in which we really can't proclaim to be any kind of expert is more on the cybersecurity pieces. Obviously we're glad that you're speaking to experts in that area.

However, other than that, we're quite happy with this legislation. Again, our concern is primarily with the timing. We feel it's a bit late, unfortunately. We were hoping to see Bill C-33 passed much earlier to make sure that it came into effect before the next election.

[Coty Zachariah, National Chairperson, Canadian Federation of Students]

[Witness speaks in Mohawk]

I was just speaking Mohawk and said, “Hello, everyone.” My name is Coty Zachariah, or “He Speaks in the Wind”. I come from the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte First Nation, located near Kingston. I'm also the national chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students and represent around 650,000 students across the country at the post-secondary level.

In October 2014, we joined the Council of Canadians in a charter challenge to the voter suppression elements of the so-called Fair Elections Act. Our primary concerns about the act were with regard to prohibiting the authority of the Chief Electoral Officer, or CEO, to authorize the use of the voter information cards as valid ID for voting, and limiting the CEO's authority to carry out voter education and outreach.

Students face additional barriers to voting, notably that students move frequently, often up to twice a year. As a result, common identification cards do not indicate the address that students live at on election day, or their names are not on the voters list in the poll or riding that they live in while they attend school. Moreover, by limiting the CEO's authority to carry out voter education and outreach, students, who are often new voters, are likely to be more confused about the process.

Despite these barriers in the last election, the CFS undertook a massive, non-partisan elections campaign that worked to mobilize students to come out in record numbers to vote. In 2015, 70,000 student voters took part in the democratic process at on-campus polling stations. It led to an expansion of that initial pilot project within Elections Canada. For 18- to 24-year-olds, turnout was 57.1%, compared to 38.8% in 2011. This increase of 18.3 percentage points is the largest increase of voting engagement in any demographic in the country. However, this increase was in spite of the Fair Elections Act and students still faced issues.

To quote the Chief Electoral Officer's post-2015 election retrospective report:

As in the previous two elections, problems with voter identification at the polls were more often related to proof of address. The labour force survey after the 42nd general election asked non-voters why they did not vote. In terms of reasons related to the electoral process, the inability to prove identity or address was the main reason cited ... and was more often cited among those aged 18 to 24.... Based on estimations from the survey, that amounts to approximately 172,700 electors. Among them, some 49,600 (28.7%) said they went to the polling station, but did not vote because they were not able to prove their identity and address. Approximately 39% of that group were aged 18 to 34.

We at CSF find that unacceptable. Students, however, are encouraged to see that Bill C-76 would make substantial reform to the Canada Elections Act, including the amendments formerly set in Bill C-33, and we look forward to seeing it passed.

We are discouraged, however, that these reforms are coming so late. It seems likely that even if Bill C-76 proceeds expeditiously, it would not make it through the Senate and be proclaimed into force until 2019, making it unlikely that Elections Canada could fully implement the bill's reforms before the next general election in October of next year. It seems likely that it is our court case with the Council of Canadians that might result in the necessary reforms around voter suppression being implemented prior to this election, a regretful outcome of a delayed process around Bill C-33 that we would like noted.

We believe student and youth participation in the democratic process is something to be celebrated and not discouraged. We hope that Bill C-76 will promote this principle.

Thank you.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Wouldn't that have been great 18 months ago, in Bill C-33?

If you were a government and you said a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian, for example, and that they should be allowed to vote, and this was important to you, and you introduced the bill 18 months ago and then did nothing, what are you telling the expat community?

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

They're only obligated to do that because the government didn't move Bill C-33, which they introduced a year and a half ago. If that bill had been moved a year and a half ago would you still be in court and would we be spending taxpayer money arguing against what the government has said?

[Professor Henry Milner, Associate Fellow, Department of Political Science, Université de Montréal, As an Individual]

I was under the misapprehension that I was going to be one of five, but it turned out that the five are the entire morning session, rather than just this hour. That is okay with me, but it means that I haven't prepared an exhaustive critique or analysis of Bill C-76. I'm just going to talk about the things that are of particular interest to me and where I think I can make a contribution.

The first thing is you will see in my presentation that I've done this before. It's nice to come to such a situation and be basically positive, rather than be here to criticize and be negative, which is the more normal situation for people like me. Much of my efforts have been around electoral reform. That experience was slightly less positive, if I may say, than this one will turn out to be, I think.

I think that I was in front of the same committee—although I think it was across the street from Parliament—being critical of the Fair Elections Act for various problems with it that seemed to have been rectified in Bill C-33, which I was happy to see presented way back when. I had assumed that this issue was now going to be resolved, but it turns out it's only now that the process continues. It has been widened, as I don't have to tell you, with a number of other areas.

From my point of view, the crucial aspect is access to make it easier for people to inform themselves. That's my specialization, political knowledge. I've published a great deal about that, including the political knowledge of young people, by comparing different countries, including Canada, and physical access to the voting booth in terms of some of the restrictions that were brought into the Fair Elections Act that have been removed in Bill C-76.

In my own work, my particular concern has been on the political knowledge aspect, so I was very concerned with the Fair Elections Act's efforts to reduce the ability of Elections Canada to provide information, especially to young people, but not only to young people, so they would be more able to participate in an election at the right time. I think that those aspects of Bill C-33 have found their way into Bill C-76, in terms of the role of Elections Canada, in terms of allowing registration before the age, in fact, encouraging young people to register before the age of 18, as well as other aspects, which are not just for young people, but for people with handicaps and so on. I'm very happy to see that.

In terms of what I would like to see added, there's only one aspect that seems to me to be missing. Once one is really looking at the entire electoral process—and I know there was some discussion of it in the consultation process that took place—perhaps regulate the question of leaders debates during the election period. Set up a process that would be standardized, so that people could expect it. I know that's a complicated issue and I certainly don't want to delay the implementation process, but I do think it's missing from a law that tries to be quite comprehensive about the way we run election campaigns.

My other problem wasn't part of the Fair Elections Act, but with the way the last election was run. It was that it was so long. I don't have to remind you that it lasted more than 11 weeks, I think. That was tied to a change—a change which I had something to do with—namely, fixed election dates. I testified before that, especially in the Senate committee, that was responsible for that issue. I have talked about that in other places, including the House of Lords in London.

When fixed election dates were adopted—and the 2015 election took place under fixed election dates—this silly idea of now doubling the time for the campaign was combined with it, which of course made us look bad, those of us who favoured fixed election dates. People were saying now it's a free-for-all, that it lasts forever, and all kinds of money is being spent. I'm glad to see that we're going back to a seven-week campaign like in the Fair Elections Act. That's the one additional factor that I think is very important, and there are some other specific procedures around this that I'm in favour of. I don't have anything particular to say about them.

My real concern is that this happen. We have an election coming up in a year and a half and I'm concerned that the necessary aspects of this law won't be implemented early enough so that they can actually work appropriately. I'm torn between wanting to improve Bill C-76 in any possible way and wanting it to move quickly. Having it move quickly is, I think, in many ways more important, especially the information aspect and so on. We would like to see Elections Canada again able to implement its various information programs.

I have to tell you—and I don't know how many of you are aware of this—that there's a very absurd thing taking place next week in Toronto. I'm not sure how many of you are aware. Probably none of you are aware, but a citizens' group tied to the Canadian Federation of Students.... I think I have it here if you'll just give me a minute. The Council of Canadians, the Canadian Federation of Students, and some individuals hired a law firm to contest the Fair Elections Act. I was one of those who wrote affidavits for this contestation, which is only now coming before the Ontario Supreme Court. All of us—there are several of us, though not as many as you'll be hearing from—those of us who opposed the Fair Elections Act, are required now to be cross-examined by government lawyers to defend our criticism of the Fair Elections Act, which, of course, will no longer exist, hopefully, very soon.

I guess the business of Parliament moves slowly. I found it quite strange, but when I was speaking to the law firm that's running all of this, I asked them why they wouldn't just drop it. They said they weren't sure that the new legislation replacing the Fair Elections Act would be implemented in time, so they had to go ahead. This will all be taking place in Toronto next week.

Finally, I want to stress that I am anxious to see this move ahead, so that it will all be in place in time for the next election.

I have to say that one of the reasons I'm a little bit cynical about how this body moves on it with what seems to be happening or should be happening is my experience with the electoral reform. I was one of a great many political science and other experts in this area who came before this body. We were a very large majority of experts who testified in favour of electoral reform, and it seemed that our voices were going to be heard as part of the process, and then, as I don't need to tell you, we know how that came out.

I don't want to be too cynical but I do want to stress the importance of moving forward with this so that this bill will be in place in time to be implemented correctly for the next election.

Thank you very much.

[Andrea Furlong]

It would. We're mostly concerned about the timeline.

As you know, Bill C-33 stalled, and now we have Bill C-76. Our timeline is very intentional, because we want this to be provided for the next federal election, and for Elections Canada to be able to have the time. Our understanding is that they need at least six months, so we're going to continue with our court challenge until the bill has reached royal assent.

To answer your question, yes, it would.

Extension of Sitting Hours

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I am happy to rise to speak to the motion before the House. Of course, the essence of this motion has to do with the government's treatment of its own business and its capacity to move legislation through the House of Commons. It has certainly been the case in the past that various governments have decided to extend sittings to try to accomplish some of the business they were not able to accomplish throughout the year.

However, I think that my hon. colleague who just spoke and moved an amendment raises an excellent and fair point. His amendment is a good one in addressing one of the issues of equity in the House. We know that it is the job of the Speaker and the House to balance the needs of the minority against the majority. The amendment recognizes the fact that some people in this place have more power by virtue of the number of MPs within the governing party, and that others do not. I think that point is very well taken in the Conservative amendment. It really is just about making sure that in the government's attempt to create more time to pass more bills in the lead-up to summer that the business and the issues that matter to the opposition are given their equal due.

Of course, some members of this House will know, and certainly you, Mr. Speaker, will know, that supply days originated for the airing of grievances before the crown, before Parliament approves funding. That is why they are kind of archaically called “supply days”. We most often refer to them as “opposition days”, but they are an acknowledgement of the importance of non-government members being able to bring forward important issues for consideration by the House as part of the process of the government's hearing those concerns before Parliament grants it the authority to spend money. Supply days are not just some sort of trivial part of the process. They are not just some sort of tangent. They are certainly not a favour that the government grants the opposition and they are not something the government gets to do what it wants with willy-nilly, as it were.

The proposed amendment simply tries to give that equal weight and value to the issues being brought forward by the opposition, as well as to the government. I think that is perfectly reasonable and it is something we will be supporting.

In the absence of having that fair treatment and the right balancing between the needs of the government and the legitimate needs and purposes of opposition members of the House, it does make it really hard to support the main motion, because in that case we would fail to find that right balance, as it would somehow be implied that simply by virtue of the fact that the government is bringing certain issues forward, those issues are more important and more deserving of time in the House when I think the Standing Orders are very clear that the opposition is entitled to a certain proportion of the time in the House to bring forward the issues that matter, not just to it as the opposition but also to many Canadians whose view the opposition brings to this House and who are not represented within the government.

It is a good amendment. It is one that we will support, and I think in the absence of that amendment's going through, it would be very hard to say this is a fair and balanced motion. It is therefore hard to support.

One of the reasons we are in this predicament, of course, is that there is a lot of government legislation that has yet to be passed. One only has to look at the Order Paper and the number of bills on it, with a little bit of an understanding of where some of those bills come from, to know that the government, remarkably, has not been very ambitious with its legislative agenda. There are bills like Bill C-76, for instance, that have just rolled in other bills. While one could point to the bill number and look at all the bills that have been before Parliament, the fact is that a number of them are simply routine appropriation bills having to do with the business of supply. There are also a number of bills on public service labour issues to repeal some of the nefarious legislation of the Harper government with respect to public servants that, for all the announcements and talk about those bills for years now, have not actually gone anywhere.

One bill gets presented, it gets talked about for awhile, and then a new bill gets that does something a little differently gets presented, and that one gets rolled under, and then there is some talk by government at various events about how there is a new bill before the House and so on. For a government that has not brought a considerable amount of legislation before the House, it is somewhat surprising that the Liberals are having to resort to extraordinary measures to try to get more legislation passed before summer.

It is particularly surprising, notwithstanding some of the comments by the government House leader during the closure debate, because the fact is that our party on an important bill with a deadline, Bill C-76, which makes a large number of modifications to the elections regime in Canada, did make a proposal to government via my colleague, the hon. member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley, to move forward with that bill in an expeditious way. By that, I mean not just in a way that allows more members to speak to it, but one that would allow a whole bunch of Canadians in their home communities to speak to the bill and the changes it proposes.

My hon. colleague presented the Minister of Democratic Institutions with a proposal for how to go out across the country, and central to that proposal was ensuring that the bill gets passed by the end of the summer. For the government to say that it sure would be nice if the opposition worked with it, I note that we have been quite willing to work with the government to get legislation passed. When my hon. colleague sent that proposal to the minister, she did not even dignify it with a response. It is hard to hear from the government that it wants to work with opposition members when it does not even bother to respond to proposals by the opposition on how to work together to get a bill passed. It is a bill that has to be passed on a timeline because the government did not act and bring that legislation forward.

Apropos to my point about bills being rolled into each other, Bill C-33 was an act to make a bunch of substantive changes to the Elections Canada Act and other acts that go together in order to, according to the government, improve our elections process. That bill sat on the Order Paper for 18 months and went nowhere. Now we are being told there is a big rush and that we have to get this bill through.

The NDP would like to see that bill passed, but it is a little cheeky of the government to wait so long to bring a bill forward to make those important changes when it knew all along, as did everyone else, that Elections Canada had been very clear about when those changes needed to be introduced and passed by Parliament to be implemented in time for the next election. The Liberals did not meet that deadline and now they are crying foul, saying that opposition parties are being obstructionist despite the fact we sent them a proposal on how to do it more quickly. We wish to goodness that they had just bothered to move it forward 18 months ago when they had a bill on the Order Paper.

None of this is rocket science. There is no black magic here. There is no opposition making unreasonable demands. It is just an opposition disappointed that the Liberals had 18 months to move forward with changes to the elections act after they tabled their own proposals. We wish they had moved forward with them. However, we did not get that opportunity, as we do not say which bills get debated during government orders.

While that was going on and we were not debating Bill C-33, we were debating some bills like Bill C-24, which was a complete and utter waste of time. I will refer members to my comments on Bill C-24. All that bill did was affirm what the government was already doing and what was clearly within its legal mandate to do. If it were not, then the government should tell us, because then it would be an issue of its acting outside its legal mandate and illegally paying ministers of state more. However, it did not seem to be doing that, so presumably we did not need a change in the law.

All the while we debated that bill, the other bill, Bill C-33, was sitting on the table. It could have been taken up and we could have been working on that and meeting the Elections Canada deadline. The government did not need to be in a panic as it is now to get that legislation passed. We could have spent time scrutinizing that legislation and trying to make it better, not just here in Parliament but also by travelling across the country to make sure that Canadians had an opportunity to weigh in on it in their home communities.

However, that was an opportunity they squandered for reasons that remain unclear. I will say that part of it has to do generally with what has become a theme of the government in terms of a serious lack of respect for Parliament. I know the Liberals will say otherwise. We hear a lot about the great respect they have for the work that is done in committees, but let us consider the fact that many committee recommendations are never taken up. We have certainly had instances where committees have amended legislation, only to see the government come in with a heavy hand at report stage and wipe out the amendments that were passed by its own members at committee. That does not make one feel that the Liberals are talking in good faith when they talk about the so-called good work of committees.

Who could forget the Special Committee on Electoral Reform, where the government did not have a majority and a number of parties came together in order to propose a way forward for the government to meet its own election commitment? Who could forget how the Liberals took that work and threw it in the garbage? The day the report was tabled, I remember the minister, with great fanfare, disrespected the work of the committee, because apparently the government thought it would fail and it did not.

Earlier today, we heard the government's own House leader get up and insinuate that concurrence debates were just a waste of time and there was no way an opposition party could move concurrence in a committee report seriously because it actually cared about what the committee said and wanted the House to pronounce on the recommendations of the committee. Of course, that is the whole reason committees do reports and report them back to the House. The current government really does not understand Parliament's place in the system and does not have a lot of respect for it.

I will come back to this theme after private members' business.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

I think Maryam Monsef was the minister at the time, and the idea that the government might be introducing electoral reform was still a live issue at the time. Indeed, at that time, we were being told repeatedly by the Prime Minister and the then minister, Maryam Monsef, that they were firm, that 2015 would be the last election conducted under first past the post. It almost seems like talking about an ancient species that existed at the same time as the dinosaurs and remains unchanged to this very day when we talk about Bill C-33. Yet it sat there, unchanged, unmoved. Some of its provisions are contained in this law and would not be part of this ginormous bill if they'd been passed then.

The creation of an artificial crisis is something that is very relevant. Now coming back to the other artificial crisis created by the weird way in which one candidate was put forward and another was not does not convince me very much.

I note that in Mr. Bittle's comments—and I suspect this is precisely the sort of thing that makes Scott Brison not like him very much—he didn't say, “So the minister can't make it for two hours. I therefore am going to amend it to one hour, because instead of having all this empty space, we think there's enough to fill one hour instead of two.”

With that in mind, Mr. Chair, I'm going to see if that would make the whole thing more palatable to the Liberals, and I therefore move to amend this motion by removing the words “no less than two hours”, and change them to “no less than one hour” and see what happens in terms of Liberal acceptance of the motion when it's worded that way.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

I had actually not meant to get back on the speakers list, but do I need to comment on that.

We have no way of knowing and I don't think we will wind up knowing, but perhaps there are privacy considerations relating to private information appertaining to either the initial appointee to this position, Mr. Boda from Saskatchewan, or some other individual being referenced here. However, given the giant gas cloud of it all being a big secret, the fog bank of “Gosh, we can't tell you anything”, to say it's unhelpful is putting it mildly.

I think it's designed to prevent us from doing our jobs. It may be designed in a way that is actually not permissible, but how do we know, since it's all a big fog bank of secrecy? The bigger the fog bank of secrecy, the bigger the curtain behind which the guy with the levers is doing his job—that's a reference to The Wizard of Oz, by the way—and the more the munchkins will be fooled and impressed by his or her ostensible grandeur.

Just to be clear, that was actually in reference to me, not to anybody else.

I do think that's an issue. There are many things the minister could share with us that, in my experience, much as I like her, she has not been sharing with us. As we saw just yesterday, by way of example, she didn't say “no comment”, but she found other words with which to say “no comment” or that she wasn't going to answer a question. Her words were, “I'm here and prepared to answer questions about the substance of the bill”, not about the timing of the bill, not about the rush to get the bill through.

The fact is, the decision to rush the bill through is one made at the cabinet level, and there was only one person in the room who was a member of cabinet and had any say in it, who had an awareness of what was being done or would have a chance to take the views of the committee back to the cabinet, who was involved in the drafting and scheduling of the legislation, the timing that caused it to come out so late. Having to rush this bill through the House by June 12 would have been an easy matter had the bill been developed, say, a year earlier, or six months earlier, and had it been divided into several slices so that the package we'd get at this late date would be much smaller. Several other pieces of the legislation, containing other elements of the bill, had been dealt with at some earlier time, and lest anyone make the claim that this could not have been done, I note that Bill C-33 was introduced some months ago.

Second reading

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the problem that the government has in making the case for limiting debate via time allocation now is the massive amount of time that went by when Bill C-33 did not come to second reading. There was lots of time to get Bill C-33 through, no matter how many speakers one party or another were to put up.

Bill C-76, bringing in Bill C-33 and additional measures, requires more study.

I completely agree and am not going to take a single point away from the fact that most of what is in this legislation was already recommended by Elections Canada. I have not doubt that most of what is in it will improve the health of our democracy. However, it is fundamental legislation. It takes a while to get back to the Elections Act. We should have full time to debate it at second reading.

I will admit in a nonpartisan way that the use of time allocation in the 41st Parliament was much more egregious, because the legislation it applied to made it harder for people to vote. However, for the Liberals to try to reverse that legislation with time allocation because they say they are not as bad as the other guys because their legislation is better does not do away with the fundamental issue of respect for Parliament, respect for this place, and allowing Parliament to have full debate at second reading, full discussion in committees, and adequate time to go through debate at clause by clause, and adequate time at report stage and third reading.

The delay on the government side in bringing the legislation forward does not make a good excuse.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is an honour for me to rise to speak to Bill C-76.

I am pleased to rise in debate today, but I regret that it is in the context of time allocation already being applied to the bill. I appreciate that the Liberal side of the House has provided time for my colleague, the hon. member for Montcalm, and for me to speak to the bill, but I regret deeply the use of time allocation. Because I was not able to get in on the debate on time allocation that occurred before the vote, let me suggest some ideas to the hon. minister, the government House leader, and others as to how we might avoid so many time allocations.

It is my belief that the ability, in votes, of all three of the larger parties, particularly the official opposition and the governing party, to put forward as many speakers as possible on any bill is a black box for our House leaders. Getting agreement is something I will leave to them. I can only assume that when we have a lot of time allocations, the coordination is not going well. I do not blame any one party more than the others. I will just say that it is not a good thing for this place when we have time allocation, particularly on a bill that is important.

I would like to suggest that the Speaker has the power, and could be encouraged by those within this place who want the place to work better, to insist on a rule that has fallen into disuse. That rule is that members cannot read speeches. If no one could read a speech, people in the back rooms could not hand a speech to someone and say, “Go give this speech. You are up next.”

They would have to call enough people forward who had read the bill and understood the bill and were prepared to debate it without notes. I am not saying that there are not many of us who are prepared to do that, but the ability of a House leader, on any side, to decide to play games with this place would be significantly minimized if we went back to that rule, which already exists.

I would urge those who think it is a good idea to perhaps speak to their own House leaders. In that case, I would just have a conversation with myself, but the rest of those assembled here should talk to their whips, talk to the House leaders, and talk to the Speaker if they think it would be a good idea to say that we do not want all the members to just read. I am not saying that members do not get up and read speeches they have written themselves. I know that happens, but a lot of times, people read something they have never seen before in their lives. We can tell by the rapt attention with which they deliver something they do not actually know much about or believe in.

Here ends the rant on how to get this place to work better. If people could only get up and speak based on what they know about a bill, we would get more interesting debates and more civilized debates, and we might have an easier time getting agreement on how many speakers there would be on legislation.

It is really tragic that we are seeing time allocation as often as we are seeing it. I do not think it is healthy for democracy, and I know it is going to be an election issue, with everyone saying, “They did it more. They did it too. They are hypocrites.” We should not live in glass houses if we are going to collect stones.

This bill is good legislation. It is very good legislation. It undoes a lot of what happened in the unfair elections act before the last election, but that does not mean that it is perfect legislation, which is why we should not be hearing from the minister that it has already been discussed at PROC. It should be discussed in this place at second reading, where all members who are engaged in the issue and know about it can participate, because not everyone is on PROC. It is a committee.

We know that Bill C-33, which was excellent legislation, languished for a year and a half. It was tabled when I was still serving on the Special Committee on Electoral Reform, which was one of the more tragic experiences of my life. We were still sitting around the table putting forward good ideas, but then saying, “Oh, the minister has new legislation that just came out that has some of our ideas in it.” That was Bill C-33. It came out in December of 2016, and everything from Bill C-33 is now rolled into Bill C-76.

For those who are not familiar with the bill, perhaps who are watching from home, let me say that Bill C-33 did a lot of very good things. I know that the Conservatives will disagree. They like Bill C-23, which they called the Fair Elections Act. What it did was make it harder for Canadians to vote. There is no doubt in my mind about that. I had people come to me who were not allowed to vote.

Bill C-23 was focused on the false notion that Canada suffered from voter fraud. However, it is very clear, on the evidence, that the problem in Canada is not people who try to vote more than once; it is people who vote less than once. We do not have any voter fraud that the elections commissioner has ever really been able to find is a problem. Our problem is low voter turnout.

The Conservatives were quite self-congratulatory when we went from an average national voter turnout of 60% in 2011 to a voter turnout of 68% in 2015. They said that proved that the unfair elections act did not decrease voter turnout. In fact, I think it masked what would have been a much bigger voter turnout. Young people mobilized in 2015. There were a lot of efforts to educate people about vote mobs, advanced poll voting, and getting people who did not usually vote out to vote.

I am enormously proud to represent Saanich—Gulf Islands. In 2011, when the voter turnout nationally was 60%, voter turnout in Saanich—Gulf Islands was just a titch below 75%. In 2015, when I was re-elected, voter turnout was just a bit below 80%. Now, that is nothing compared to my friend who is leader of the Green Party in Prince Edward Island, Peter Bevan-Baker. When he was elected, voter turnout in his riding was 93%.

Let us not be satisfied with 68%. We need to see 90% or 95% of Canadians voting and feeling good about the democratic experience. I think getting back the voter registration card is important. Bringing back vouching is important, and so is bringing back the powers of the Chief Electoral Officer to inform people and educate people. Warn people when voter fraud is happening.

Everything in Bill C-33 that would undo Bill C-23 is to the good and should be passed quickly. As well, I really like the idea that the Elections Canada folks would go into schools and register people who are 16 to 18 years old so that when they get the right to vote, they know what they are doing. They know where to go. They have already registered to vote. That is all in what was former Bill C-33. It is all good stuff. I wish we had already passed it.

Now we are looking at new and additional changes. I wish we had seen more. Clearly, if we are going to protect the privacy of Canadians, it is long past time that political parties were exempted from the Privacy Act. I have never heard a single good reason why we are in a special category, political parties, and Canadians' data is safe with us. Clearly, it is not safe with us. We get hacked. We hire companies and do not have any idea that they will be doing stuff like Cambridge Analytica or some of the ones that mine data and use it for other things. We are not in a position to say that it is good enough to have a voluntary code of privacy practice for every political party that we are required by law to show Elections Canada and have posted publicly.

By the way, I do not think “trust us” works terribly well for political parties. One of the best pieces of legislation from the 41st Parliament, the Reform Act, to bring about reform in this place and reduce the power of political party leaders over their MPs, which came out under the name of the member for Wellington—Halton Hills, required a change in the Parliament of Canada Act. It was executed. Section 49 is new and requires parties, immediately after the election, to have a discussion in caucus and a vote to decide what the powers of the leader will be. For instance, will the power of the leader include throwing someone out of caucus?

I am reliably informed that even though that is the law of the day, two out of three recognized parties in this place skipped that step and did not think it was important to follow the Parliament of Canada Act, section 49. I am deeply dismayed that this took place. All MPs in this place should ask their party leadership if they did that. Did they file the letter with the Speaker? They should ask to see the letter filed with the Speaker to comply with section 49 of the Parliament of Canada Act.

On to the other things in Bill C-76. I hope the government will be open to amendments. As I said, this is good legislation. It does take on things like pre-writ spending. However, why are we allowing any pre-writ spending on televised election ads that bombard Canadians with negative messages and attack ads. It is good to regulate spending before an election. Let us just say that between election day and the next time a writ drops, no one is allowed to spend any money on political ads. There is not an election going on, so no spending. I will be bringing forward things like that as amendments.

Why are we increasing the spending ability of third parties? I would love to see us go in the direction of many countries around the world, including the U.K., which prohibit spending for electronic political ads of any kind at any time. It is very useful legislation.

There are many things I would like to suggest need more work in this legislation. Getting it to committee is important, but not so important that we should have time allocation in this place.

Bill C-76—Time Allocation Motion

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Madam Speaker, have there been four days of debate? Is the minister kidding the House? I cannot believe what I just heard from the minister. Thursday, May 10 had the sitting hours of a Wednesday, and then we had a Friday May 11. Yesterday was the only full day. Today is a Wednesday, so we will be lucky if we get an hour this afternoon to debate the bill. I just cannot understand the gall of the Liberals. The Liberals before 2015 and the Liberals now are just completely different stories.

I am sick of the Liberals blaming the opposition for their delays, when they let Bill C-33 languish at first reading for 18 months. They dumped this bill in the House of Commons on April 30 and then expect us to wear the blame for their delays. Will the minister please explain to the House why she delayed this, when the Liberals control the procedure and House affairs committee and have a clear majority in the House. Here, at the 11th hour, she is dumping the blame on the opposition for her government's fault.

Elections Modernization Act

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am happy to rise this afternoon to speak to Bill C-76, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act. Since elections are at the heart of our democracy, this is clearly an important bill for debate in this House.

The bill is a belated response to the Liberals' election promise to reverse some of the egregiously anti-democratic aspects of the Conservative government's so-called Fair Elections Act of 2014. I say “belated” because the acting Chief Electoral Officer gave the government a deadline of the end of April for any election reform legislation if changes were to be made in time to be implemented before the October 2019 election. That deadline was for passing legislation, not for introducing it, so we have clearly missed the boat there.

Speaking of delays, it has taken the government two years to name an official Chief Electoral Officer. Since it is such an important position, one would think the government would make that a high priority.

This bill is another in a series of very large bills that the current government has tabled. At 230 pages, it is very much an omnibus bill. It absorbs Bill C-33, which was tabled 18 months ago and never acted on. Even the minister who tabled it seems to be unclear as to what is in it. It is ironic that the Liberals complained about the Fair Elections Act from the previous Conservative government and its propensity for omnibus legislation, when here they are doing the same thing.

Now I would like to touch on some of the provisions included in Bill C-76.

It limits the writ period of an election to 50 days, thus eliminating the chance for another marathon election campaign of more than 70 days, such as that which we were subjected to in 2015. That is great news. I would like to thank the member for Cowichan—Malahat—Langford for suggesting this to the government in the form of his private member's bill.

Canada is far behind other countries in gender equity, and it is past the time when we should be taking concrete steps to improve this situation. The bill allows candidates to report child care expenses, but it falls short of promises to allow more candidates from equity-seeking groups to take part in our elections. The member for Burnaby South put forward his private member’s bill, Bill C-237, which would have strongly encouraged parties to increase the proportion of female candidates in future elections. Unfortunately, the government voted that bill down and failed to include its provisions in this bill.

I have been to many schools to talk about government and the electoral process, as I am sure many members here have, and I have always been impressed by the keen interest of many young people in civics. The questions I get at school talks are often much more informed than those that I get at open town halls. Therefore, I am happy to see that two parts of this bill encourage young people to get informed and to get involved in the electoral process. First, Bill C-76 would allow the registration of future electors between the ages of 14 and 17. This simple act has been shown in other jurisdictions to increase the proportion of young people who vote after they turn 18. That would be a good thing, since young people do not generally vote at the same rate as older adults. Second, the bill removes the ban on public education programs conducted by the Chief Electoral Officer through Elections Canada. Why this ban was put in place in the so-called Fair Elections Act is beyond me. However, I welcome the opportunity for Elections Canada to inform and educate Canadians on our electoral process.

Bill C-76 also brings back the process of vouching to allow electors without proper ID to vote, as well as allowing the use of the voter ID card for the same purpose. These were disallowed under the Fair Elections Act in an effort to solve a non-existent problem of voter fraud—of which there are vanishingly few, if any, examples—by creating a much more serious problem that inhibited Canadians, particularly disadvantaged citizens, from voting at all. We should be encouraging all Canadians to vote, and this will be a step in the right direction at last.

Also included in the bill are provisions to allow more expatriate Canadians to vote, effectively doubling that number. I think this is a very welcome addition.

While the bill institutes some rules around third party activity during elections, it does allow spending of up to $1 million in the pre-writ period for third parties, which is hardly a restriction, considering that parties are allowed only $1.5 million. As well, there is no limit on how much individuals can donate to third parties involved in election campaigns. If we want to get big money out of our election campaigns, this is not the way to do it.

I want to talk a bit now about the big thing missing from this bill, the elephant in the room, or maybe it is the elephant that is not in the room. Of course I am talking about real electoral reform. The Liberals, the NDP, and the Green Party all campaigned on a promise that 2015 would be the last federal election run under the first-past-the-post system. Over 60% of Canadian voters supported this idea. For many Canadians, it was the most important promise made in that election campaign. Canadians were tired of elections that gave parties with less than 40% of the vote 100% of the power under majority governments. The Harper government was an example and the present Liberal government is another, so creating a new system was very popular.

Unfortunately, once the Liberals were in power, they forgot about that promise. They created a committee that travelled the country and worked very hard to hear from as many Canadians as possible. The committee heard from electoral experts from around the world on best practices from other countries. The committee tabled a report calling on the government to create a proportional representation system after consulting Canadians with a referendum. The Minister of Democratic Institutions asked all MPs to go back to their ridings and hold town halls to hear what their constituents had to say on the subject. We in the NDP caucus took that request seriously and did just that. We not only held town halls but also handed out questionnaires at the meetings to tally the preferences of the attendees. I sent similar questionnaires to every household in my riding.

We found that over 80% of respondents from across the country preferred a proportional representation system. Unfortunately, the Prime Minister did not like that answer. He did not like the committee's recommendations and announced that he was going to break his promise on electoral reform. The Minister of Democratic Institutions even insulted the committee by saying it did not do the hard work expected of it. The Liberals say they want to increase the participation of Canadians in the electoral process and that Bill C-76 is their answer to this, but the incredible cynicism of their lack of action on real electoral reform has already had a negative effect on how Canadians feel about their elected representatives and whether it is even worth voting in the next election.

I was talking on the phone with a constituent a while ago on a separate issue, and at the end of the conversation, she said how nice it was that the MP was calling her directly. She told of how she and her husband engaged their children in the election campaign of 2015. They listened as a family to the debates, they read the campaign platforms, and in the end the parents asked their children who they should vote for. She did not say who they decided to vote for, but she did say that electoral reform was the issue that the children felt was the most important to them. They wanted every vote to count and were devastated when the Prime Minister went back on his solemn election promise. She even worries that their children might never vote when they are old enough. That was exactly the opposite effect that she and her husband were hoping for when they got them involved in the discussion.

I will close by saying that I support many of the reforms contained in Bill C-76, but it falls short in so many other ways: in its size, in the short amount of time we have had to debate it, and above all in the complete lack of real reform. Let us get rid of big money in elections and get back on track to getting rid of first past the post so that every vote will count.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak to Bill C-76, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act and other acts and to make certain consequential amendments, also known as “the bill to change the rules to favour the Liberals because they cannot fundraise competitively, and other consequential amendments”. However, that is just the working title.

I appreciate that the minister for electoral reform has come back to the House. The job done previous to her by the treasury board president has been a mess. Now the treasury board president has shown once again that he is not up to the job, whether it is watching Bill C-58 , the Access to Information Act, or his complicity in ignoring reports that Phoenix was not ready, or his attempt to pass off his $7 billion estimate slush fund as transparency.

The acting Chief Electoral Officer had made it 100% clear to the government and Parliament a year ago that he would need legislative changes completed by April 28 in order to have time to be ready for the fall 2019 election, not starting debate and not introducing the legislation by April 28, but completely finished by April 28, through the House and Senate. However, here we are. Instead of having legislation debated and passed through the Senate by now, the Liberals are now just starting.

Let us go back a bit. Following the 2015 election, Elections Canada provided a list of recommendations for changes. The procedures committee was looking at these recommendations for a report to bring back to the House. Then out of nowhere the government dropped in our lap Bill C-33 , an act to amend the Canada Elections Act. Before the report from the committee was completed, the Liberals introduced a bill with incomplete information.

The Liberals rushed in a flawed bill, ignoring the procedures committee, and promptly did absolutely nothing for an entire year. If we add in the inability to appoint a permanent chief elections officer, the cynical Bill C-50 to distract from their cash for access scandals, and the desire to create a debates commission, we have typical Liberal ineptness. Well done, mission accomplished.

How did we get here? We went through the sham consultations a year and a half ago on the electoral reform. It was the same consultation meant to change the voting process from first pass the post to a system that would of course favour the Liberals. This is from their website, and it is still up, “We are committed to ensuring that 2015 will be the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system.”

Henry James, considered by many as one of the greatest novelists in the English language, has said, “To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text.” If we read between the lines of “We are committed to ensuring that 2015 will be the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system”, we get if and only if the Liberals get the system they want, one that would guarantee Liberal re-election, then 2015 will be the last under the first-past-the-post system. Further reading between the lines we also see, “If we don't get the system that favours only the Liberals, then we'll abandon the plan”.

It is funny that when we go to the Liberal mandate tracker it shows electoral reform as not being pursued. It is not a broken promise, or thrown into trash or not being pursued. If we go down a bit further on the mandate tracker and look under “Balance the budget”, which is also in their mandate letter to balance the budget by 2019, it says “Underway - with challenges”. There are tens of billions of added debt. Maybe the budget will be balanced by 2045, but we do not know as the finance minister will not answer.

The Liberals are adding $43 billion in debt from when it was supposed to be balanced in 2019 in the mandate to the end of where the budget shows in 2022-23, with $75 billion of added debt over the period from being elected to 2022-23. This is what they call “Underway - with challenges”.

At the operations committee, we asked representatives of the Privy Council Office about this. Privy Council runs this mandate tracker website. We asked them why they would put out this information. It was very clearly a lie and misinformation. They said that the finance department told them to. I feel badly for the Privy Council having to sit at committee and defend such disingenuous information.

Let us go back to Bill C-76 and look at some of the measures in the bill to change the rules that favour the Liberals, because they cannot competitively fundraise, and other consequential amendments. It allows the Chief Electoral Officer to authorize the voter information card as a piece of ID. This is not a voter ID card, as some people are trying to pass it off as; it is a voter information card. People can head to the polls with that piece, which was mailed to them, and vote.

Here are some fun facts from the last election. Non-Canadian citizens were sent the card in the mail, even though they were not eligible to vote. Cards went out with the wrong names. People were directed to the wrong polling station, sometimes 100 kilometres away. There was a 1.5% error rate on the 26.5 billion cards that were sent out, which means 400,000 people got cards with wrong names, wrong addresses, and so on.

In the 2011 election, before that one, three-quarters of a million Canadians moved during the 36-day writ period.

Elections Canada says that the voters list that it draws the cards from is just a snapshot in time. We are going to base the entire integrity of our election on a snapshot in time? Elections Canada says that it cannot even check the voters list to ensure that those on the list receiving the cards are actually Canadians.

To summarize, hundreds of thousands of incorrect cards are going out and three-quarters of a million people are moving during a standard election period. Over a million people potentially could have the wrong card or have someone else's card. Elections Canada is stating that there is no way to check if the cards are going out to Canadian citizens. The integrity of democracy is based on what Elections Canada calls a “snapshot in time”.

This bill would allow Canadians living abroad to vote regardless of how long they have lived outside the country and whether they intend to return. Right now it is five years. It is being challenged before the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has not even ruled on this yet and the Liberal government will bring in changes to allow anyone, regardless of how long they have been out of country, to vote.

Three million Canadians are living abroad, wonderful people, spreading the word of hockey in Canada around the world. However, should we allow those who have no intention of ever returning to Canada to help decide our policies in our country? The Ontario Court of Appeals, which ruled on the five year law, stated that it was democratically justified because it preserved the social contract between voters and lawmakers.

I know the Liberal government loves social licence, social licence for pipelines and for everything else, but I wish it would respect the social contract as has been decided by the Ontario courts.

There is no requirement that any of these expats have to vote in the last riding they lived in or even have visited one of the ridings. My brother, Bob, who left the country about 18 years ago, lives in New Jersey. He has never once stepped foot in my riding of Edmonton West. Should he be allowed to vote in my riding, even though he has never stepped foot in it and left Canada about 18 years ago? I have to wonder how many ridings across Canada in the last election were settled or won by less than 1,000 votes.

Concerted efforts by unfriendly foreign regimes could easily swing ridings by those with no skin in the game. Again, should people with perhaps no roots here and no family here and who perhaps pay no taxes and have not stepped foot in Canada for 10, 15, 20, or 30 years be deciding our foreign policy or what communities are getting funds for infrastructure? Should those who have zero intent of returning be deciding who sits in these chairs in the House?

I mentioned my brother. I love him dearly and still feel bad about knocking his teeth out playing hockey years ago, but I do not think he should be eligible to vote in Canada. He left many years ago.

I want to talk about the ID issue. We heard a lot of misinformation and saw hand-wringing throughout this debate about voter suppression under the Fair Elections Act. Let us look at the truth and the facts. Under the Fair Elections Act, we had an 11.5% increase in voter turnout in the 2015 election. It surged.

Here are some of the IDs that people could use: certificate of citizenship, citizenship card, Indian status card, band membership card, Métis card, old age security card, hospital card, CNIB card, credit card, debit card, and employee card. There is over 60 valid pieces of ID that can be used. People can even get a note from a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter to use as ID.

The bill would allow a maximum of third-party spending to soar through the roof, to allow Tides Foundation in the U.S.A., and Russian influence in Tides, to influence our election here. It is wrong. We have seen the issue of Facebook data misuse and Russian hacking. The bill would allow money from these groups to influence our vote.

We have seen the government try to change the rules when it falters. The Liberals changed the fundraising rules and they tried to change our rules in this place when they found the opposition to be too effective. They tried to change how Canadians voted to rig the next election. Now the government is botching this bill.

Bill C-76 is an omnibus of a mess and should be dismissed.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, that is a valid question from my hon. colleague. That is one of the main concerns we have been raising. The government has been aware of these problems for so long. It let Bill C-33 languish for 18 months after first reading. It is no secret that Elections Canada has consistently told the House and the government that the changes need to be implemented by a certain time to be ready for 2019. That was April 2018, last month. I am not sure what the Chief Electoral Officer will be able to do, but let us hope that at least we can get some of these measures put in place in time.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it gives me great pleasure to rise today on the debate on Bill C-76. I know we have had a lot of conversations in this House of Commons about the Liberals and their plans for debating this bill or the ideas behind the bill.

As this House knows, Bill C-33 was languishing at first reading for 18 months. We then finally had the government bring in Bill C-76 on April 30. That was precisely during the month when the acting Chief Electoral Officer had informed the government and all members of Parliament that he wanted to see the changes on behalf of Elections Canada put in place in April 2018 so that Elections Canada would have the opportunity to implement the changes in time for the 2019 election. Here we are. It is now well past the halfway mark in May, and we are debating the bill at second reading.

I am by no means making an argument that the House should not have its look at this legislation. My main criticism is that the government has been sitting on this file for so long and has really left it to the eleventh hour to bring in major reform of our electoral system. The Liberals have made arguments that this issue has been looked at by the procedure and House affairs committee and that these concepts have been debated. I acknowledge that this is the case, but debating issues and policies at the procedure and House affairs committee is very different from actually looking at a piece of legislation, especially one that is as large as this particular bill. To dump this bill into the House of Commons on April 30, to have its first-day debate on May 10, then May 11, and then today, and then to suddenly expect the House of Commons to do its due diligence, when the government was aware all along of the constraints it was facing, really does a grave injustice to the people of Canada and to the members of this House who are here representing the people of Canada.

The other thing that we in the NDP are fairly critical of is the fact that there were some missed opportunities in this piece of legislation. For example, we all know that this Prime Minister, both in the 2015 election campaign and in this House, repeated the promise that 2015 would be the last election held under first past the post. That is a missed opportunity.

We had a special committee on electoral reform. I had the honour of sitting on that committee when it was going through the Atlantic provinces, and I remember hearing from Atlantic Canadians, both experts in the field and normal, everyday Canadians, who took time out of their day to appear before our committee in Halifax, in St. John's, in Fredericton, and in Charlottetown, to give us their views on what electoral reform should be. I thought the report by that special committee, which was formed by this House upon the recommendation of my colleague from Skeena—Bulkley Valley, was quite comprehensive and reflected a majority of the views of Canadians.

The way we reached a consensus was that all the parties on the opposition benches tried to work out our differences. I know that my Conservative colleagues have had a few problems with some of our ideas on electoral reform, but we in the NDP, the Green Party, and the Bloc Québécois decided that to arrive at a compromise so that we could have a committee report backed by the majority of the members on that committee, we would agree to hold a referendum to give Canadians the ability to decide whether they wanted to go past first past the post into a new system that would perhaps be something closer to proportional representation. It is just a fact of life here in Parliament that the governing party usually gets in with 39% of the vote. The ironic thing is that 60% to 61% of Canadians actually vote for members of the opposition parties, yet our voices continually lose out when it comes to votes in this place.

On the subject of missed opportunities, my colleague from Vancouver Kingsway mentioned this. There was an opportunity to go back and extend the media blackout so that the citizens of British Columbia who had yet to cast their votes would not be unduly influenced by a broadcaster announcing the results before the polls closed. We talk about fairness in this place. Where is the fairness for British Columbia when people are lining up at 6:30 or are just about to leave the house to go vote, and CBC comes online and says that the election has already been won and that we are going to get a Liberal majority? That is not fair to the people of British Columbia.

I acknowledge that we cannot do anything about social media. We cannot do anything about people on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram announcing the results, but we can at least make an effort so that our major broadcasters are not dumping this on the news and providing those kinds of updates. That was a missed opportunity.

I also think that in some ways, we could have provided an opportunity for a per-vote subsidy. In the NDP, we have always talked about this. The argument made is that we should not have public financing of our political system. Guess what, folks. When people make donations, especially generous donations, they are eligible for tax credits, which they can then apply, so we are actually giving people a reward from our public funds. Political parties are eligible for reimbursement of a certain percentage of their eligible election expenses. Our tax dollars are already being used, but they reward people with the means to make donations.

Before I continue, I want to notify the House that I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley.

Continuing in that vein, a lot of my constituents struggle to pay the bills. Usually these families are living day to day and paycheque to paycheque, and they do not have the means to invest $100 in a political party. They certainly do not have the means to invest $1,500.

Through this system, political parties have to chase the money to stay competitive. I would like to see a system in which votes are put more on an equal plane and political parties are, in fact, rewarded for going after and getting the vote out rather than for going out and seeking the highest donor to fund their election expenses.

There are some good things. I will use the last bit of my speech to talk about the limit that would be placed on election length in this particular bill. I very much appreciate that the government has adopted my idea, because I introduced Bill C-279 in 2016, which sought to place a cap on the length of elections of a maximum of 46 days. I got this idea from the 2015 election, when we all had to go through the marathon 78-day campaign. I had a lot of constituents asking me why we needed an election that was 78 days and saying that they could easily make their decision in 36 days or 40 days. Obviously, the intent was to lengthen the election to such a point that money became an incredibly huge factor.

When we look at our neighbours to the south, the influence of money in politics is an insidious thing and can be a slippery slope. I am very glad the government has taken my private member's bill and sucked it up into Bill C-76 to make it part of this legislation. I am very glad to see that.

I am also glad to see that we will be registering future electors from age 14 to 17 and that we will allow child care expenses to be reimbursed. I would like to see more single parents have the opportunity to run as candidates. If we are truly going to be a representative House, we have to start reaching out to members of our society who do not often get that opportunity. We had an opportunity with the member for Burnaby South's bill, which would have rewarded political parties for trying to establish equity.

I see that my time is almost up. I will conclude by just acknowledging that the NDP will be giving its support in principle to this bill at second reading. We, of course, know that there will be a lot of hard work ahead in committee.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to stand to speak to this legislation.

The Liberal government is really good at saying one thing and doing another, and Bill C-76 is another classic example of exactly this point.

First, the fact is that this is an omnibus bill. It is a 350-page bill. The Liberals can say what they want about the previous government's use of omnibus legislation, but they have plain out campaigned against the use of it. The 2015 Liberal Party platform said:

...Stephen Harper has also used omnibus bills to prevent Parliament from properly reviewing and debating his proposals. We will change the House of Commons Standing Orders to bring an end to this undemocratic practice.

Here we are today, debating a 350-page piece of legislation. It is certainly omnibus legislation, and not the Liberals first use of it either. There is a term I could use to describe that, but it is unparliamentary language so I will not use it.

However, members do not have to take it from me. Senate Liberal Joseph Day stated recently, “This government has evidently abandoned its election promise to end the practice of omnibus bills”, and indeed it has. Bill C-76 is a shining example of that.

That is not the only broken promise or the use of Liberal doublespeak I will be talking about today. In fact, that is just the tip of the legislative iceberg on the level of egregiousness the Liberals have used in this bill.

What is worse is that the Liberals sat on the predecessor of Bill C-76, which was Bill C-33, for almost two years without debating it even once. November 24, 2016, was when Bill C-33 was tabled. It is now past the eleventh hour. The deadline of April 30 was set by the acting Chief Electoral Officer. He stated for some time, as did his predecessor, that action needed to be taken by a certain time in order to change electoral legislation.

I think it was a few weeks ago when the acting Chief Elector Officer was before the procedure and House affairs committee once again. He testified that April 30, 2018, was the absolute drop-dead date that he would need to have legislation, with royal assent, in order to have it implemented prior to the 2019 federal election. Maybe the Liberals slightly misunderstood that and thought it had to be tabled by April 30, because that is when they tabled the legislation. However, the Chief Electoral Officer was quite clear that the bill would need to have had passed and received royal assent by that date. Therefore, here we are late into May and just starting to debate it.

The Liberals have slapped a bunch more changes on Bill C-33 and have rushed it out the door. We have even heard reports of the Liberal's minister did not knowing what was in the bill. This was indicated in a Huffington Post article, entitled “Bill C-76: Democratic Institutions Minister's Office Didn't Know Elections Bill Closes Loophole”. Even their own minister and his office were not familiar themselves with what was in the bill. That is how quickly the Liberals rushed this thing out. Then they expected members of Parliament to digest the 350-plus pages so quickly that after one hour of debate, they gave notice of time allocation.

The minister has invited members of Parliament to submit amendments to the bill, but as it turns out, the bill already would accomplish things that the minister did not even realize. The minister's communications director told the Huffington Post in that same article “neither she nor [the minister] was aware that the bill actually addresses the long-standing loophole.”

He went on to say:

She wasn't certain why all the government's communications material relating to Bill C-76, the Elections Modernization Act, makes no mention of it or why officials had also glossed over the change.

As a legislator, that certainly does not instill too much confidence in me and my colleagues when neither the minister nor his staff know what this legislation does, or what is even contained in it. I am not sure whether that is incompetence or a result of political masters having no idea of what bureaucrats are doing, or what it is, but any way, it is completely unacceptable.

What we have in Bill C-76 is the Liberals claiming to fix a problem, but actually making it worse in the process. What they are proposing with regard to third party spending, for example, would increase the potential opportunities for foreign money and foreign interference in our democratic process. There have been numerous claims about millions of dollars in foreign funding being funnelled into third party advocacy groups here in Canada during the last election. It is something we have raised time and again as an issue and a problem. If we look at the Ontario provincial election currently in progress, we can see the practice of third party advocacy and advertising in action now. Global News reporter, David Akin tweeted on May 4:

Coincidental? As shadowy @ActWow seeds social networks fear-mongering about Ford cutting healthcare, latest release from @ontario_liberal party is … fear-monering about Ford cutting public services.

Akin was wondering whether the messaging being tied together in that regard was just coincidental.

Canadians would certainly not have an issue if these third parties were solely funded and supported by Canadian money, because third party groups certainly have a right to have its say in our elections. However, I think people would expect that these would be funded and supported by Canadians, and not a result foreign money coming in to push viewpoints upon Canadians and to interfere in our elections. However, we are certainly seeing more of that. We are seeing foreign entities funnelling money into Canada through these third party groups to try to affect the outcomes of our elections. I think all Canadians expect that only Canadians should be allowed to determine the outcome of our elections.

Foreign interference in Canadian policy is happening already, and it is time that the Liberals realized it. There are groups like the U.S.-based Tides Foundation that have poured considerable amounts of money and manpower into shutting down our oil industry. Its goal is to land-lock Alberta and our oil, and it does not care how many Canadians it puts out of jobs. It does not care how many opportunities are lost to Canadians as a result. It is not concerned about that.

The loudest groups, like those against the Trans Mountain expansion project, are usually foreign funded. They are acting in ways that do not serve the best interests of Canada. However, only Canadians should be able to determine Canadian policy.

Currently, Canadians are allowed to contribute $1,575 annually to political parties or to candidates, and corporations or unions are completely banned from making those types of contributions. Under the government's proposed legislation, foreign entities could contribute an unlimited amount to third parties to engage in campaign activities just weeks before an election.

Third parties wish to behave like political parties and engage in campaigning. That is certainly fine. We live in a democracy. They are able to do that. However, they should be required to follow the same rules that political parties do. They should be held to the same kinds of standards that political parties are. If a political party needs to account for and pay for campaign expenses like polling and organizing rallies, so should third parties.

If not, John Ivison of the National Post rightfully pointed out that it could lead to U.S.-style political action committees emerging, funded in part by foreign money, to influence federal elections. It is not just me and my colleagues in the Conservative Party who are speaking to this; it is coming from a media source as well, and others out there. It is certainly a pretty accurate concern. It is a concern that many Canadians would have if they were aware of this.

Does the Liberal government want to see big money, foreign-backed political action committees here in Canada? I ask because that is what we are getting, and it is due to its inaction on this very serious threat to our democracy. The vote and voice of each Canadian is diminished when foreign parties try to sway the outcome of our elections. Foreign interference in our elections is a concern I have heard from many Canadians, and I am sure that all members have heard those same kinds of concerns.

I will turn now to another common concern I hear, namely, voter identification. It is really unfortunate that the Liberal government is going to weaken the laws on the requirements for proving one's identity when one votes. The Liberals want to move backward and allow the use of voter information cards as acceptable pieces of ID for voting.

There is a high rate of error in the elections register. Elections Canada shows that in the National Register of Electors, there can be error rates as high as 16% in the records at any given time. It is a very significant, high rate. In the last election, the rate of erroneous cards sent out was also quite high. There were nearly one million of them erroneously sent out in the 2015 election. This policy could really have far-reaching implications, and certainly leaves our Canadian democratic process open to the potential for fraud.

In their response to Parliament and written Question No. 333, Elections Canada and the Privy Council Office said that “there were 986,613 updates to elector information during the revision period which resulted in another Voter Information Card (VIC) being mailed to the elector.” That was during the last election.

As well, there were 509,397 individuals who received voter information cards, representing about two per cent of the voter information cards, who proactively advised Elections Canada of incorrect information on the cards. Those are the numbers of those who notified them.

How many more did not, in fact, notify Elections Canada of errors? It was about 16%, as I mentioned earlier, according to the testimony of the previous Chief Electoral Officer, Mark Mayrand, of Elections Canada. He confirmed the statistic I just gave: 16% of entries in the National Register of Electors are erroneous at any given time. He also indicated that after the revisions period during an election, the error rate is still approximately 12%. That is a pretty significant error rate, one that could potentially affect three million or four million electors, because the National Register of Electors contains about 26 million electors.

This legislation would allow the use of the voter information cards, which have an average error rate of 16%, as an acceptable form of ID to vote. Again, 16% is roughly four million electors. That means that with voter information cards, nearly four million electors could be sent erroneous information. For the life of me, I do not understand how the Liberal government could see that as acceptable. Right now, there is a long list of potential pieces of ID that can be used and are acceptable to Elections Canada for voting.

There are 39 potential forms of ID available for electors to use. They range from drivers' licences, to bank statements, to letters confirming residency, and even e-statements and e-invoices are acceptable if they are shown on a mobile device. There are 39 different forms, and it is hard to imagine a scenario in which someone would not have one of the 39 forms, and yet they would have a correct voter information card. That is very hard to imagine.

It is really not too much to ask that Canadians show some form of ID before casting a ballot? That is not unreasonable, and it is not just me who thinks that. Canadians overwhelming accept that showing ID before voting is a positive thing. When polled, 87% of Canadians indicate it is reasonable to require someone to prove their identity before they vote. The Liberal government needs to explain to those Canadians why it does not think that ID should be required to vote. Why does it not want to protect our electors from potential voter fraud?

We want to encourage as many Canadians as possible to vote, but we have to do everything we can to ensure that we prevent all potential avenues of voter fraud as well. People are expected to show ID before they rent a car, check into a hotel, buy alcohol or tobacco, or consume marijuana, and before they board an airplane. I could go on and on with that list. Why not for voting as well? That is a question the government has failed to answer, but leave it to the government to introduce a bill that is 350 pages long and lacks some specifics.

There have been all kinds of attempts by the government to make changes to its benefit. The Liberals have been caught in scandal after scandal, with ethics violations and cash for access to the Prime Minister, and when they tried to make electoral changes to their benefit. If they had wanted to do something to strengthen democracy rather than attempt to benefit themselves, they would not have sat on their hands with this piece of legislation for two years. They waited until we were past the eleventh hour to bring forward this legislation, and nothing was done to properly consult with opposition parties in the process either.

Conservative Party members have raised the issue of foreign interference in our elections multiple times. The Liberals could have maintained that voters need to have proven identity to vote. They could have ensured there were proper privacy safeguards for our children, but none of those things were done. We are left with a massive disaster of omnibus legislation that the Liberals are trying to rush through after waiting and delaying and making other attempts to try to benefit themselves. Here we are with legislation that is 350 pages long. After one hour of debate, they moved notice of time allocation. It is absolutely astounding that the government breaks every promise it has made during the election. It continually says one thing and does another, and this legislation is another example of that.

We will continue to push the Liberals on that, and I know that Canadians will hold them accountable as well. I look forward to taking questions on the bill.

[Alupa Clarke, Conservative, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Mr. Speaker, thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak today as we get back to the House after a week in our ridings. Last week was very busy, I must say. I also want to take this opportunity to say hello to the many constituents of Beauport—Limoilou who, as always, are watching now on Facebook Live or who will be watching at a later time when the videos are posted on CPAC.

Today we are talking about democratic participation, which I find fascinating. If there is one thing that interests me most in life, it is democratic participation. This was the reason I got involved in politics. I urge Canadians to get involved. Last week I held the first-ever “Alupa à l'écoute!” public consultation in Beauport—Limoilou. I spent more than six hours listening to my constituents and answering their questions. Ultimately, my goal was to hear about the concerns, challenges, and difficulties they face in their day-to-day lives. The next consultation will be in Giffard on September 13, and the third will be in Beauport on November 17. For more information, people can call 418-663-2113. After these three public consultations, I will produce a report in the winter of 2019 and introduce a bill to address an issue that people face in their day-to-day lives. In those six hours last Thursday, I answered every question from around 40 constituents. I was very proud, because this kind of democratic accountability is absolutely essential. That actually ties into this bill.

Let us talk about participatory democracy. Once again, Bill C-76 is not all bad, but we expect that the Conservatives will vote against this bill for specific reasons. I did say “expect”, but that will depend on what happens in committee. My first impression is that this is another attempt by a government that brags about its international and national brilliance. Specifically, the Liberal government thinks it has a monopoly on being virtuous all the time. They want to sell to Canadians on the idea that with this bill they are again improving the accessibility of the electoral system and the eligibility to vote. A number of Liberal colleagues spoke in this place about the integrity of the system. With respect to Bill C-76, we feel that some of the amendments and new rules will directly or indirectly undermine Canada's electoral system.

My Liberal colleague, who as usual was fiery and spouted anti-Conservative rhetoric, said that voting is of course a fundamental right, but that it is also a privilege, as my colleague from Lethbridge stated. It is a privilege that requires a right and individual responsibility first and foremost. The laws that govern Elections Canada at present seek not just to foster participation, but also to ensure that this duty is carried out with integrity and responsibly. It is really a conflict between how to increase the public's participation and how to ensure that the right to vote remains a protected right.

The Liberal member for Willowdale spoke eloquently of the history of our great federation by talking about the changes in voting almost every decade; we went from suffrage on the basis of property ownership to popular ballot. We went from the popular ballot, just for men, to voting for women, thank God. It was Borden's Conservative government that gave women the right to vote. All the parties here, Canada's major governing parties, Liberal and Conservative, are always in favour of making voting more accessible.

We have some technical questions about the bill. That is unfortunate because, as my Liberal colleagues said, accessibility to the vote is a fundamental debate. Why did the Liberals move a time allocation motion a week ago? We were supposed to vote on time allocation today. Surely, the Liberals backed down after finding that they would look undemocratic by allocating only two or three hours of debate on such a fundamental issue.

In comparison, for Conservative Bill C-23, which dealt with Elections Canada and which was introduced during the 41st Parliament, we had four days of debate for a total of 14 hours, in addition to 23 meetings in committee, on this bill that was aimed at improving our electoral system. At this point, we have only had two hours of debate on Bill C-76.

As the NDP did, it is important to recall the concerns raised by the Chief Electoral Officer. He said that the government had previously tabled the amendments to Bill C-76 in Bill C-33, which died on the Order Paper. Actually, it did not exactly die on the Order Paper, because there was no prorogation, but it never got beyond first reading. The Chief Electoral Officer therefore told the government that it needed to get to work right away if it really wanted to make changes in time for the 2019 election. However, the government waited until the last second to make these changes, just days from the deadline set by the Chief Electoral Officer. Clearly, this is just another tactic to keep us from debating Bill C-76 properly.

Certain parts of this bill are fine, but what I find utterly astounding about it is that it proves that Mr. Harper was right back in 2015. The Liberals called us terrible, horrible partisans for announcing the election on July 1. However, the reason we did that was because Mr. Harper had noticed a problem. During the month of June 2015, unions, such as the FTQ in eastern Canada and other big unions in western Canada, which of course are free to protest, had spent tens of millions of dollars on partisan ads attacking the Canadian government in power at the time, which was a Conservative government. Since we could not respond to that situation because we were not in an election period, Mr. Harper, a man of unimpeachable integrity, decided to call an election so that we could respond using election expenses.

Throughout the campaign, the Liberals called us enemies of democracy who only cared about winning votes. In fact, they still say that about us today. However, by creating a pre-election period beginning on June 30 in Bill C-76, they are confirming, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Mr. Harper was right to do the same thing four years ago. That is a tribute to our former prime minister.

What exactly would Bill C-76 do? It would expand voter eligibility. Apparently this bill would prepare future voters by creating a register of young people aged 14 to 17 so that Elections Canada can start communicating with them. That seems kind of strange to me because that is when young people are most likely going to CEGEP or community college and living in apartments with two or three roommates. I do not really know how that communication is supposed to happen considering that young people today use their phones and social networks such as Facebook to communicate.

My Liberal colleague said that Liberals support enfranchisement, but giving kids the right to vote is something else entirely. He said that voting is a basic right, but that there is discrimination inherent in our system because Canadian citizens under the age of 18 do not have the right to vote. Voting is not in fact a privilege and a basic right granted to everyone. There are limits, and we can all agree that those limits are good for democracy and the duty to vote because people under the age of 18 have to go to school and do their homework. I strongly agree with that. If they are not in school, they should at least be working or travelling around the world and around Canada without asking anyone for money. I can say for sure that, up to age 18, people should be preparing to exercise their civic duty. That is why people cannot vote until they turn 18. It is not in fact an absolute right for everyone. There is already some discrimination inherent in the right to vote in Canada.

Then there are three pre-election periods. I have already mentioned the pre-election period, so let us talk about the “pre-pre-election” period. There is already a problem with this one, since there will be no constraints on the financial commitments of domestic and international third parties.

Until June 30, we know very well that all the international environmental groups, who like to see the Prime Minister contemplating the death of the oil sands, will spend millions of dollars to promote the end of natural and energy resources in Canada, which is very bad news. Natural resources represent 40% of the Canadian economy. We are in an energy transition. The systematic blindness on the part of the Marxist left and the centrist left in Canada is astounding. We are always being told that we are not making any effort on the environmental front. Since 1960, the environment has been systematically and continuously improved. Let us also not forget that this 40% of the Canadian economy is used to fund hospitals, education programs and our elections, which still cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

They also want an extended period of advance polling, which is very good. I won because of advance polling, so it is a very good idea. Joking aside, it is a good thing.

With regard to limiting the election campaign to 50 days, we could also ask why 50 days and not 37.

The Liberals want to change the requirement of having identification with an address and photo. It will be terrible. I go door to door every month in my riding—

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I agree with the member that there are a lot of good things to unpack in this bill. I particularly like the fact that we are going to be registering young people. Over the last two months, I have had some great conversations in high schools in my own riding, and I am very proud to report to the House how engaged the youth are in those classrooms. It makes a lot of sense to start setting up the process so that when they turn 18 they are able to participate in our democracy.

I want to go back to the question I posed earlier to the parliamentary secretary regarding the timing of this bill. We know from the previous acting Chief Electoral Officer that Elections Canada really wanted to have these changes implemented by April 2018, and here we are, having had this bill introduced on April 30. Furthermore, the government let Bill C-33 languish at first reading for 18 months. Given that Elections Canada needed this time to have the legislation implemented, and the bill still needs to travel through the House of Commons and the other place and receive royal assent, I would like to ask the member why his government waited so long to introduce this bill.

I do not agree that we have debated the particulars of the bill. I know that the PROC committee has been debating the issues, but that debate is separate from the debate on the legislation. The House really needs to have its time to examine the legislation. Why did his government wait so long to introduce this very important piece of legislation?

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the parliamentary secretary is right that the New Democratic Party is prepared to give its support to the bill to move it to committee. However, I take issue with his accusations that this side of the House is responsible for the delay of the bill. The bill received first reading on April 30 of this year, and the acting Chief Electoral Officer said that April was the month in which the changes actually needed to be implemented in order for them to be ready for the 2019 election. Furthermore, Bill C-33 has been languishing at first reading for 18 whole months, so I will take no accusations of delay on this side of the House.

My question to the hon. parliamentary secretary is this. Why did his government wait so long, until April 30, when it knew full well that the proposed changes needed to be implemented well before then to be in time for the 2019 election and knowing that the bill has to clear the House of Commons and the other place before receiving royal assent? Does he realistically think he has enough time to act on the Chief Electoral Officer's recommendations?

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I share my colleague's concerns about the way Bill C-76 has been introduced, particularly at this moment in the parliamentary calendar. We also had Bill C-33 languish at first reading for 18 months. For a government that is all about electoral reform and attaches such importance to it, I would have thought that we would not be debating such an important bill on the back nine of the golf course. I certainly hope that the government honours its promise to allow this place to fully debate this bill.

One part of the bill that I do like is that it would adopt what my private member's bill, Bill C-279, sought to do, which is to put a hard limit on the length of elections. Many of us felt that was a reasonable amendment to put into the Canada Elections Act, because it would prevent future governments from going through another 78-day marathon campaign. I would appreciate hearing my colleague's thoughts on that particular aspect of the bill.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise today and participate in the debate on Bill C-76, the amendments to the Canada Elections Act.

One of the privileges we have in Canada and as Canadians is to participate in free and fair elections. I do not think there is anyone in this House who would disagree with the importance of that privilege and honour that we have as Canadian citizens to participate in our democratic rights.

However, the government has shown its inability to properly introduce legislation to change our elections. In fact, the acting Chief Electoral Officer made it very clear to Parliament and at committee that in order for Elections Canada to make the changes necessary for the next election in 2019, legislation had to receive royal assent by April 2018. Here we are in May, only just kicking off debate on this matter.

On April 24, 2018, at committee, the acting Chief Electoral Officer, Stéphane Perrault, had this to say to the procedure and house affairs committee:

When I appeared last February I indicated that the window of opportunity to implement major changes in time for the next election was rapidly closing. That was not a new message. Both Monsieur Mayrand and I had previously indicated that legislative changes should be enacted by April 2018. This means that we are now at a point where the implementation of new legislation will likely involve some compromises.

Later in his comments he said:

However, it is also my responsibility to inform you that time is quickly running out. Canadians trust Elections Canada to deliver robust and reliable elections, and we do not want to find ourselves in the situation where the quality of the electoral process is impacted.

The government tabled Bill C-76 in April 2018, the same day legislation was supposed to be in place. The government botched the entire process for implementing changes to the Canada Elections Act. As a result of its mismanagement, the government had to introduce this omnibus bill in order to play catch-up and distract from past failures.

The Chief Electoral Officer provided recommendations for legislative reforms following the 42nd general election in 2015. The Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs was reviewing the recommendations and preparing a report for this House. Then, on November 24, 2016, before the committee had completed its work, the former minister of democratic institutions introduced Bill C-33, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act and to make consequential amendments to other acts. She introduced an incomplete bill and demonstrated a blatant disregard for the committee's work.

Then, after rushing to create a bill and, in their haste, creating a flawed bill, the Liberals stalled. They have been sitting on the bill and have still not brought it forward for debate at second reading a year and a half later. If we add to that their failed attempt to change Canada’s electoral system to favour their party, the tremendous delay to appoint a permanent Chief Electoral Officer, and the incomprehensible action to perhaps create a debates commission, this government's democratic reform has been a colossal disappointment. The Liberals waited well beyond the April 2018 deadline to introduce Bill C-76.

What is more, Bill C-76 is an omnibus bill. It is 350 pages long and contains hundreds of different sections. At best, it contains seven vastly different elements. Many of these elements are flawed, and not only will they not improve our elections, but in some cases they will actually weaken them.

This brings me to one of the key points contained in the bill, which is the subject of identification. The government is clearly out of touch with what is reasonable in the 21st century.

Today, photo ID and identification with one's address is commonly and routinely used for interactions with governments at all levels, whether federal, provincial or municipal. Under the current law, nearly 50 different types of identification are permitted to allow a Canadian voter to prove his or her identity and address.

Canadians are used to using identification. In Canada, no one bats an eye when he or she is required to show ID to board a plane. No one bats an eye when he or she is required to show ID to prove his or her age to purchase alcohol or tobacco. Students are regularly required to show ID when they take VIA Rail to get the student discount. When we drive a car, we need a driver's licence. When we go fishing, we have a fishing licence. When we go to get a prescription for medication, we show identification. Even to borrow a library book, we need a library card, which, I might add, in most municipalities is free. What is more, when we get that library card, we can also use it as one of the acceptable forms of ID with Elections Canada.

I am proud to have a library card for both the Wellington county libraries and the libraries in Perth county, and I use them regularly. I encourage all Canadians to go to their local libraries and get a card.

Let us look at the list of some of the identification that is currently approved by Elections Canada. Of course, there is the driver's licence or a provincial or territorial ID card. In Ontario, that includes both a photo ID as well as an address on those cards. Also, there is the Canadian passport, a birth certificate, and a label on a prescription container.

It has been mentioned before that perhaps those living in a retirement home or a long-term care home may have a challenge finding identification. However, I would challenge anyone to show me a senior who may be living in a long-term care home who does not have perhaps a pill bottle or prescription that has his or her name and identification on it. Another case would be an identity bracelet issued by a hospital or long-term care facility. Also, one could use a credit card, debit card, or employee card.

The minister talked about students. Nearly every student in high school, college, trade school, or a university has a student card. Most students also have a bus pass or public transportation card. It is unfortunate that the Liberals got rid of the public transit tax credit but, nonetheless, most students do have a transit card, particularly if they do not have a driver's licence.

One could also use a licence or card issued for fishing, trapping, or hunting, one of the great pastimes in Canada. One could use a utility bill, whether that be for electricity, water, telecommunications, cable, or satellite. What is more, Elections Canada also accepts either e-statements or e-invoices for that type of ID. In a growing technological world, I know many of us receive our bills solely online, which is an acceptable form of ID.

One could use a personal cheque, a government statement of benefits, or an income tax assessment. All Canadians are required to file their taxes every year. April 30 was just upon us, and I am sure all Canadians remember that well, with the Liberal government in power.

One could use correspondence issued by a school, college, or university. Again, a student going to college or university in Canada would potentially have that letter. Barring that, it could be a letter of confirmation of residence from a place such as a student residence, for those attending university, or a seniors residence, a long-term care home, a shelter, or a soup kitchen, so that those who may not have a permanent fixed address would still have confirmation of their eligibility to vote.

There is also a third option, in which an oath can be taken to provide confirmation of one's address from someone within the same electoral district undertaking that confirmation.

Most Canadians would see these rules as reasonable and fair. The rules ensure that only those who are eligible electors vote, and that they vote in the correct riding. Canadians are rule-loving people. We respect the rules. When we are asked to prove that we are in fact legitimate voters within an electoral district in Canada, we are happy to do so.

This brings me to the government's decision to use the voter information card as identification. It is an information card, not an identification card, as is often said by members across the way. These are information cards because that is what they provide, information. It has been stated before that, in the 2015 election, 986,613 of these voter information cards had inaccurate information, were sent to the wrong address, or were not complete, yet the Liberals are okay with nearly a million voter information cards being used as identification.

Canadians know that things change. Addresses change, and the voters list is not always entirely up to date. Nonetheless, the Liberals are relying on that information to be used to confirm residence within a riding.

One of the challenges with using the voters list and the voter information cards is that much of this information comes from the Canada Revenue Agency. I will cite a couple of examples where the CRA has mistakenly declared people dead, yet this information is now being used to inform the voters list, and then the voter information card, which entitles people to vote.

I would draw the members' attention to an article from November 2017 in which a Scarborough woman was declared dead and her estate was sent her tax refund of nearly $2,800. Another example recently from CBC, in April 2018, talked about a Cape Breton man whose error on a tax return declared both him and his late wife dead, despite the fact that he never submitted a death certificate for himself. Again, this information is being used to inform the voter information cards, which the Liberals now want to use as a confirmation of an address.

The minister also said that the Liberals would be removing the voting restrictions for those living outside of Canada, removing the five-year limitation and the intent to return to Canada. There are two points on this matter. First, it might be reasonable for Canadians who want to see this country prosper and thrive to at least give an indication that at some point in the future they wish to return and live in this great country we call Canada.

Second, when we look at our Commonwealth cousins and the example of Commonwealth countries around the world, we see that they have similar provisions in place. In the United Kingdom, a national who leaves for more than 15 years is not eligible to vote in a national election. In Australia, the length of time is six years.

I want to talk briefly about foreign financing. The Liberal government tries to claim it is shutting the door on foreign financing, that it is blocking foreign influence in elections. What is actually happening is it is opening up a great big loophole that will allow foreign influence to funnel large amounts of money into U.S.-style super PACs to be distributed within Canada during an election campaign.

In a recent article, John Ivison writes:

In the last election, foreign money wielded by political advocacy groups targeted Conservative candidates—Leadnow claimed its 6,000 volunteers helped defeat 25 Tories.

Leadnow said no international money went towards the campaign. However, the New York-based Tides Foundation donated $795,300 to a B.C.-based non-profit called the Sisu Institute Society, which in turn donated to Leadnow.

Leadnow acknowledges Sisu contributed grants for its “other campaigns” but said the election campaign was funded entirely by Canadian sources. Yet, as Duff Conacher at Democracy Watch pointed out, this is nonsense. “Any grant frees up other money, if it’s all in one pot.”

There is nothing in the new bill to stop this from happening again.

Another example comes from our good friend Andrew Coyne, who wrote:

But let’s examine those much-hyped measures to “protect and defend” Canadian democracy. For example, we are told the bill will prohibit foreign entities “from spending any money to influence elections.” Wonderful, you say: how much were they allowed to spend until now? Er, $500.

But then, the real scandal, to borrow Michael Kinsley's phrase, is not what is illegal—direct foreign spending on Canadian elections—but what's legal: foreign money, by the millions, funneled through Canadian intermediaries, which pass it on to domestic advocacy groups to spend.

This is wrong, and Canadians understand that this is not the way that Canadian elections ought to be run. Creating loopholes that we could drive a Mack truck through, allowing foreign influence in Canadian elections, is wrong, and Canadians understand that. They understand that so much of what the Liberal government is doing in the bill is wrong. Canadians believe that voters should be required to prove their identity before they vote. Canadians believe that proper identification is necessary before they vote in an election. They believe that foreign influence in Canadian elections is wrong and that loopholes should not be allowed in the bill, as the Liberals have done.

Canadians also wonder about the lack of urgency of the Liberal government. We have known for a year and a half that we would need a Chief Electoral Officer, and yet the Liberals waited 18 months. They introduced Bill C-33 and let it languish on the Order Paper, and now, at a point in time when the Liberal government has been told directly by the Chief Electoral Officer that they do not have time to implement the changes, the Liberals are proposing to go ahead anyway with this information.

It is for this reason that I move:

That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “That” and substituting the following:

the House decline to give second reading to Bill C-76, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and other Acts and to make certain consequential amendments, since the Bill fails to address the high error rate in the National Register of Electors, and the high rate of erroneous Voter Identification Cards, reported at 986,613 instances in the 2015 election, and does nothing to deal with foreign interference in Canadian elections because the Bill proposes to double the total maximum third party spending amount allowed during the writ period and to continue to allow unlimited contributions in the period prior to the pre-writ period.

[Scott Brison, Liberal, President of the Treasury Board]

moved that Bill C-76, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and other Acts and to make certain consequential amendments, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to begin the debate at second reading of Bill C-76, the elections modernization act.

Our democracy is stronger when more Canadians, not fewer, are able to participate in our elections. Our government believes that democratic institutions and election rules must keep pace with changes in society and the expectations of our citizens. The elections modernization act is an important step forward for our democracy and for the ability of Canadians to participate in and trust our democratic institutions.

The changes we are proposing under the elections modernization act will make the electoral process more accessible to all Canadians, will help modernize the administration and enforcement of election rules, will make the electoral process more secure and transparent, and will protect the integrity of the Canadian electoral system, while better protecting the personal information and privacy of Canadian citizens.

We believe that our democracy is stronger when as many Canadians as possible participate in it.

In 2014, the previous government passed the Fair Elections Act. This was a regressive piece of legislation that former chief electoral officer Marc Mayrand said contained measures that would “undermine [its] stated purpose and won’t serve Canadians well.” One hundred and sixty academics signed a National Post editorial stating that the Fair Elections Act would “damage the institution at the heart of our country’s democracy: voting in federal elections.” The Globe and Mail ran five editorial board pieces, pleading with the Conservatives to reconsider that legislation.

The Harper Conservatives did not listen to reason. They did not pay attention to evidence, and Canadians paid the price. After the passage of the so-called Fair Elections Act, we saw the disenfranchisement of more than 170,000 Canadian voters who lacked sufficient identification. That is according to Statistics Canada. We saw it become more difficult for Canadians to get information about where, when, and how to vote. We saw it became easier for elections lawbreakers to actually evade punishment.

Unlike the Conservatives, we are listening to Canadians. We want Canadians to be able to participate in our democracy.

By repealing the unfair provisions of the Harper government's Fair Elections Act, we are making it easier for all Canadians to vote.

In April, I was pleased to introduce the elections modernization act on behalf of our government. Not only would it undo the controversial aspects of the Conservatives' so-called Fair Elections Act, but it would strengthen our democratic institutions by making voting more accessible to millions of Canadians who have previously faced unfair barriers.

I will illustrate some of the proposed changes by focusing on four groups of voters: Canadians with disabilities, women and men of the Canadian Armed Forces, Canadian citizens living abroad, and those who do not have the identification required under the Fair Elections Act.

To ensure Canadians with disabilities are better able to participate in our democracy, Bill C-76 confirms existing accessibility practices and further requires a combination of measures to be available to all persons with disabilities, regardless of the nature of that disability. Bill C-76 creates financial incentives for political parties and candidates to accommodate electors with disabilities. These could include providing election material in accessible formats or adding wheelchair ramps to campaign offices, as examples. It makes changes to election expense provisions so that candidates with disabilities or candidates who are caregivers for young, sick, or disabled loved ones would find it easier to run for office.

For these individuals, costs related to this caregiving could be paid from either personal or campaign expenses and would not count against spending limits. These expenses would be reimbursed at up to 90%.

Canadian Forces members make tremendous sacrifices defending our democracy. It only makes sense that we make sure they are able to participate in it as well. In the most recent election, 68% of Canadian electors voted. Among members of the Canadian Forces, the participation rate was only 46%. The bill would give Canadian Forces personnel the same flexibility as other Canadians in choosing how to cast their vote.

Canadians living abroad are no less dedicated to our country than those who reside within its borders, yet many are not able to vote. The bill restores voting rights to more than a million Canadians living abroad by removing the provisions that electors cannot have resided outside of Canada for more than five years and must have an intent to return.

Debates in the last Parliament highlighted a fourth group of Canadians who have challenges when it comes to participating in elections. These are citizens who do not have the required identification. The previous government stopped the use of voter information cards as an allowable piece of ID to establish residency. This happened despite Elections Canada's observation that some four million Canadians do not possess a driver's licence. Canadians impacted most by the Conservatives' regressive law change included university students, indigenous peoples, and in some cases seniors who live in long-term retirement facilities.

We will restore voting rights to these Canadians and we will also restore the practice of vouching for identity and residence. This will help bring eligible voters back into our electoral process. Those who vouch for others would continue to be required to make a solemn declaration and would not be able to vouch for more than one person.

Conservatives may try to say that this would make it easier for non-citizens to vote, but that is simply not the case. In his 2011 compliance report for Elections Canada, Harry Neufeld, an independent elections expert, recommended “widening use of the Voter Information Card as a valid piece of address identification for all voters.”

To ensure that only Canadian citizens are able to vote, the bill would authorize the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship to provide the Chief Electoral Officer with information about permanent residents and foreign nationals living in Canada. This would help ensure that only Canadian citizens are included in the register of electors and would help to create a more accurate and up-to-date list of voters. The bill would also grant the commissioner of Elections Canada the ability to impose a financial penalty on individuals who vote when they are not able to do so.

Today Canadians are busier than ever. They work irregular hours. They do shift work. They travel for business and pleasure, and they have parenting or caregiver responsibilities that start before dawn and end late in the evening. As a result, more and more Canadians vote at advance polls. We would increase the hours during which these polls are open to provide more flexibility and enable more Canadians to participate in the electoral process.

The bill would restore the Chief Electoral Officer's authority to conduct public education and information activities to help inform Canadians about the voting process. Through the bill, we would empower young Canadians to pre-register for elections so that when they turn 18, they are automatically registered to vote. As well, the bill would make it easier to hire Canadians aged 16 to 18 as election officers, giving them an opportunity to get engaged earlier in the electoral process.

While we are making it easier for Canadians to vote, we are also making it more difficult for elections lawbreakers to evade punishment. The bill sanctions the powers of the Commissioner of Canada Elections and offers a wider range of remedies for enforcement.

Through the bill, the commissioner would again report to the Chief Electoral Officer and would have new powers to impose administrative monetary penalties for minor violations of the law, have the authority to lay charges, and be able to apply for a court order to compel testimony during investigation of election offences.

Budget 2018 would also provide $7.1 million to support the work of the Office of the Commissioner of Canada Elections. This funding would help ensure that the Canadian electoral process continues to uphold the highest standards of democracy.

In 2017, the Prime Minister expressly gave the Minister of Democratic Institutions a broad mandate to enhance the openness and fairness of Canada's public institutions. Part of that mandate is to deal with foreign influence and emerging technologies.

Last year, the member for Burlington, my predecessor and soon-to-be successor in the role of Minister of Democratic Institutions, asked the Communications Security Establishment to conduct a study on cyber-threats to our democratic processes. This first-of-its-kind public report found that there was no evidence of nation states interfering in the 2015 Canadian election, but that there has been an upward trend in cyber-threat activity against democratic processes globally.

We take that report seriously. It found that over a 12-month period, 13% of elections globally had some level of foreign interference. We recognize the seriousness of this threat. We cannot afford to ignore these threats and we have a responsibility to defend the integrity of our electoral system.

We are moving forward to protect our democratic institutions from cyber-threats and foreign interference. In budget 2018, the Government of Canada provided approximately $750 million for the creation of a new Canadian centre for cybersecurity. Budget 2018 also sets aside more than $100 million over the next five years for the creation of a national cybercrime coordination unit. These organizations will bring together expertise from across government, coordinate investigations, and protect and defend our government and democratic institutions from cyber-threats.

Bill C-76 takes a step forward in addressing potential manipulation of social media by prohibiting the malicious use of computers where there is an intent to obstruct, interrupt, or interfere with the lawful use of computer data during an election period.

Current provisions of the Canada Elections Act that deal with publishing false statements are, according to the Commissioner of Canada Elections, unenforceable. The bill before us would narrow the focus to information about criminal records and biographical information. A new provision would prohibit distribution of material intended to mislead the public as to its source.

Most importantly, we are closing the loophole that has previously allowed foreign entities to spend money in Canadian elections.

As a result of news reports earlier this year, Canadians are rightly concerned about the way private corporations use their personal information for political ends. I want to reassure Canadians that in Canada these corporations are already regulated under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, PIPEDA, but that does not mean our work is done. Through this bill, we are requiring for the first time that political parties be transparent about the steps they are taking to protect Canadians' personal information.

Bill C-76 requires political parties to have a publicly available privacy policy addressing a series of privacy issues in terms of how a party collects or gathers data, how it uses data, how it shares data. A party that does not meet these criteria will face deregistration by Elections Canada.

I also hope that colleagues on the procedure and House affairs committee, PROC, will revisit their study on privacy and political parties and provide recommendations on the issue. It was less than a year ago that PROC took a look at this issue and recommended no changes, but I think all members would recognize that the ground has shifted on this issue and that it bears revisiting by PROC. PROC represents all parties, so it makes a great deal of sense for it to be the vehicle to do a deeper dive into this.

Some of the measures in this legislation may be familiar to members of the House, as they were introduced previously in Bill C-33. This underscores the breadth and depth of input and advice that has gone into the bill before us.

This legislation has also benefited from the input of the Minister of National Defence and the Minister of Sport and Persons with Disabilities. I would like to thank them for their work. I want to thank parliamentarians who contributed to this at PROC, and I also want to thank Elections Canada. Eighty-five per cent of the recommendations from Elections Canada after the last election were incorporated into the bill. The report's findings after the last election are very much at the heart of the bill. Again, I want to thank the members of PROC, who conducted a detailed analysis of the Chief Electoral Officer's report.

Our government is committed to strengthening Canada's democratic institutions. We are committed to maintaining the trust of Canadians in our democratic processes. Bill C-76 would advance that agenda, and I urge hon. members to move expeditiously on it so that it can be in place for the October 2019 general election.

[Nathan Cullen]

Here's what confuses me. The bill to make some of these changes, to fix the problems that the government and that we and many Canadians agreed with, to fix the problems in Harper's elections act, Bill C-23, was introduced November 24, 2016, in Bill C-33, and hasn't been seen since. We don't have it at committee. It hasn't passed through the House for debate, yet the government was in court three weeks ago, fighting against a charter challenge of the unfair elections act.

Are you aware of this case?

[Stéphane Perrault]

There are a number of them, including some in Bill C-33, but in our recommendations to Parliament, for example, we've recommended different categories of expenses to be a bit more fair. When you start playing with categories of expenses, then you need to design the systems to analyze the returns accordingly.

[Nathan Cullen]

So it was both the changes that were promised in Bill C-33, which was meant to undo some of the changes made in Bill C-23, the so-called Fair Elections Act—some said “unfair elections act”—plus any changes that this committee proposed after having studied the last election with Elections Canada about how to make the next election secure. Your recommendation to the Government of Canada, to Parliament, was to pass all of those changes through Parliament and the Senate by the end of this month.

[Stéphane Perrault]

That also includes the recommendations this committee has been supporting that are not part of Bill C-33.

[Nathan Cullen]

That's curious.

You talked about the deadline, which you've let us know about. You've let the government know of this deadline. The homework was due in order to have the changes in place. Some of these are very substantive changes. The ones that are contemplated in Bill C-33 include expat voting, Canadians living abroad; your ability, or who does the investigations of potential election fraud; your mandate for public education, which is important; and vouching and ID requirements. Those are all contained in a bill that you said you needed passed by now. Is that right?

[Stéphane Perrault]

It is fair to say that we have been and continue to be quite busy. We have a very tight but clear schedule of the work that needs to be done for the next election. We are working on schedule.

Of course, if changes are coming up, as you've indicated there may be, then we'll have to introduce them into our schedule, so after September, once we've done our testing, we may have to introduce other changes to the system, which is why I'm here today saying time is of the essence. We need to bring forward any legislation if we are going to implement them.

You talked about promoting democracy. As you know, our mandate is limited in that regard. We certainly have been working with youth. We have an inspire democracy program that has been focusing on youth, and we are working toward renewing our civic education program in the lead-up to the election. We will see whether Bill C-33, if I'm not mistaken, has a provision in it to restore the fuller civic education mandate, the public education mandate, to Elections Canada, and we'll see where that goes.

[Stéphane Perrault, Acting Chief Electoral Officer, Elections Canada]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

It is a pleasure to be back before the committee today to present Elections Canada's Main Estimates for 2018-19. This appearance also provides the opportunity to highlight the calendar of key activities that remain to prepare for the next general election, particularly in light of potential important legislative changes.

Today, the committee is voting on Election Canada's annual appropriation, which is $30.8 million and represents the salaries of some 360 indeterminate positions. Combined with our statutory authority, which funds all other expenditures under the Canada Elections Act, our Main Estimates total $135.2 million.

There are now at most 16 months left before the start of the next general election. Of course, we do not know exactly when it will begin, but there are at most 16 months before the start of the next election, and less time than that for Elections Canada to achieve a full state of readiness, for which our target date is April 2019. We are giving ourselves some flexibility between April and the start of the election in case any last-minute adjustments are needed.

A strict calendar of activities serves to ensure that changes to the electoral process and its administration are well tested before they are deployed and used by some 300,000 elections workers during the election.

I would therefore like to take this opportunity to explain key aspects of our readiness calendar. This is particularly important should legislative changes be introduced late in the electoral cycle.

There are some 40 IT systems that are critical to the services we provide to electors, candidates, and political parties in the context of the delivery of an election. A majority of these systems will be new or will have gone through significant changes for the next general election. The importance of these changes is a reflection of the need to improve services for Canadians as well as renew aging technology and enhance cybersecurity.

I'm glad to say that work on these systems is progressing well. Over this summer, we will be migrating 27 of these systems and associated databases to our new data centre, which is currently being built. The new data centre is essential to provide the flexibility and the security required to deliver the election in the current environment.

Starting September 1, we will subject all systems to a full round of integrated testing that replicates the activities and transactions of a general election.

Through the fall and winter, we will perform necessary adjustments to our systems and rerun testing cycles until we are satisfied that they are capable of sustaining the requirements, volumes, and pressures of an actual general election.

In March 2019 we plan to hold a simulation of the election process in several electoral districts. This is an exercise we did prior to the last general election as well. The purpose of this exercise is to see how the new business processes and technology that will be used at the next general election perform in a simulated setting, including interactions between local offices and headquarters.

By April 2019 we will also have designed, produced, and largely assembled electoral supplies and materials so that they can be progressively deployed to the 338 electoral districts.

Finally, in the spring of 2019 we will then have also trained all returning officers and have completed and tested the training modules for the poll workers who will be hired for the general election. The training program for returning officers is largely delivered online, and must undergo stringent quality assurance and testing processes before it is rolled out to field administrators, more than a third of whom will be new at the next election.

This is our readiness plan under the current legal framework.

Now, as you know, following the last general election, we made some 130 recommendations for legislative improvements. Many have been endorsed—endorsed unanimously, I should say—by this committee. In its response, the government has indicated that it broadly supports the recommendations for change, and has put forward additional proposals for improvements. These are over and above the proposals already contained in Bill C-33 and Bill C-50, which are currently before Parliament, not to mention private members' bills.

Considering the above, it is pressing for legislative changes to be made without delay if they are to be implemented for the next general election.

When I appeared last February, I indicated that the window of opportunity to implement major changes in time for the next election was rapidly closing. That was not a new message. Both Monsieur Mayrand and I had previously indicated that legislative changes should be enacted by April 2018. This means that we are now at a point where the implementation of new legislation will likely involve some compromises. Let me explain.

Should legislative changes be enacted over the coming year, the agency will need to minimize, as much as possible, changes to existing systems and applications. There are considerable risks in introducing last-minute changes to complex IT systems if there is not enough time to test them thoroughly. As indicated earlier, our window for integrated testing is September 2018, therefore there may not be sufficient time to automate new processes. Less optimal paper or manual solutions may have to be used instead.

Moreover, to the extent that legislative changes impact rules for political entities—and I'm referring here in particular to political financing rules—there will be only a short window of time to complete the necessary steps for renewing all of the manuals and consulting with all the parties, as well as the Commissioner of Canada Elections, on the changes being made, as required by law now. The same is also true for instructions required of field personnel. Last-minute updates to poll worker training and manuals reduce the time for quality control and testing in advance of the election.

Of course, Mr. Chair, our mandate is to implement the changes that Parliament decides to enact, and we will find ways to do that if and when legislation is introduced and passed. However, it is also my responsibility to inform you that time is quickly running out. Canadians trust Elections Canada to deliver robust and reliable elections, and we do not want to find ourselves in a situation where the quality of the electoral process is impacted. Should legislation be introduced, we will, of course, support the work of this committee, including informing members of operational impacts and implementation strategies.

Mr. Chair, this concludes my opening remarks. As usual, my colleagues and I will be happy to answer questions that members may have.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I think they're already past this committee. They haven't even been to this committee. Bill C-33 has got a lot of the big changes. Is this going to be a problem, Chair? I'll leave it open ended, but I've got to tell you there's going to be hell to pay if we went through all that work and Elections Canada is raring to go and that legislation doesn't get through Parliament. You can blame the opposition all you want; you're the majority government; you control the House; you control everything. I'm a little disappointed that one of you isn't confident enough in your own government's ability to pass legislation so you'd give us that assurance today.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thanks, Bill C-33, and there's another one. Anyway, those two bills have been through us, but they're waiting. They need them passed, and I'm just asking if we can get some assurance from the government that they're going to be made law so that Elections Canada can act, because time is running out.

[An hon. member]

It's Bill C-33.

Canada Elections Act

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Burlington, ON]

Madam Speaker, as I mentioned in my speech, I am very proud of the bill. This is an important step and it opens up fundraising activities in a way that we have not had before in Canada. It is yet to be determined what kind of impact it will have. However, the fact that the official opposition does not want to pursue it demonstrates that it has a significant impact on how we raise money as politicians, something all of us absolutely need to do.

With regard to the other elements of my mandate that were mentioned, I am very proud of Bill C-33. It is a really important bill that will reverse some of the elements of the previous government's so-called fair elections act.

With regard to cybersecurity and protecting our democratic institutions, it is absolutely vital for our next election.

I look forward to continuing to work with members in this place to do what we can to protect, strengthen, and improve our electoral system and democratic institutions.

[Pam Goldsmith-Jones, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of International Trade]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill C-50, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act in relation to political financing. This bill proposes to amend the Canada Elections Act to bring unprecedented openness and transparency to federal political fundraising. The legislation is the latest step the Government of Canada is taking to improve upon transparency, accountability, and integrity in our public institutions and toward strengthening the democratic process. I would like to thank the minister and her parliamentary secretary for their work.

In 2017, Canadians celebrated the 35th anniversary of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The charter is a model for democracies around the world. Section 3 of the charter guarantees every citizen the right to vote and to run in elections. This fundamental democratic right guaranteed to all Canadians is central, obviously, to our democracy. When candidates for a federally elected office engage in raising funds to run a campaign and when donors contribute, it is critical to ensure that the processes are open, transparent, and accountable. The integrity of our political system depends on being vigilant and on continuous improvement in recognition of the fact that the public trust is earned and re-earned every day.

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms also enshrines the freedoms of association and expression. Section 2 of the charter has been interpreted to include the right of Canadian citizens and permanent residents to make a donation to a political party and to participate in fundraising activities, subject to reasonable limits. Political parties are a vital part of our democratic system. They unite and mobilize people from different regions and with a variety of different perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences to volunteer, champion policies, have new ideas, and foster and engage in public debate.

Voting in an election for a candidate is one of the ways we play an active role in our society. Volunteering for a political party or campaign is another way. Certainly, making a financial contribution to a political campaign is a way to play a direct role in the democratic process. Upholding and protecting the integrity of the political campaign contribution process is our collective responsibility as members of Parliament. We must continue to ensure that Canadians are free to contribute to political parties and candidates.

Canada is known around the world for the rigour of its political financing regime, and this comes from our constant attention. Donations from corporations and unions are prohibited under existing legislation and there are strict limits on the contributions an individual can make. Canadian citizens and permanent residents can contribute a maximum of $1,575 annually to each registered party. They can donate $1,575, in total, to all leadership contestants in a particular contest, and they can donate a total of $1,575 to contestants for nomination, candidates, and/or riding associations of each registered party. Contributions are reported to Elections Canada, and the names, municipalities, provinces, and postal codes of those who contribute more than $200 are published.

Bill C-50 builds on the existing rules. When a fundraising event requires someone to contribute or pay a ticket price totalling more than $200, the name and partial address of each attendee, with certain exceptions, would be published. The exceptions are young people under 18, volunteers, event staff, media, someone assisting a person with a disability, and support staff for a minister or party leader in attendance.

Canadians take political fundraising seriously. There are significant consequences for disobeying the law, and that is why currently the Canada Elections Act provides tough sanctions for those who break the rules. Though Canadians can be proud of our already strict regulations for political financing, we recognize that they have the right to know even more when it comes to political fundraising events. Bill C-50 would provide Canadians with more information about political fundraising events in order to continue to enhance trust and confidence in our democratic institutions.

If passed, Bill C-50 would allow Canadians to learn when a political fundraiser that has a ticket price or requires a contribution of $200 or more is happening and who attended. This legislation would apply to all fundraising activities attended by cabinet ministers, including the prime minister, party leaders, and leadership contestants who meet the criteria. It would also apply to appreciation events for donors to a political party or contestant. This legislation would only apply to parties with a seat in the House of Commons. It would require parties to advertise fundraising events at least five days in advance. Canadians would know about a political fundraiser before the event takes place, giving them an opportunity to participate and even observe.

Bill C-50 gives journalists the ability to determine when and where fundraisers are happening. At the same time, political parties would retain the flexibility to set their own rules for providing media access and accreditation. Parties would be required to report the names and partial addresses of attendees to Elections Canada within 30 days of the event. That information would then become public.

The bill would also introduce new offences in the Canada Elections Act for those who do not respect the rules, and require the return of any money collected at the event. These sanctions would apply to political parties and event organizers rather than the senior political leaders invited to the event. We propose a maximum $1,000 fine on summary conviction for offences introduced under Bill C-50.

This new level of transparency recognizes that the public trust is always being built, and delivers on the government's promise to bring greater transparency to Canada's political financing system and thus strengthen our democratic institutions. We are also taking action to increase voter participation and enhance the integrity of elections through Bill C-33. The government is partnered with the Communications Security Establishment to protect Canada's democracy from cyber-threats.

While we know that Canadians have every reason to be proud of our democracy, which together we build every day, we recognize there is always room for improvement. Shining a light on political fundraising activities builds upon our already strong and robust system for political financing in Canada.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill C-50, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act (political financing). This bill proposes amending the Canada Elections Act to bring an unprecedented level of openness and transparency to federal political fundraisers. The legislation is just one of many steps that we are taking as a government to raise the bar on transparency, accountability, and integrity of our public institutions and the democratic process.

The year 2017 marked the 35th anniversary of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which was signed on a blustery day in April on the front lawn of Parliament just a few steps from where we are right now. Canadians cherish our charter and rightly so. It is a model for democracies around the world.

Section 3 of the charter guarantees every citizen the right to vote and to run in an election. This fundamental democratic right, guaranteed to all Canadians, is one of our most cherished civic rights. The simple act of voting is an exercise of democratic freedom that unites all of us as Canadians. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms also enshrines the freedoms of association and expression. Section 2 of the charter has been interpreted to include the right of Canadian citizens and permanent residents to make a donation to a party and to participate in fundraising activities. Of course, these rights are both subject to the reasonable limitations that might be imposed in a free and democratic society.

Political parties represent a vital part of our democratic system. They unite people from different parts of the country with a variety of different perspectives and backgrounds and experiences. Parties mobilize ordinary citizens to champion policies and ideas and they foster the kind of vigorous public debate about ideas that is at the heart of our healthy democracy. Voting in an election for a candidate is one of the ways Canadians play an active and engaged role in this society. We see this as an opportunity to make our country a better place for our children and our grandchildren. Some Canadians even choose to work or volunteer in a political party or a candidate's campaign, and for many of us here in this room, we probably know few people who do not. We engage all of our friends and family to help us in our political activities, and many of the people whom we meet are either our volunteers or people who work against us in campaigns.

It is true that it is a broad expanse of the Canadian population that participates in political activity at the municipal and provincial levels, and also here at the federal level, but not everyone has the time or inclination to become involved in politics in that respect. Still, people may want to have their voices heard, so for many Canadians, making a financial contribution to a political campaign is a meaningful way for them to play a direct role in our democracy. It is an important forum of democratic expression. Choosing to support a political party or a candidate is something we must continue to uphold and protect. Everyone in this place knows that donations given by people who believe in us, who believe in what we stand for and what our parties stand for, help make our work possible, and we must continue to ensure that Canadians are free to contribute to political parties and candidates openly and transparently.

It bears noting that Canada is known around the world for the rigour of its political financing regime. Donations from corporations and from unions are prohibited under the existing legislation. To further level the playing field, there are strict limits on the contributions an individual can make. Canadian citizens and permanent residents can each contribute a maximum this year of $1,575 to each registered party. They can donate a total of $1,575 to the leadership contestants in a particular contest. In addition, they can donate a total of $1,575 to contestants for nomination, candidates, and/or riding associations of each registered party. Contributions are reported to Elections Canada and the name, municipality, province, and postal code of those who contribute more than $200 are posted online.

Bill C-50 would build on this existing regime so that when a fundraising event requires an attendee to contribute or pay a ticket price totalling more than $200, the name and partial address of each attendee, with certain exceptions, would be published online. The exceptions are youth under 18, volunteers, event staff, media, someone assisting a person with a disability, and support staff for a minister or party leader in attendance.

Canadians take political financing seriously. There are significant consequences for disobeying the law, and that is why currently the Canada Elections Act provides tough sanctions for those who break the rules. Although Canadians can be proud of our already strict regulations for political financing, we recognize that they have a right to know even more and perhaps in a more timely fashion when it comes to political fundraising events. Bill C-50 aims to provide Canadians with more information quicker about political financing events in order to continue to enhance trust and confidence in our democratic institutions.

If passed, Bill C-50 would allow Canadians to learn when a political fundraiser has a ticket price or requires contributions above $200, that it is happening, and who attended. The legislation would apply to all fundraising activities attended by cabinet ministers, including the Prime Minister, party leaders, and leadership contestants who meet these criteria.

This provision also applies to appreciation events for donors to a political party or contestant. This legislation would apply only to parties with a seat in the House of Commons. It would require parties to advertise fundraising events at least five days in advance. Canadians would know about a political fundraiser before the event takes place, which would give them the opportunity to inquire about a ticket if they so choose.

Bill C-50 would also give journalists the ability to determine when and where fundraisers are happening. At the same time, political parties would retain the flexibility to set their own rules for providing media access and accreditation. Parties would be required to report the names and partial addresses of attendees to Elections Canada within 30 days of the event. That information would then become public in a much more timely fashion than currently is the case.

The bill would also introduce new offences under the Canada Elections Act for those who do not respect the rules and require the return of any money collected at the event. These sanctions would apply to political parties and event organizers rather than the senior political leaders invited to the events.

We propose a maximum $1,000 fine on summary conviction for offences introduced under Bill C-50. Of course, this is in addition to returning the funds raised. This new level of transparency would further enhance Canadians' trust in government, and that is good for everyone.

If passed, Bill C-50 would deliver on the government's promise to bring greater transparency to Canada's political financing system and thus strengthen our democratic institutions. As I have said, this is just one of the efforts that we are putting into place. The government is also taking action to increase voter participation and enhance the integrity of elections through Bill C-33, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act, and the government has partnered with the Communications Security Establishment to protect democracy from cyber-threats.

While we know that Canadians have confidence in our democracy, we recognize that there is always room for improvement. Shining a light on political fundraising activities as and when they happen builds upon our already strong and robust system for political financing in Canada. It should be welcomed by everyone in the House.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the million-dollar question is, where is Bill C-33? It was introduced in November 2016, and yet here it is, stalled. There has been no debate at second reading. It has not even reached the point where we can get it to committee and discuss it. Our party is open to debating Bill C-33, but we have not been given the chance to debate it. It is sitting awaiting second reading, unmoved, unloved, completely stalled. I would have to ask the government, where is Bill C-33?

Where are so many other bills that the government has introduced and let sit stagnant on the Order Paper?

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I believe my colleague just referred to the first past the post electoral system.

It is not something that trips off the tongue easily even for the Québécois, but that is the current dysfunctional voting system we have.

I appreciate that the hon. member for Perth—Wellington raised, as I did, a really substantive piece of legislation. I do not know why Bill C-33 has been stalled for so long at first reading. I wonder if he could give me a sense of the reason.

The member for Perth—Wellington and I worked together on electoral reform on various committees. He is a sterling fellow. I do not want to put him on the spot on behalf of his whole party. Bill C-33 is trying to repair a lot of what many of us in the opposition at the time felt was damage to our electoral system. Does my colleague know the current intention, and how does he personally feel he will vote on Bill C-33?

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

My colleague is telling me to get a life.

It is an excellent piece of work. I am thankful to all those involved. It will stand the test of time as an important document.

Let us go to the subject at hand, Bill C-50.

The member for Saanich—Gulf Islands briefly mentioned in her comments Bill C-33, and I was intrigued today in question period when the Minister of Democratic Institutions mentioned Bill C-33. In fact, I will quote her from the blues. She said, “My job is to strengthen and protect our democratic institutions and ensure they represent the values of Canadians. Through the introduction of Bill C-33 and Bill C-50, we are moving to accomplish that mandate.”

How important is Bill C-33 to the government? It received first reading on November 24, 2016, 14 months ago. Where is that bill today? It still sits at first reading, having never been brought forward for second reading. This is reflective of the entire government's legislative agenda. It introduces certain pieces of legislation to great fanfare, yet there they sit 14 months later, unmoved, at the same stage as they were when they were first introduced. This is reflective of the entire government's agenda, but most particularly of the democratic institutions' agenda.

Let us contrast that with our former Conservative government's agenda. The very first piece of legislation introduced in 2006 was Bill C-2, the Federal Accountability Act. What did that do? It banned corporate donations and union donations, and placed a hard cap on the maximum that an individual could donate.

The Liberal government, in the introduction of Bill C-50, is simply trying to legitimize its cash for access events. It is trying to legitimize its pay-to-play events. It is trying to legitimize that which it should not have been doing in the first place, by its own rules and its own document “Open and Accountable Government”.

I would like to quote from this document. The prelude states:

Open and Accountable Government sets out core principles regarding the roles and responsibilities of Ministers in Canada’s system of responsible parliamentary government.

Under Annex B, “Fundraising and Dealing with Lobbyists: Best Practices for Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries”, the very first paragraph states:

Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries must avoid conflict of interest, the appearance of conflict of interest and situations that have the potential to involve conflicts of interest.

This legislation would not have been needed had the Prime Minister accepted his own words, and had he and his ministers followed their own document and simply done what they were asked to do.

It goes on to state:

Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries must ensure that political fundraising activities or considerations do not affect, or appear to affect, the exercise of their official duties or the access of individuals or organizations to government.

On this specific point, the Liberal government, the Prime Minister, and his cabinet have failed to live up to the standards that the Prime Minister himself set in “Open and Accountable Government”. The Prime Minister laid out his vision. He promised to be open and transparent, and then the Liberals broke their own rules.

This is not the first time we have seen this. We have seen it time and time again over the two years this government has been in office. The Liberals are constantly placing themselves in the appearance or potential of conflict of interest. All week in this House we have heard questions asking the Prime Minister and the government House leader about the Prime Minister's unethical trip to the Aga Khan's island, for which he was found guilty on four separate counts under the Conflict of Interest Act.

The government, in only two short years, is achieving a level of ethics lapses that took the Chrétien-Martin Liberals a full 13 years to get to. It has accomplished that in two years.

Let us talk about this piece of legislation and some of the exemptions and exceptions that the government has brought forward in Bill C-50. There is one particular exception, what I like to call the Laurier Club loophole. This legislation applies to donor appreciation events, except when those events take place at conventions.

People may be wondering, what exactly is the Laurier Club? I have an answer. I went on the Liberal Party's website and found a little information about it. For the low price of $1,500 a year, anyone can become a member of the Laurier Club.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, we also have another really important piece of electoral reform legislation that has received first reading in this place, but has not yet gone to committee, which is Bill C-33. It would do away with a lot of what was done under the previous administration's, what we called, the unfair elections act. It has a lot of really good provisions in it to bring back the rights of the Chief Electoral Officer to communicate with Canadians and educate Canadians. It has a really cool provision to allow young people at age 16 to be registered to vote, so they are already registered by the time they turn 18. I would love to see something in there, and we could go back to that when it gets to committee. What former Prime Minister Harper did in the unfair elections act was create, for the first time, additional money, depending on how long the writ lasted.

We had a very long writ period in 2005. My friends here with the memory will remember that on November 28, 2005, the Liberal government of Paul Martin fell, but the election was not until later in January. There was the feeling that between Christmas and Hanukkah there had to be some time allotted. However, that was in the days before we had additional spending limits during a writ period. Stephen Harper changed it so parties could get more money back by having a longer writ period. That election campaign went from August 3 to late October.

I agree entirely with my friend. I do not know that we want to put a hard cap on the length of an election. There may be reasons we would want to extend it, like if a government falls right before Christmas, as in the case of the November 28, 2005, fall of the government. However, we need to ensure that long writ periods are not an excuse to get more money from taxpayers because the game has already been rigged so parties can spend more money and get more money. The party that had the most money at the time engineered those changes.

Democratic Reform

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Minister of Democratic Institutions]

Mr. Speaker, when it comes to strengthening our democracy, Canadians want us to focus on what unites us, not on what divides us. We listened to Canadians. They expect us to protect the integrity of our democracy.

My job is to strengthen and protect our democratic institutions and ensure they represent the values of Canadians. Through the introduction of Bill C-33 and Bill C-50, we are moving to accomplish that mandate.

I know every member of the House shares the deep affection Canadians have for our democracy. Canadians want us to work together on priorities that unite us, and that is where our focus will remain.

An Act to change the name of the electoral district of Châteauguay—Lacolle

[Kyle Peterson, Liberal, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House to speak to Bill C-377.

This is a private member's bill put forward by my colleague, the hon. member for Châteauguay—Lacolle. As we know, it proposes to change the name of her electoral district to Châteauguay—Les Jardins-de-Napierville.

The municipality of Lacolle, which is currently included in the name of my colleague's electoral district, is actually located in the neighbouring riding of Saint-Jean. This is confusing as we have heard, for residents in both ridings and for this reason, the hon. member for Saint-Jean supports the legislation as well. Our government in turn supports the bill because it makes good sense.

Typically, as all members know, riding names are selected during a process every decade under the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act. In the latest process, census commissions were created in all provinces after the 2011 census. Each three-person commission, in accordance with the legislation, was chaired by a judge appointed by the provincial chief justice.

In the spring and summer of 2012, the commissions crafted and made public proposals for each of their respective provinces. They then held hearings to get public feedback and to consider possible alterations. Final reports were submitted by the Chief Electoral Officer to the Speaker of the House of Commons. They were then referred to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.

This process is as exciting as it sounds. I think we can all agree with that. That referral gave MPs an opportunity to file objections, which the committee considered before producing its final report. That report was put forward to the commissions with the recommended changes.

In the case of Quebec, the committee sent 11 objections to riding names and suggested alternatives. All were adopted and the 2013 Representation Order was proclaimed that autumn, resulting in our new electoral map.

However, Parliament has the option of adopting name changes after this process finishes. Normally this goes smoothly, though in 2003-04 there were objections from the Chief Electoral Officer at the time, Jean-Pierre Kingsley. Mr. Kingsley pointed out that there was an excessive administrative burden imposed because it took place so close to the 2004 election. He also voiced concern that the change could lead to public confusion and additional costs because electoral materials would have to be reprinted and software reconfigured. However, there have not been any significant issues identified when name changes are proposed well in advance of elections.

In the case of the bill we are considering now, there is no indication that the name change will cause any technical problems. Elections Canada has asked that no name exceed 50 characters, including hyphens and dashes. This proposed new name is well below that threshold. I am sure the member for Louis-Saint-Laurent would agree with that.

Elections Canada has also asked that name change bills receive royal assent no later than January 2019. There is plenty of time.

In addition to this kind of legislation, our government and indeed all members of this chamber must do everything in our power to encourage Canadians to participate in our democracy. Confusing Canadians, confusing voters does not foster participation in our democracy. In fact, the Minister of Democratic Institutions has spoken passionately about the need for us to do everything we can to encourage and not discourage democratic participation.

As a result, we are committed to restoring integrity to our democratic process by reversing some of the previous government's Fair Elections Act, which made voting difficult for so many. We are accomplishing this with Bill C-33, which was introduced last year, as all members of the House know. This legislation, if passed, would make it easier for Canadians to vote, get more Canadians involved in voting, and build confidence and integrity in our voting system.

In essence, this private member's bill is about empowering Canadians. It is about empowering constituents to feel they are part of the process.

I do find it a little surprising that some members opposite are quarrelling about the process, although are supportive of the substance. However, there are many ways to get to the same objective. For instance, some people wear belts. Some wear suspenders. Neither is right and neither is wrong. They both get to the goal that is established at the outset, and in this case, it is holding up one's pants. Does it really matter what process is used if it supports the goal? It is a fair and open process. Surely we can all agree on that in this place.

My colleague for Châteauguay—Lacolle knows her constituents' concerns better than any of us. She has heard from them. We heard her say there is a petition in the riding asking to change the name of the riding. The member for Châteauguay—Lacolle would ignore that at her peril. How could she go back home and say she got the petition with the thousand names, but decided to ignore it because the opposition wanted her to do something else for them instead? Would they not ask if she were not here to work for them? Of course she is, as we all are throughout this country, working very hard for our constituents. To the suggestion there is some flaw in her conclusion that it is important to her constituents, I would say, no, there is not.

I honestly believe, as I think we all do, that this private member's bill—

[Peter Julian, NDP, New Westminster—Burnaby, BC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Christopherson.

As I mentioned in the presentation, Bill C-364 touches the same subject, amending the Election Act, as Bill C-50 and Bill C-33, so there's a bit of an inconsistency between two decisions with bills that have subjects that are similar to the subjects of government bills but are being treated in a different way.

As I said earlier, and I can't stress this enough, the intent of providing more scope for private members' business, as Mr. Christopherson said very eloquently just now, has always been to open the scope for each of us as a private member. It has nothing to do with whatever party we're affiliated with. It has much more to do with our rights as members.

This committee has always been the committee that has stood up for the prerogatives of members of Parliament. You have a very important role to play in that regard. This is, I think, a key circumstance, in that there's a bit of a loophole and that's why you're being asked in a sense to hear this appeal and make what I believe would be the right decision, which is to make Bill C-352 votable, because I think it meets all the tests. It certainly meets the intent as well of where we have evolved on private members' legislation, and you're the ones who can come to the defence of private members' legislation with this appeal that Ms. Malcolmson has brought to your attention.

[Peter Julian, NDP, New Westminster—Burnaby, BC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I also want to thank you, Ms. Malcolmson. We are very happy to have an opportunity to speak with you today about why Bill C-352 should be votable in the House of Commons.

Since your committee is in charge of all the prerogatives of Parliament, the decision you have to make is important.

There are three main arguments I would like to put forward at the beginning.

First off, as you will see, Bill C-352 is in fact quite a different piece of legislation from the government bill, Bill C-64, and therefore should not be considered the same question as Bill C-64, which is currently on the Order Paper.

Second, the subcommittee was incorrect in applying the criteria to Bill C-352 because it was similar to Bill C-64 at the same meeting where it applied different criteria, it seemed, to Bill C-364, which was declared votable, despite being on the same subject and amending the same Canada Elections Act as Bill C-50 and Bill C-33. There's an inconsistency there.

Third, allowing the subcommittee decision to stand is allowing the government to violate the separation of private members' business and to let it do through the back door what the rules were designed to forbid through the front door: to deny individual members their right to vote on their preferred item of private members' business.

As we all know, government bills are subject to party discipline. Private members' bills have been the exception to this, and in our bible, which is O'Brien and Bosc, House of Commons Procedure and Practice, it is clear that these rules were developed over decades, leading to a system based on the following fundamental characteristics: each member should have “at least one opportunity per Parliament to have an item of Private Members' Business debated” and voted upon, and “each item in the Order of Precedence would be votable, unless the sponsor opted to make it non-votable.”

The basic premise for PMBs is that government business is fundamentally different from private members' business. This premise was put in place to protect individual initiatives from members against the power of majority governments, including the power to try to knock off a bill.

Now, to emphasize the differences, the House has many rules built in to reflect the separation of government and private members' business. Amendments to private members' motions can only be moved with the consent of the sponsor. PMB recorded divisions, as we know, are done row by row in the chamber, and not by party. The lottery is designed to exclude ministers and parliamentary secretaries from PMBs, and if the committee makes a decision and it is appealed, the appeal is done by secret ballot on the floor of the House of Commons. The only other time this arises is when we elect a Speaker at the beginning of Parliament.

I would like to pass the microphone back now to Ms. Malcolmson, who will explain why Bill C-352 is so different from Bill C-64.

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Minister of Democratic Institutions]

Thank you very much, Minister Brison.

Mr. Chair, colleagues, committee members, thank you for inviting me to appear alongside my colleague, Minister Brison, to address Bill C-58. I'd like to acknowledge that Allen Sutherland from Democratic Institutions is here.

I want to acknowledge the important work of the public service in putting this bill together.

The Government is taking measures to maintain the openness, the transparency and the accountability of our democracy. To this end, we have introduced Bill C-33 in order to increase voter turnout and to enhance the integrity of our electoral system.

We've also put forward Bill C-50, which would make political fundraising more transparent.

As Minister of Democratic Institutions, I have also acted to help protect our electoral system from cyber-threats.

Earlier this year, I asked the Communications Security Establishment, or CSE, to undertake the very first assessment of threats to our democratic process. Since the release of the report, in June, the CSE has communicated with political parties and with provincial and territorial chief electoral officers to provide them with advice against cyberthreats.

Today, I am here with you to discuss Bill C-58. This legislation includes long-overdue amendments to an access to information law that has not been updated since it passed almost 34 years ago. The amendments to the act being brought forward by my colleague, Minister Brison, would help to significantly update and improve how Canada's access to information laws function.

Right now, I would like to focus in particular on how Bill C-58 would impact three areas: the offices of the Prime Minister and his ministers, members of Parliament and senators, and the administrative institutions that support Parliament and parliamentarians.

The bill would require the Prime Minister’s Office and ministerial offices to proactively disclose a variety of documents, including mandate letters, transition handbooks, information packages for ministers and their deputies, as well as information regarding travel and accommodation costs for ministers and their exempt staff.

It would also require disclosure of contracts over $10,000.

Information prepared by departments for question period and parliamentary committee appearances would also be subject to the act.

As you know, some of this information is already proactively disclosed by ministerial cabinets. However, this practice is not consistent and is not set out in the law. The aim of this bill is to obtain uniform disclosure from all cabinets. It would require the public release of those documents for the first time.

Of course, exemptions and exclusions under the law would still apply in the case of requests concerning certain issues, such as personal and national security issues.

Bill C-58 also extends the act to senators and members of Parliament. For the first time, this disclosure will be formalized in law. Bill C-58 also applies to institutions that support Parliament. I am referring to organizations like the Library of Parliament, the parliamentary budget officer, and the Senate and Commons administrations.

We’re improving the openness of these offices while ensuring security laws and parliamentary privilege.

Bill C-58 will make it possible to achieve the necessary balance while implementing measures that will contribute to modernize the Access to Information Act. Canada’s democratic institutions will thus increase their transparency and accountability.

To conclude, Bill C-58 will significantly advance the availability and efficiency of the Access to Information Act as it is related to the Prime Minister's office and ministers' offices, parliamentarians, as well as the institutions that support Parliament.

The reforms proposed in Bill C-58 are an important step in the ongoing review and modernization of the Access to Information Act, and I look forward to working with all members to enhance accountability.

With that, I welcome your questions. Merci.

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Minister of Democratic Institutions]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Good morning, everyone. This is your 70th meeting today. Congratulations for that. It is important.

I will acknowledge, though, that I have mixed feelings about being here today.

I am honoured to be before you again to talk about legislation that makes our democracy more open and transparent, but I'm also saddened to recall that my previous appearances at this committee included the participation of my dear friend and colleague, the member of Parliament for Scarborough—Agincourt, Arnold Chan. He was both an outstanding parliamentarian and a really great guy. His passing has left an enormous gap in this committee and in the House of Commons and, I'm sure, in all of our hearts.

I just wanted to put that on the record.

Our focus today is on Bill C-50, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act (political financing). This bill would amend the Canada Elections Act to create an unprecedented level of openness and transparency surrounding political fundraisers.

Bill C-50 required the hard work and dedication of many public servant officials, so before I start, I would like to acknowledge and thank them for their contribution.

Thank you for your commitment to this legislation.

The Government of Canada has promised to set a higher bar on the transparency, accountability, and integrity of our public institutions and the democratic process. Today I'm addressing one of our initiatives that will help reach this objective. This year we celebrate, in addition to the 150th anniversary of Confederation, the 35th anniversary of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Canadians cherish our charter. It is a model for new democracies around the world.

Section 3 of the charter guarantees every citizen the right to vote and to run in an election. The freedoms of association and expression enshrined in section 2 of the charter include the right of Canadian citizens and permanent residents to make a donation to a party and to participate in fundraising activities. Of course, these rights are subject to reasonable limitations.

Political parties represent a vital component of our democratic system. They unite people coming to the table from different regions, and with a variety of perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences. Parties mobilize ordinary citizens to champion ideas and work to get others to join them.

In my speech in the House of Commons, I quoted former Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci. He said, “Political parties provide individual citizens with an opportunity to express an opinion on the policy and functioning of government.”

Each time that Canadians vote in an election for a political party that shares their objectives or world view, it is one of the ways in which they play an active and engaged role in their society. We see this as an opportunity to make our country a better place for our children and grandchildren. Some Canadians even choose to work or volunteer for a political party.

But not everyone has the time or inclination to become active in politics as a volunteer. Perhaps they can do that, and something else as well. Still, they may want their voices heard. For many Canadians, making a financial contribution to a political campaign is a meaningful way to play a direct role in our democracy and an important form of democratic expression. Choosing to financially support a political party is something we must continue to uphold and protect.

Everyone in this room knows that donations given by people who believe in us, who believe in what we stand for, make our work possible, and we must continue to ensure that Canadians are free to contribute to political parties in an open and transparent manner.

It bears noting that Canada is known around the world for the rigour of its political financing regime. Companies, industry associations, unions, or any organization for that matter, cannot give funds to any politician or political party, and there's a strict limit on individual contributions. Canadian citizens and permanent residents can contribute a maximum of $1,550 annually to each of the following: a registered party, a leadership contestant, and an independent candidate. In addition, they can donate a total of $1,550 to a contestant for nomination, a candidate in an election, and/or a riding association. Contributions are reported to Elections Canada and the name, municipality, province, and postal code of those who contribute more than $200 are published online.

Bill C-50 will build on this existing regime. Where a fundraising event requires any attendee to contribute or pay a ticket price totalling more than $200, the name and partial address of each attendee, with certain exceptions, will be published online. The exceptions are: youth under 18, volunteers, event staff, media and support staff for the minister or party leader in attendance.

As I said during second reading debate in the House of Commons, Canadians take political fundraising seriously. There are serious consequences for disobeying the law, and that is why the Canada Elections Act provides tough sanctions for those who break the rules. The penalties include fines of up to $50,000, up to five years in jail, or both.

Although Canadians can be proud of our already strict regulations for political financing, we recognize that they have the right to know even more than they do now when it comes to political fundraising events.

Bill C-50 aims to provide Canadians with more information about political fundraising events in order to continue to enhance trust and confidence in our democratic institutions.

If passed, Bill C-50 would allow Canadians to learn when a political fundraiser that has a ticket price or requires a contribution above $200 is happening and who attended.

This legislation would apply to all fundraising activities attended by cabinet ministers, including the Prime Minister, party leaders, and leadership contestants when a contribution or ticket price of more than $200 is required of any attendee. This provision also applies to appreciation events for donors to a political party or contestant.

These provisions apply to all parties with a seat in the House of Commons.

Bill C-50 would require parties to advertise fundraising events at least five days in advance. Canadians would know about a political fundraiser before the event takes place, giving them an opportunity to inquire about a ticket, if they wish.

Bill C-50 would also give journalists the ability to determine when and where fundraisers are happening. At the same time, political parties would retain the flexibility to set their own rules for providing media access and accreditation.

Parties would be required to report the names and partial addresses of attendees to Elections Canada within 30 days of the event. That information would then become public.

The bill would also introduce new offences in the Canada Elections Act for those who don't respect the rules, and require the return of any money collected at the event. These sanctions would apply to political parties, rather than the senior political leaders invited to the events.

We propose a maximum $1,000 fine on summary conviction for offences introduced under Bill C-50. And if rules are broken, then contributions collected at events would have to be returned.

This new level of transparency will further enhance Canadians' trust in the political system, and that's good for everyone. If passed, Bill C-50 would fulfill our government's promise to make Canada's political financing system much more transparent to the public and the media. This is one of many actions we are taking to improve, strengthen, and protect our democratic institutions.

We are also taking action to increase voter participation and to enhance the integrity of elections through Bill C-33, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act, and we have partnered with the Communications Security Establishment to protect Canada's democracy from cyber-threats.

As I noted in my speech in the House of Commons, Samara Canada issued a report indicating 71% of Canadians said they are fairly satisfied or very satisfied with how democracy works in Canada. While this report suggests that Canadians have confidence in their democracy, we recognize there is always room for improvement. That's why we've decided to shine a light on political fundraising activities and build upon our already strong and robust system for political financing in Canada.

I am eager to hear the opinions of committee members. This is important legislation that affects all of us, and I hope you share my desire to ensure Canadians know more about fundraising events.

I look forward to your questions.

Thank you for the invitation to be here before you today.

Access to Information Act

[Andy Fillmore, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Democratic Institutions]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Vancouver Quadra.

I am proud to rise in the House to speak to Bill C-58, an act to amend the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act.

Our government was elected on a promise to reinforce public trust in our democracy, and over the course of our time in office, we have put action behind our words. For example, we are reforming campaign finance laws to make one of the world's most respected democracies even more transparent. We have introduced legislation to make Canada's democracy more accessible to all Canadians. The debate today is about another of the fundamental concepts of any modern democracy.

We know Canadians cannot meaningfully participate in democracy when they are in an information vacuum. Access to government data is vital. Without it, neither the public nor the media are able to hold governments to account. That is why our government promised to firm up one of the key pillars of our democracy: access to information.

We told Canadians we would make information open by default, and in formats that would be modern and simple to use. Canadians pay for the information that is assembled in the Government of Canada, so why should they not have access to this data? This greater openness in turn will lead to greater confidence in our democracy, which is why this government has put such a great emphasis on amending the Access to Information Act with Bill C-58.

This is the first major overhaul since our predecessors in this very institution voted in favour of the current act 35 years ago, so it is long overdue.

The act, which was enacted in Parliament in 1982, and took effect the following year, came long before anyone had ever heard of the Internet. Governments in those days had far more administrators and clerks, because there was so much paperwork to file and record. One could not just flip a written message to a colleague by email. If one wanted to send an interesting news article to a counterpart in another department, one could not just forward a link. One's options were limited to things like a fax machine or an inter-office courier.

Today, technology has dramatically changed how governments operate, and we need to align our laws to take into account this new reality. We have a responsibility to make it easier to obtain information and once Canadians get it, that information should be in easy-to-use formats. We can think of the graduate students, like those at Dalhousie University or Saint Mary's University in my riding of Halifax, who are out there doing groundbreaking research but operating on tight timelines. We want them to be able to, when possible, obtain an electronic version of government records so they can more easily navigate and analyze the documents. Think of the time that will be saved if they do not have to go through hundreds of pages to find what they are looking for.

Now Bill C-58 has many components, but for now I would like to focus on how it impacts parliamentary institutions. I am talking about the Library of Parliament, the parliamentary budget officer, the Parliamentary Protective Service, the Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, the Office of the Senate Ethics Officer, and the administration of the Senate and of the House of Commons. These institutions are foundational components of our democracy, and Bill C-58 proposes to bring them under the Access to Information Act to make them more accountable. The proposed legislation will require these institutions to publish each quarter their travel and hospitality expenses as well as disclose over the same timeline any contracts with a value above $10,000.

Another important component of Bill C-58 is the new powers it would give to our Information Commissioner. This is of particular interest to me, both in my role as a Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Democratic Institutions as well as the member of Parliament for Halifax.

Not too long ago, I met with representatives from a group based in Halifax called the Centre for Law and Democracy, whose mission is to:

...promote, protect and develop those human rights which serve as the foundation for or underpin democracy, including the rights to freedom of expression, to vote and participate in governance, to access information and to freedom of assembly and association.

Some members may be familiar with the centre's work on the right to information rating, or RTI, which is developed along with Access Info Europe to calculate and rate the overall strength of countries' right to information laws.

The topic of the Information Commissioner was one I discussed with representatives of this group in my office during a meeting in the spring. They believe, as I do, and so too does our government believe, that the Information Commissioner ought to have the ability to order the release of records, or so-called “order making”. I am proud to say that Bill C-58 would give the Information Commissioner that power. I would like to congratulate and thank the Centre for Law and Democracy on its strong advocacy on this point, and for its ongoing work in Canada and across the world to strengthen democratic institutions.

It is important to note that the legislation would also give government institutions the ability to decline requests that are excessively broad or requests of information already in the public domain.

The government has limited resources, and this will free up government institutions to respond to other requesters. Of course the applicant subjected to a decision like this would be able to make a complaint to the Information Commissioner.

Bill C-58 would also oblige members of Parliament and senators to publish all travel and hospitality expenses, and all service contract amounts. In both cases, this information would have to be made public on a quarterly basis.

We know senators and members of Parliament already publish travel and hospitality expenses pursuant to their own internal rules, and senators disclose service contract information, while MPs publish the total costs of awarded service contracts.

Importantly, Bill C-58 would enshrine the current practice of also requiring additional details on the service contracts and travel costs of MPs.

This legislation will require a review of the act every five years, starting in 2019. This will give Canadians an opportunity to look for further improvements.

We believe Canada deserves a vibrant democracy that is transparent, open, and accountable, but our efforts do not begin and end with changes to the Access to Information Act.

We have been relentless since taking office to look for other ways to improve our democratic system. For instance, Bill C-33 would amend the Canada Elections Act to increase voter participation and improve the integrity of our electoral system. Bill C-50, meanwhile, if passed, will make important changes to the same act to make political fundraising more open and transparent. We are also taking action against cyber threats and the danger they pose to our electoral system.

We live in one of the most respected democracies in the world, but our government will remain relentless in ensuring that any weaknesses are dealt with. Bill C-58 is a major part of this effort, and I am proud to work with the Minister of Democratic Institutions to advance it. With that, I welcome any questions from my colleagues.

Concurrence in Vote 1—Privy Council Office

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Burlington, ON]

Madam Speaker, we know and have the facts from Statistics Canada that almost 200,000 Canadians did not vote in the last federal election because they did not have the sufficient identification required to vote. The voter identification card is an excellent way for Canadians to be able to use that as sufficient ID to cast their ballots. All Canadian citizens have the right to vote. We need to ensure that they have the opportunity and the possibility to vote and that is exactly what Bill C-33 intends to do. I hope that all members in the House share that the importance of democracy is ensuring that everyone can participate.

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Minister of Democratic Institutions]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin my remarks this evening by acknowledging that this week is the 25th annual National Public Service Week.

Now is the time to celebrate the tireless work of the more than 250,000 public servants who support the Government of Canada and ensure that the needs of Canadians are met.

I want to sincerely thank my officials who have supported me since the day I was sworn in as Minister of Democratic Institutions. They work hard to ensure that I am supported in my duties as minister. I feel proud and fortunate to work with such an exemplary group of public servants. Even more than that, Canada can be proud of the strength of its public service, thanks to individuals such as these. I thank them for all that they do.

I am pleased to rise this evening to speak to this opposed vote. This particular motion deals with vote 1, in the amount of $129,915,146, under Privy Council Office program expenditures, in the main estimates for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2018. Of this $129 million, $1 million deals with the creation of the new, non-partisan, merit-based Senate appointments process.

As the Minister of Democratic Institutions, I am mandated to “restore Canadians' trust and participation in our democratic processes”. My job is to improve, strengthen, and protect Canadian democracy.

I was honoured when the Prime Minister asked me to take on this portfolio, as, to me, it is one that touches every single Canadian. The effectiveness of our democratic institutions and the health of our democracy is one of the most defining features of our identity as a country. We know that when Canadians have faith in their institutions, they are engaged. It is when they lose faith in these institutions that they become disengaged from the process and disheartened by their lack of voice in the system.

Unfortunately, Canadians' faith in the Senate was shaken during the Senate expense scandal that saw the previous Prime Minister's Office directly interfere in the day-to-day operations of the Senate. We listened when Canadians told us they were losing faith in this institution. We listened when they told us they did not think the Prime Minister's Office should be interfering in the careful deliberations of the upper house. We listened when they told us the Senate should not simply be a rubber stamp for the government in the House of Commons, but instead should be conducting its important constitutional role as the chamber of sober second thought. Under the previous government, the reputation of the Senate suffered.

Canadians care deeply about their democracy. It is our job as legislators to ensure that we continue to strengthen and protect our great institutions.

That is why we announced in our 2015 election platform that, once elected, a Liberal government would set up a non-partisan committee whose members would be appointed based on merit and would propose candidates to the upper chamber to the Prime Minister.

We made this commitment to restore Canadians' trust in this institution. The Senate, after all, plays a pivotal role in our Parliament, and as it is written in our Constitution, we cannot pass legislation without it going through the Senate.

On January 19, 2016, we established the Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments and launched a non-partisan, open, and transparent application process. It consists of three permanent federal members and two ad hoc members from each of the provinces or territories where a vacancy exists.

The independent advisory board has a mandate to provide non-binding, merit-based recommendations to the Prime Minister on Senate appointments by carefully assessing applications using merit-based criteria. The advisory board looks to identify Canadians who would make a significant contribution to the work of the Senate.

From now on, Canadians across the country will be able to apply to become a senator.

The changes we made reflect our commitment to make the Senate a more open and transparent institution, a Senate that is arm's length from the government and less partisan than ever before.

If Canadians want to apply to serve in the Senate, they simply have to visit the government's website, Canada.ca. Our government is committed to a merit-based assessment of Senate candidates. Our emphasis is on individuals who meet the merit-based criteria established by the government.

The first such criterion regards gender, indigenous, and minority balance. Individuals will be considered with a view to achieving gender balance in the Senate. Priority consideration will be given to applicants who represent indigenous peoples and linguistic minority and ethnic communities, with a view to ensuring that representation of those communities in the Senate is consistent with the Senate's role in minority representation.

The second criterion is non-partisanship. Individuals must demonstrate to the advisory board that they have the ability to bring a perspective and a contribution to the work of the Senate that is independent and non-partisan. They will also have to disclose any political involvement and activities. Past political activities would not disqualify an applicant.

The third criterion is knowledge. Individuals must demonstrate a solid knowledge of the legislative process and Canada's Constitution, including the role of the Senate as an independent and complementary body of sober second thought, regional representation, and minority representation.

The fourth criterion is personal qualities. Individuals must demonstrate outstanding personal qualities, including adherence to the principles and standards of public life, ethics, and integrity. Individuals must demonstrate an ability to make an effective and significant contribution to the work of the Senate, not only in their chosen profession or area of expertise but in the wide range of other issues that come before the other place.

Since spring 2016, our government has appointed 27 senators through the new appointment process. Whether they are from Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, Ontario or British Columbia, they who have taken their sears in the Senate are all outstanding Canadians who are doing an excellent job on behalf of all Canadians. These new senators are from a variety of professional backgrounds; they are former judges, Olympians, engineers, civil servants, teachers, police commissioners and more, and they will add their knowledge and skills to the wealth of experience each member already brings to our institution.

While we have taken steps to modernize the Senate through the appointment process, the Senate itself has undertaken a number of modernization efforts to fulfill its important constitutional role. For example, the Senate has begun inviting ministers to appear at Senate question period. This gives senators an opportunity to directly question ministers in relation to their portfolios and mandates and to hold the government to account. I had the opportunity to appear before the Senate during its question period in February this year.

Furthermore, a new special committee was created in the Senate to deal specifically with Senate modernization. This Special Committee on Senate Modernization has released 11 reports to date on a variety of modernization efforts the Senate can implement within the current constitutional framework. These reports deal with issues such as question period, the speakership of the Senate, regional interests, and more.

On May 11, 2017, the Senate adopted the seventh report of the Senate Standing Committee on Rules, Procedures and the Rights of Parliament. This report implemented recommendations from the Special Committee on Senate Modernization that amended provisions in the Senate rules to allow any group of at least nine senators to be recognized either as a recognized party in the Senate, as long as the party was registered under the Canada Elections Act, or had been in the last 15 years, or as a recognized parliamentary group formed for parliamentary purposes. This change is a response to the influx of senators who are now sitting with designations of Independent or Non-affiliated. There are currently 43 senators who are not sitting as part of a recognized political party.

The Senate has also made changes to its committee structure. In December 2016, a sessional order was moved to increase the size of Senate committees to accommodate non-affiliated senators and to give them better representation on committees that is more in line with their numbers in the chamber.

The Senate is taking an active role in modernization efforts, and we applaud all senators for their hard work in this regard.

Our efforts to modernize the Senate by making it more open and transparent go hand in hand with our vision of governance.

We promised Canadians a government that is fair, open, and transparent, and that is what what we are doing. In addition to reforming the Senate, the Prime Minister gave me a mandate to deliver on other government priorities, such as significantly enhancing transparency for the public at large and media in the political fundraising system for cabinet members, party leaders, and leadership candidates.

I recently introduced Bill C-50, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act (political financing). This bill, if passed, will make political fundraising more open and transparent for Canadians.

Any fundraising activity with a ticket price of $200 or more and involving the Prime Minister, cabinet members, ministers, party leaders, and leadership candidates currently sitting in the House of Commons must be publicly advertised at least five days prior to the event. In addition, a list of everyone in attendance must be submitted to Elections Canada within 30 days so that it can be posted online.

Canada, it should be repeated, has one of the strictest oversight systems in the world when it comes to the financing of political parties. We have strict spending limits, a cap on annual donations, and a ban on corporate and union donations, but that does not mean we cannot do more to improve and strengthen our institutions.

Canadians have a right to know more about political fundraising in Canada. Bill C-50 will give Canadians more information than ever before on fundraising. This is part of my commitment and this government's commitment to protect, strengthen, and enhance our democracy.

This commitment also led us to introduce Bill C-33, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act and to make consequential amendments to other acts. If passed, Bill C-33 would make it easier for Canadians to vote. It would make our elections more open and inclusive and would help to build confidence in the integrity of our voting system.

Specifically, the legislation would do the following. It would restore the Chief Electoral Officer's ability to educate and inform Canadians, especially young people, indigenous Canadians, new Canadians, and others about voting, elections, and related issues. It would help more Canadians to vote by restoring vouching and using the voter identification card as ID. Guided by the Charter of Rights, it would break down barriers preventing millions of Canadian citizens living abroad from voting in Canadian elections. It would invite more Canadian youth into our democracy by allowing voting pre-registration for Canadians aged 14 to 17.

If passed, this bill will strengthen the integrity of the electoral process by giving Elections Canada new tools to ensure that only Canadians with the right to vote are listed in the national register of electors. In addition, this legislation will increase the level of independence of the commissioner of Canada Elections.

Bill C-33 would keep our government's promise to repeal certain elements of the previous government's so-called Fair Elections Act, which made it harder for Canadians to vote.

We believe that Canada is better served when the franchise is extended to as many Canadians as possible, not restricted. We will continue to look at ways to encourage greater voter participation and engagement. We will continue to work with the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, which is currently studying the report of the Chief Electoral Officer, entitled “An Electoral Framework for the 21st Century: Recommendations from the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada Following the 42nd General Election”.

The committee has been studying this report, item by item, and I would like to thank them for all the work they have done so far in that regard. I very much look forward to receiving their recommendations.

In closing, I would like to take this opportunity today to remind Canadians that our work is not finished. Indeed, as I carry out my mandate, I will continue to work hard to protect, strengthen and improve our democratic institutions. To that end, I am currently working with the Minister of National Defence and the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness to assess our electoral process' degree of vulnerability to cyber threats.

I will also be looking at bringing forward options to create an independent commissioner to organize political party leaders' debates during future federal election campaigns, with a mandate to improve Canadians' knowledge of the parties, their leaders, and their policy positions.

I will also review the limits on the amounts political parties and third parties can spend during elections and propose measures to ensure that spending between elections is subject to reasonable limits.

Our democracy is strengthened when Canadians can get directly involved in our process. While casting a ballot is one of the most important ways to make our voices heard in our democracy, we have to ensure that Canadians know that it can be so much more than that. We can do this by continuing to examine what barriers exist between Canadians and participation and by learning how to create pathways for meaningful engagement.

I intend to do just that.

Canada Elections Act

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to rise tonight and speak to Bill C-50 or, as I like to refer to it, the “got caught with my hand in the cookie jar so I'm going to blame the cookie jar act”, because that is exactly what the Liberals are trying to do with this legislation. They knew what the rules were. They knew what the rules were all along. Then they just broke them. They continued to break them. Then they got caught. Now they are trying to put up a bit of a cover for that. They did this for months. They went on and on with it. They showed no remorse. They did not seem to have any feelings of guilt. However, when they were caught, they decided that it was the rules' fault and not their fault. That is where we are today.

I guess we could look at it the way my colleague, the member for Calgary Rocky Ridge, put it. He told me this legislation was designed to stop the Liberals from doing what they have been doing. Maybe it would just be easier if they just stopped doing it. What is even worse is this legislation would not even stop them from doing it. It is just a cover. When people forget about the cash for access scandals, they will just quietly start doing it again. This legislation really would not do anything to stop it.

Let me back up a bit and take us to where we started with all of this, or where they started with all of this. In November 2015, very shortly after the Liberals formed government, the Prime Minister issued some directives. These directives were titled, “Open and Accountable Government.” I suspect if anyone is watching tonight, they are probably chuckling a bit at that, because it does sound amusing to hear that title, given what we have seen from the Liberal government in the year and a half to two years it has been in power. However, I do not want us to get too distracted by that because it is a bit amusing. There is no question about that.

However, under “Annex B” of that directive, “Fundraising and Dealing with Lobbyists: Best Practices for Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries”, the Prime Minister outlines three general principles that he said must be followed. I will read them:

Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries must ensure that political fundraising activities or considerations do not affect, or appear to affect, the exercise of their official duties or the access of individuals or organizations to government.

There should be no preferential access to government, or appearance of preferential access, accorded to individuals or organizations because they have made financial contributions to politicians and political parties.

There should be no singling out, or appearance of singling out, of individuals or organizations as targets of political fundraising because they have official dealings with Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries, or their staff or departments.

When we start thinking about that, they have broken all three of those multiple times.

Of particular note is the second principle that talks about preferential access to government by donors of political parties. Let us look at the Liberal record of upholding that principle as it pertains to the rules laid out in the Conflict of Interest Act.

In April 2016, the Minister of Justice attended a $500-a-ticket fundraiser at Torys LLP offices, in Toronto. Several of the law firm's members were registered to lobby the federal government, including a senior member who was registered to lobby the justice department. How, in any universe, is that not a conflict of interest? The Minister of Justice has a duty, not only to be independent, but also to be perceived as independent, which was very clearly compromised by that fundraiser.

What was discussed at this fundraiser? Did the lawyers who were present lobby the minister to advance their interests? Did the interests of those lawyers go further than the ones who did not contribute to the Liberal Party? At the time this was discovered, the Liberal Party refused to say who was in attendance at the event. That information only became public once it was posted on Elections Canada's website.

It is actually interesting that the Liberals feel the need to change the law to make sure that attendees at ministerial fundraisers remain public, because when given the chance, they refuse to do so themselves. It goes back to the principle that it would be easier to just stop doing what they are doing. They do not have to change the law to stop doing it; they just need to stop doing it. They know it is wrong, so they should not keep doing it.

How about the fundraiser the finance minister attended in Halifax in October, where corporate executives paid $1,500 each to attend? How about when the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Justice, who was the Prime Minister's point person on legalizing marijuana, headlined a private Liberal fundraiser, attended by a marijuana lobbying group, at a law office in Toronto that advises clients in the cannabis business? Seriously, this stuff can not be made up. I know the Liberals eventually returned the donation from the marijuana lobbyist. They acknowledged what was obvious, that it was clearly a conflict of interest, but they only did so when the fundraising event became a media story. In other words, it was when they got caught. Again, they put their hand in the cookie jar, someone caught them, and they were trying to blame the cookie jar.

Because of all of this, we know that Liberal ministers and parliamentary secretaries cannot, or maybe will not, and are not following simple ethical rules when it comes to fundraising.

I am sure the Prime Minister must have been incredibly disappointed when members of his own government not only broke the conflict of interest rules but also the very rules he created himself called “Open and Accountable Government”. Hold on. Was he disappointed? As it turns out, in May of last year, the Prime Minister was a guest star at a $1,500 Liberal Party cash-for-access fundraiser at the mansion of a wealthy Chinese Canadian business executive. One of the guests in attendance was a donor who was seeking approval from the federal government to begin operating a new bank in Canada. Another guest at the event made a sizable donation to the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation. It was $50,000 to build a statue of the former prime minister himself just weeks after the event. It was just a pure coincidence, I am sure.

It looks like it was not just his cabinet that was breaking his rules. The Prime Minister himself broke his own rules when it came to political fundraising, which is why I do not know how anyone can take this bill seriously. Again, if they want to stop doing it, they just have to stop doing it.

We all know what it really is. It is just a smoke screen they are putting up to make it seem like they are being accountable. They like to talk, but they do not really like to follow through with action. It is all talk and no action. It is just a smoke and mirrors situation, just like everything else they do.

If they really want to be accountable, they do not need a bill to do so. They could just stop selling access to the government for cash. They could voluntarily provide the list of attendees at their fundraising events. They could ensure that the Prime Minister and other members of cabinet were not in a conflict of interest when they attended partisan events. A new law is not going to make their cash-for-access fundraisers ethical. It just will not do that.

If the Prime Minister wanted to end cash for access, all he ever had to do, and all he still has to do, is stop doing these fundraisers. It is that simple. It does not take legislation.

Bending the rules so the Prime Minister can keep charging $1,500 for wealthy individuals to meet with him and discuss government business is still wrong. It will always be wrong. That is clear. What else is clear are the rules. Why do the Liberals not just start following the rules like everyone else?

Here is the answer. It is because they are not open, they are not transparent, and they definitely have no intention of actually being accountable. They like to talk about it, but they certainly do not want to walk the walk. It seems like this is a pattern with these Liberals. It is a pattern with all Liberals, but certainly with these ones. They do not want to be accountable to Canadians.

Remember just a few months ago when the government House leader introduced her quite ironically titled discussion paper on changes to the Standing Orders. It became obvious very soon after that a discussion was actually the last thing the Liberal Party wanted and they tried to ram those changes through the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, with no discussion, no debate, no questions and answers, and without unanimous consent.

Let us try to remember some of the changes they were trying to force through and I am sure they are going to continue to try to force through. They want to take every Friday off. Canadians work five days a week, at least. Why does the Prime Minister and the Liberal government think that they are more entitled than average Canadians? It is a pattern with them again. They seem to think they are entitled.

Really, I think they want to avoid scrutiny from the opposition parties, the media, and therefore Canadians. Why show up and be held accountable five days a week when they can try to get away with just four? They will try to get away with cash for access. Why not try to get away with fewer days to be held accountable?

Furthermore, the Liberals proposed that the Prime Minister only attend question period once a week. I realize the Prime Minister does not actually answer questions when he comes to question period anyway, but that does not mean he should not show up most days. He should be expected to show up so that people can see him not answering the questions. What would that mean? With the schedule of the House of Commons and his showing up and answering questions one time a week, it boils down to his answering questions for as little as 25 hours in an entire year. That is on the weeks he shows up at all, because last week we did not see him once.

Some of the other changes that were being proposed by the Liberals were designed to limit and handcuff the opposition, essentially to not allow them to do their jobs to full capacity. These changes would have diminished Parliament and they largely would have stripped the opposition of the power to hold the Prime Minister and his government to account. There it is again, the lack of wanting to be accountable.

What is worse than the outrageous changes they tried to make, which I am sure will continue, is the fact that they tried to ram these changes through a Liberal dominated committee without the consent of all political parties. This was an unprecedented move that had not been seen before in Canadian democracy. It had been a long-standing tradition in Parliament that any changes to the way the House of Commons operates must have unanimous consent from all the major parties represented in the House.

That entire standing order debacle made it quite clear that the Prime Minister has absolutely no respect for democracy. The Liberals only backed down after Canadians let them know that they would not stand for it. Again, the Liberals get away with it as long as they can and when they are called out on it, they try to find some way to weasel out of it.

During the procedure and House affairs committee, I had the opportunity to read hundreds of emails from Canadians who were upset and very angry that the Liberals were trying to subvert democracy in such a way. An e-petition that was created on March 23, collected over 30,000 signatures pretty much over a weekend.

I am happy and proud that Canadians became so engaged in our parliamentary process, but it should not have had to come to that. The Liberals should have known better, just like they should know better when it comes to cash for access fundraisers. I know they do know better. They think they can get away with it and that is just plain wrong.

The Liberal government members should be accountable, should be open, and should be transparent on their own, not only when there is public outcry. It should not take public outcry to make them appear to be accountable, open, and transparent. They should just be doing it, but that is not the LIberal way.

There is another parallel I can draw. We have heard it mentioned a couple of times tonight already, but this bill deals with a problem that the Liberals have created themselves, which they could just stop doing. They do not need a bill to stop doing it. There are all kinds of serious matters that are potential threats to our democracy that they could be dealing with. A great example of this is third-party spending during elections. I will take a moment to talk about that glaring issue.

The commissioner of elections told the Senate committee the following:

We have received a significant number of complaints about the involvement of third parties in connection with the 2015 general election. And I would add we received many more complaints than had been filed with respect to the previous election in 2011.

Common to many of these complaints was the perception that third parties, in some ridings, were so significantly involved in the electoral contest that this resulted in unfair electoral outcomes.

I would suggest that third-party engagement in Canada’s electoral process will likely continue to grow. For that reason, it may be time for Parliament to re-examine the third-party regime....

The previous electoral officer, Marc Mayrand, also testified that a registered third party can accept and use foreign money during a Canadian electoral campaign and that, further, there is no limit to the amount it can spend, except on advertising. The current election law only regulates third-party activities that are directly related to advertising. Therefore, Elections Canada does not define things like surveys, election-related websites, calling services, push polls, and other things to communicate with electors as advertising. Once the funds are mingled in with an organization in Canada or from outside of Canada, it is within their funds and they can use those funds in an unlimited amount, the way it is now.

The commissioner further stated:

In Canada, third parties are only regulated with respect to their election advertising activities. Provided they act independently from a candidate or party, they may incur limitless amounts of expenses when carrying out activities such as polling, voter contact services, promotional events, etc. They can also use whatever sources of funding—including foreign funds—to finance these non-election advertising activities.

The level of third party engagement in Canada's electoral process will likely continue to grow in the years to come. For that reason, Parliament should consider whether there is a need to re-examine the third-party regime, with a view to maintaining a level playing field for all participants.

Does no one on the government side find those statements in any way concerning? They should.

The commissioner of Canada elections is saying that Parliament needs to be looking at changing the third-party regime to ensure the integrity of Canadian elections. Instead, the Liberals are introducing legislation to police themselves because the Prime Minister and the Liberal Party got caught with their hands in the cookie jar. Instead, they could be dealing with something that would ensure the integrity of elections. That is what we should be doing. In fact, on this one, the Minister of Democratic Institutions is turning a blind eye and pretending that this has not even been flagged as an issue. It was said by the commissioner of Canada elections, nonetheless.

During question period in the Senate recently, the minister testified on foreign funding in third-party spending during elections, and stated:

From the experience we have, we have found that this is not something that is currently present and so significant that it would impact the electoral system or the confidence that Canadians have during a writ period or during an election.

She also said, “there's very little evidence to suggest that foreign money is influencing Canadian elections by third parties.” It seems to be quite different from what the commissioner had to say, quite different. I will point out that just because the minister is turning a blind eye does not mean this is not a glaring issue. As the minister's mandate letter famously put it, “Sunshine is the best disinfectant to concerns about our political process.” Why is she not shining a little light on this issue? Is this issue not in need of a little sunshine? Why do we not deal with that? It is not dealt with in Bill C-33 and it is not dealt with in Bill C-50, which we have before us today.

At the end of the day, Liberal members opposite can use all the platitudes they want. They can claim all they want to be open, transparent, and accountable, but Canadians are certainly growing tired of their games. Canadians are seeing the Liberal government for what it really is: the same party that brought us the sponsorship scandal, only with slightly better hair and maybe some really snappy socks.

The Liberals got caught breaking the rules, and changing the rules does not make them any less guilty. They still broke the rules, and they continue to break the rules. It is time for that to change.

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Minister of Democratic Institutions]

moved that Bill C-50, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act (political financing), be read the second time and referred to a committee.

Madam Speaker, it is a great pleasure to rise today to speak to Bill C-50, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act, regarding political financing, which would amend the Canada Elections Act to create an unprecedented level of openness and transparency for political fundraising events.

I first want to recognize my officials for their extraordinary effort in developing, drafting, and refining this important legislation. I thank them for their hard work over the past few months. They are a credit to our public service.

Our government told Canadians we would set a higher bar on the transparency, accountability, and integrity of our public institutions and the democratic process. We have also sent a clear message that we want to encourage Canadians to embrace our democracy.

I have been focused, in particular, on this latter objective since the Prime Minister asked me to be Canada's Minister of Democratic Institutions. This is why our government has moved on several fronts to enshrine a more open and inclusive democracy. We have changed the way we appoint senators and judges, we are making our elections more accessible and inclusive, and we are taking steps to protect our democracy from cyber-threats. We take these actions because we know how deeply Canadians value and cherish our democracy.

As we celebrate the 150th anniversary of Confederation this year, we can reflect on the work of past generations that have improved, strengthened, and protected Canadian democracy. The challenge facing us is how we, as parliamentarians, can continue to lead this work and fulfill the promise of a strong, stable, vibrant democracy.

The simple but important act of voting is a central part of this discussion. Casting a ballot is a rite of passage in this country. I am sure that many hon. members recall going with their parents to a polling station. Many members will recall bringing their own children with them to vote at their local school, church, community centre, or in one of the many other locations where voting takes place.

In many respects, election day is one of the last true civic rituals that Canadians take part in. It is a day on which we all come together to take part in the democratic process. We wait in the same lines, we follow the same rules, and we exercise the same rights and freedoms.

Today, as Minister of Democratic Institutions, I have a mandate to protect and improve one of the greatest democracies on earth. It is an honour to talk about this in one of the most respected democratic institutions in the world. We know that democracy does not just happen on its own. We all need to contribute to it, and that means more than just voting every four years. Democracy requires our constant attention.

There are many different ways Canadians choose to make a valuable contribution to our democracy. It could be as simple as engaging in a public policy discussion with a friend, joining a community group, participating in a demonstration, or volunteering with a charity. It could also include joining a political party, making a donation to a party, or attending a political fundraiser. Democratic participation and civic engagement are critical to a healthy democracy.

While we believe that we could always do more to raise the bar on openness and transparency in political fundraising, we also respect the right of all Canadians to choose to financially support a party of their choice.

We are celebrating the 35th anniversary of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms this year. Section 3 of that Charter guarantees every citizen the right to vote and to run in a federal election. Section 3 is closely linked to the protection of the freedom of association, which is also provided for in the Charter.

Today in Canada, Canadians and permanent residents have the legitimate right to make a donation to a party and to participate in fundraising activities. All parties of the House receive support for the honest work that they do through the donations and contributions of individuals who believe in and support their work.

It is important to take a step back and look at Canada's political fundraising system as it now stands, even before the changes we are discussing. The Canada Elections Act sets out the legal framework that governs fundraising and campaign financing, and all registered federal political parties are subject to it.

According to Elections Canada, disclosure requirements have existed for candidates since the beginning of the 20th century, but the current regime was essentially laid out with the introduction of political party registration in 1970 and the Election Expenses Act in 1974. Essentially, there have been limits on contribution amounts and on the people through whom Canadians can make donations to federal political parties for the past 43 years.

Today, only individual Canadians and permanent residents can donate. Companies, industry associations, and trade unions cannot give funds to any politician or political party. There is a strict limit on individual contributions. Annually, individuals can donate up to $1,550 to a national political party. They can also donate up to $1,550, combined, to all the riding associations, candidates, or nomination contestants of a party. Finally, if their preferred party is in a leadership contest, an individual can donate up to $1,550, combined, to all the leadership contestants in a leadership race.

Today, there are already a number of different reports and requirements that parties, electoral district associations, candidates, leadership contestants, and others must complete. Elections Canada publishes all financial reports, as well as the identity and postal codes of those donating more than $200 on its website.

It is also important to note that there are strict penalties under the Canada Elections Act to punish anyone violating political financing rules. The penalties could include fines of up to $50,000, or up to five years in jail, or both. Canadians take political fundraising seriously. There are serious consequences for breaking these rules.

It is important to point out that 2% of Canadians are currently members of a party or have made a campaign donation. Not everyone wants to join a political party, but everyone can celebrate the contribution that political parties make to our democracy. These institutions bring together people from across the country, people with diverse perspectives, opinions, backgrounds, and experiences. Some parties might focus on specific issues or concerns, while others might seek to cover a broad range of opinions.

At best, parties can mobilize many people and encourage them to take action on important causes, champion certain ideas, and work hard to convince other people to join them.

Political parties are vital to the discourse that we have in Canada about our democracy. To quote former Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci:

Political parties provide individual citizens with an opportunity to express an opinion on the policy and functioning of government.

They are capable of introducing unique concerns into the political discourse. In order to participate in political discourse, parties require funding to operate. As Canadians, we have the right to contribute to a political party that shares our ideals and our aspirations. For many, contributing to a political party and attending a fundraising event is a valued form of democratic expression, and I know all hon. members agree that this is an important right we must continue to respect and uphold.

I believe that a strong democracy does not merely tolerate the exchange of ideas, but rather encourages it. A healthy democracy fosters lively partisan debate that offers ideas and clear choices to people. Canadians can choose to donate to a political party to show their support for that kind of democratic debate. In Bill C-50, we are proposing that people continue to make donations to political parties and do so in a way that is more open and transparent than ever.

If passed, Bill C-50 would provide Canadians with more information about political fundraising events than ever before. It would make our already strong and robust system for political financing even more open and transparent, so that Canadians can continue to have confidence in our democratic institutions. It would ensure that Canadians know who is going to fundraisers, when and where they are happening, and the amount required to attend.

If passed, Bill C-50 will apply to all fundraising activities that cabinet members, party leaders, and leadership candidates take part in when the ticket price is over $200. This will apply only to parties sitting in the House of Commons. The bill will therefore apply to all of Canada's political leaders, across party lines. These are the people who are leading our country and aspire to become prime minister themselves.

Fundraising events involving these individuals would be advertised at least five days in advance. Canadians would know about them before these events take place, giving them an opportunity to inquire about a ticket, if they wish. They would know exactly where and when a fundraiser is happening, who is organizing the event, and which senior political leader or leaders will attend.

Further improving openness and transparency for our political leaders will enhance the trust that Canadians have in our democracy across the political spectrum, and we believe this is a good thing.

Public disclosure of fundraising details offers the added benefit of providing that information to the media, leaving it up to the press whether to cover it or not. I believe, and our government believes, that a free press is essential to our democracy and that a healthy media landscape is necessary for a healthy democracy. Our approach in Bill C-50 is to provide journalists the information they need to choose whether to cover an activity or not and give the political parties the flexibility to set their own rules for providing media access and accreditation.

Political parties would also be required to report the names and addresses of those who attended the fundraiser, within 30 days, to Elections Canada. This information would be published online. Canadians and the media would know who attended a fundraiser, and could hold politicians and attendees more accountable for their actions.

Elections Canada, as the recipient and publisher of so much fundraising information already, is the natural place to collect this new information. Publishing all the information in one non-partisan place would make it easier for Canadians to search for this information. I should add that certain individuals, such as minors, service staff, and volunteers, would be exempt.

The bill would also create a new Elections Act offence for not respecting these rules. Any penalties would be borne by political parties, not the senior political leaders invited to attend the events. The maximum fine we propose for violating the provisions would be $1,000 on summary conviction, and any party that breaks the rules would also have to return the contributions collected at the events.

If passed, Bill C-50 will fulfill our government's promise to make Canada's political financing system much more transparent to the public and the media. This is one of many ways our government is improving, enhancing, and protecting our democratic institutions.

Members of the House know that we also introduced Bill C-33, which, if passed, would repeal undemocratic aspects of what the previous government called the Fair Elections Act. Bill C-33 would make it easier for Canadians to exercise their right to vote. It would also encourage voter turnout, and enhance the public's trust in our electoral system as well as its integrity.

To that end, significant measures will be taken, such as allowing the Chief Electoral Officer to accept voter cards as identification and re-establishing vouching so that eligible voters without identification can prove their identity and place of residence by asking another voter to vouch for them.

Moreover, under the bill, Elections Canada could register young Canadians 14 to 17 to include them in the electoral process at a younger age.

Those are just some examples of the measures our government is taking to ensure that we continue to enhance democratic institutions.

We have also introduced a new merit-based Senate appointments process, as I mentioned. To meet the expectations of Canadians, we developed a process to appoint senators that is more open and transparent than ever before. We established an advisory board for Senate appointments and launched a new, open, non-partisan application process. Now any Canadian can directly apply to become a senator, and since spring 2016, we have appointed 27 senators through this new process. The Senate is an important institution in our democratic system, and our government remains committed to building a more effective and less partisan Senate in partnership with hon. senators and all parliamentarians.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the members of the procedure and House affairs committee, as well as the Senate legal and constitutional affairs committee. Both of these committees have been studying the Chief Electoral Officer's report on the 2015 election and will be reporting their recommendations to their respective chambers. Their guidance will be incredibly helpful, as I work with all of our colleagues to continue the important work of improving, strengthening, and protecting our democratic institutions. Bill C-50 is an important example of how we can continue to raise the bar when it comes to our democracy.

Samara Canada recently released a report entitled, “Democracy 360: The Second Report Card on How Canadians Communicate, Participate and Lead in Politics.” The report measures the health of Canada's democracy across 19 different indicators. According to Samara, 71% of Canadians said they are fairly satisfied or very satisfied with how democracy works in Canada. This is six percentage points higher than the first report card in 2015.

Although this report suggests that Canadians have confidence in their democracy, we realize that there is always room for improvement. We therefore introduced Bill C-50 for more open and transparent fundraising activities.

We are shining a light on these types of activities so that Canadians can know and understand what is happening. We are providing them with information on who attends these fundraisers, when and where they are taking place, and how much it costs to participate.

Political fundraising is an important form of democratic expression. Fundraisers are an opportunity for groups of like-minded Canadians to come together and discuss values, opinions, and policy ideas. They also provide Canadians with the opportunity to support a party or individual with whom they share similar perspectives and ideas. We believe it is important to clarify what happens at these fundraising events. Bill C-50 would do so by shining a light on who is attending political fundraisers, where and when they are taking place, and the amount required to attend them. For the first time in Canadian history, our government is legislating and requiring political parties to disclose this information, because Canadians have a right to know even more than they do now about political fundraising events. I think all members of this House can agree that political parties do not have anything to hide. Bill C-50 would ensure that more information than ever before about political fundraisers is shared with the media and the public at large, so that Canadians can continue to have confidence in our democracy.

I am eager to hear the opinions from other members of this House about the bill itself. This is important legislation that affects all of us in this chamber, and I am confident that the hon. members share my desire to provide Canadians with more information about political fundraising events. I look forward to the debate ahead.

[Yves Côté]

As you said earlier, since Bill C-23 was passed, we have been an entity within the office of the director of public prosecutions. Officially and legally, we have been removed from the CEO's organization.

In my opinion, things are going quite well on the whole. They are going very well in fact. For the CEO and for us, however, it is difficult for technical reasons to share information more quickly, since we are now officially part of two different government institutions. Certain rules apply, which makes things a little more difficult.

That said, you probably know that the government has introduced Bill C-33 and that, if it is passed in its current form, it would return us to the CEO's office.

I would also note, importantly, that since we arrived at the office of the director of public prosecutions, this office has provide exemplary service and support in all respects, as was the case when we were part of Elections Canada.

Electoral Reform

[Andy Fillmore, Liberal, Halifax, NS]

Madam Speaker, the member has hit exactly on the areas in which there was great consensus through our public engagement process over the last year or so. Those are things like removing barriers to traditionally marginalized voters so they can get to the ballot box, through our work with Bill C-33. It includes efforts to engage youth into our political process through things like the pre-voter registration, a proactive analysis of cyber threats to our democratic institutions and voting systems, making changes to make our political fundraising more open and transparent and reintroducing the voter identification card. It also improves large-scale efforts by allowing the Chief Electoral Officer to engage in education efforts for all Canadians.

[Andy Fillmore, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Democratic Institutions]

Madam Speaker, I am rising today to discuss the motion moved by the member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley.

I want to begin by thanking all the members of the special committee on electoral reform for their excellent hard work in producing this report.

The committee held 57 meetings in every province and territory, listened to the testimony of 196 witnesses, collected and considered 574 written submissions, reached more than 22,000 Canadians through an online consultation process, and received 172 reports from members of Parliament who had hosted their own town halls to gather opinions from their constituents, my own among them.

Their report, entitled “Strengthening Democracy in Canada: Principles, Process and Public Engagement for Electoral Reform”, is a significant addition to the study of electoral reform in Canada and includes many important recommendations to improve our electoral system.

I also want to thank all the expert witnesses, the tireless and dedicated committee staff, and the thousands of Canadians who participated in this very important exercise in democracy. The extent of their work was impressive, and a credit to our democratic system.

Meanwhile, our government also spent the summer and autumn of 2016 engaged in extensive consultations on this important issue. We were elected on a commitment to listen to Canadians. The previous Minister of Democratic Institutions and her parliamentary secretary also undertook a cross-country tour during this period, holding community events in every province and territory.

Our government also launched an innovative online tool to engage in a conversation with Canadians and learn more about what they value most in our democracy. This website, mydemocracy.ca, not only helped us to engage with as many Canadians as possible but also provided us with essential statistically valid public opinion research data. Every Canadian household was invited to participate, and more than 360,000 individuals took the time to share their views on democracy. We thank them for doing that. It is indeed rare for a government to be able to engage in such a significant national dialogue.

As the electoral system is a foundational component of any democratic system, I think all hon. members would agree that any significant change in how we vote must have the broad support of Canadians.

As was announced on February 1 of this year, these consultation efforts revealed that there is no broad consensus throughout the country to replace the current voting system or on what a preferred new system would look like.

We learned that Canadians value the direct relationship between their members of Parliament and the constituents they represent and the ability of these constituents to hold their elected representatives directly to account.

Therefore, our government has taken and will continue to take concrete steps to work with all parliamentarians to advance the five principles of the special committee's mandate. These principles are effectiveness and legitimacy, public engagement, accessibility and inclusiveness, integrity, and local representation.

In his report following the 2015 election, our former chief electoral officer made a number of recommendations aimed at modernizing the Canada Elections Act. The Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs is currently considering these recommendations. To date, two interim reports have been tabled, with further feedback expected.

Another important step that we have taken to advance these principles is the introduction of Bill C-33, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act. This legislation seeks to increase inclusion and voter participation by breaking down barriers that discourage Canadians from voting. It would also enhance confidence in the integrity of Canada's elections.

Bill C-33 addresses many of the concerns we have heard from Canadians in response to the changes made by the former government's Fair Elections Act. Bill C-33 reflects our government's focus on how we can help all members of our society gain access to the democratic process, including youth, seniors, indigenous Canadians, new Canadians, those with disabilities, and those from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

Returning to the special committee's work, I would note that the committee made a number of important recommendations that extended beyond the foundational changes to the voting system, and I would like to address a few of those now.

Let us start with committee recommendation 3, which calls on our government to not bring in mandatory voting at this time. Our government agrees with the committee that mandatory voting is not the correct approach at this time. However, we are committed to taking steps to encourage greater civic participation and greater citizen literacy to increase voter turnout in future federal elections.

Bill C-33 aims to increase voter participation by reducing barriers posed by voter identification, expanding the Chief Electoral Officer's mandate to undertake broad education campaigns, and creating a national register of future electors.

Furthermore, the government will continue to explore avenues to remove barriers to participation and improve voter turnout. We will do this by working with our partners and all Canadians. Our work will be informed by the recommendations of the Chief Electoral Officer and the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.

Another committee recommendation, number 4, advises against allowing online voting at this time. Again, we agree, and while Canadians who participated in mydemocracy.ca agreed that online voting would improve voter turnout, their support was contingent on the need for solid assurance that such a system would not be vulnerable to manipulation by hackers. Similar concerns were heard from the experts before the special committee.

Recommendations 5 and 6 call on Elections Canada to explore the use of technology to make voting more accessible, particularly for people with disabilities, while also ensuring the overall integrity of the voting process. The former chief electoral officer has made similar recommendations, and the government will consider them carefully in light of PROC's own deliberations. We will also consider consultations led by the Minister of Sport and Persons with Disabilities on broader measures to help disabled Canadians participate in our democracy.

Recommendation 8 calls on the government to amend the Canada Elections Act to create a financial incentive that encourages political parties to run more female candidates. The government acknowledges that more must be done to support the participation of women in Canada's democratic life, and we urge all parties to more aggressively recruit, encourage, and support female candidates. As such, the government is committed to building on existing measures as well as to considering innovative approaches to further this goal.

For example, last year Status of Women Canada solicited applications for projects to create inclusive public spaces to increase the participation of women, including indigenous women, in the democratic life of our country. The call consisted of two themes: empowering women for political action to promote the participation of women in political life, and empowering women for community action to improve conditions for women by amplifying women's voices and enhancing their civic participation. A total of 14 projects have been approved for funding since the spring of 2016, totalling an investment of $8.7 million over the next three years.

Recommendation 9 of the special committee report calls on our government to include youth in the national register of electors before they reach the voting age. Our government is very much in favour of this recommendation. In fact, we have already included a national register of future electors in Bill C-33.

Canadians have told us that they want to encourage young people to vote, and research has found that when young people vote in one election, they are more likely to make it a lifelong habit. The Chief Electoral Officer recommended that we prepare young people to vote. It would happen by introducing pre-registration. The amendments to the Canada Elections Act in Bill C-33 would allow Elections Canada to work with young people in schools and other settings to register to vote. Young Canadians aged 14 to 17 would be able to pre-register and to access educational resources as well as other information about our democracy, elections, and voting. Upon turning 18, they would be automatically added to the national register for voting and would be ready to cast that all-important first vote.

The 10th recommendation made by the committee has a similar theme. It asks the government to empower Elections Canada to encourage a higher voter turnout. We agree with this recommendation, as a lack information can create a significant barrier to participation. Under the previous government's legislation, the Chief Electoral Officer can only conduct educational programs for primary through grade 12 aged children. The Chief Electoral Officer has recommended that the mandate be extended to conduct education programs for all Canadians. We agree, and that is why our government has included a provision in Bill C-33 to allow the Chief Electoral Officer to undertake non-partisan educational programs aimed at providing information to all Canadians.

During our national electoral reform engagement tour, Canadians told us that they wanted more done to improve civic literacy and to build knowledge about Canadian democracy. They told us that they want us to make it easier to vote. They want to make it easier to learn about voting and the democratic process, and they want to make sure that as many Canadians as possible who are eligible to vote have an opportunity to do so.

Although this is reflected in the measures in Bill C-33 I have already mentioned, the bill has several other key measures that underscore the efforts we would make to improve democratic participation in our country. First, it would allow the Chief Electoral Officer to authorize the use of voter information cards as identification. Elections Canada piloted the use of the VIC as ID in 2010, and in the 2011 general election, approximately 900,000 Canadians, at more than 5,600 polling stations, were eligible to use the card as ID. The initiative was particularly useful at polling places such as long-term care homes and seniors' residences.

Unfortunately, the former government's Fair Elections Act prevented Canadians from using the voter ID card as ID in the 2015 election. Last autumn, the CEO recommended to the procedure and House affairs committee that the practice to use the card as ID be re-established. He said that this would be particularly helpful for three groups that have difficulty proving residency: youth, seniors, and indigenous voters.

Reinstating the VIC would increase access to voting for a number of Canadians.

Second, Bill C-33 would re-establish vouching so that a Canadian citizen could vouch for another to allow him or her to vote. Before the Fair Elections Act, an eligible Canadian voter could vouch for someone who needed to prove his or her identity and residence but lacked proper ID. The limitation on vouching created a significant barrier to voting.

A Stats Canada survey last year estimated that some 172,000 Canadians said they were unable to vote because they lacked proper ID. This is a particular problem for indigenous people living on reserve and homeless people.

Third, Bill C-33 would help Elections Canada clean up data in the national register of electors. This is in response to the Chief Electoral Officer's request for more tools to improve the register. Our bill, if passed, would give Elections Canada new resources to refine the register's data and to let it operate more effectively.

Fourth, it would improve the public's confidence in the integrity of our elections by addressing concerns raised related to the independence of the commissioner of Canada elections as a result of the Fair Elections Act. The commissioner is a non-partisan official responsible for investigating potential voting issues, such as voter fraud or financial irregularities. The commissioner ensures that Canada Elections Act rules are followed.

Previously, from 1974 to 2014, the Chief Electoral Officer appointed the commissioner, and the commissioner reported to the Chief Electoral Officer within Elections Canada. The previous government's Fair Elections Act transferred the commissioner to the office of the director of public prosecutions. We heard from Canadians during electoral reform dialogues that there were concerns that the commissioner would be subject to less independence. Bill C-33 would enhance confidence in the integrity of the elections system by clarifying this situation.

Finally, it is estimated that Bill C-33 would expand voting rights to more than one million Canadians living abroad. Today, Canadians living abroad may only vote within five years of leaving Canada and must have an intention to return. These restrictions are currently being challenged before the Supreme Court of Canada. Our bill would remove a barrier to voting for those Canadians who, even though they choose to live abroad, care about the future of our country and want to have their voices heard. This proposal does not impact Canadian Armed Forces voters, who already have a full right to vote, regardless of where they are posted.

I want to touch briefly on the Minister of Democratic Institutions' mandate to protect our electoral system from cyber-attacks. Working with her colleagues, the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness and the Minister of National Defence, the minister has asked the Communications Security Establishment to analyze proactively the risks to our electoral system and to release a public report. Further, we will ask the CSE officer for advice for political parties on cybersecurity best practices.

In conclusion, the government is greatly appreciative of the special committee's work in studying electoral reform as well as other important issues they raised as part of their study. We remain committed to strengthening Canada's democratic institutions and processes. Bill C-33 would remove voting roadblocks, encourage participation, and create a level playing field for political parties. We are also working to defend the Canadian electoral process from cyber-threats and are increasing transparency in the political fundraising system.

Why take these actions? It is because Canadians value their democratic institutions, which remain the envy of the world. Our system is trusted by Canadians and is renowned worldwide. Our government remains committed to improving, strengthening, and protecting our democracy. The work of the Special Committee on Electoral Reform represents an important contribution to these efforts.

Democratic Reform

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Madam Speaker, I can maybe provide some comfort by indicating to the member that today we have a Prime Minister who truly believes in accountability and transparency. We see that day in and day out on a multitude of levels.

On the issue of cabinet confidentiality, the member across the way does not have to provide a reading of the rules. We understand the importance of cabinet confidentiality, and I can assure the member that there has been no violation of cabinet confidentiality. The member might want to speculate, but it is all speculation.

At the end of the day, we understand the importance of cabinet secrecy, and there has been no violation of that secrecy. It is an important issue.

On the issue of electoral reform, there has been a great deal of debate, not only in the chamber but also outside the chambre. There were a fair number of individuals who were discouraged that we were not able to build overall consensus, but one should not be overly disappointed in the sense that the minister has brought forward another piece of legislation. The Minister of Democratic Institutions has done an outstanding job in ensuring that there will be a difference in future elections.

We have raised issues. We have listened to what Canadians have said. We appreciate the fact there was no consensus, but there are some areas where there has been consensus. Where we have seen it, we now have a Minister of Democratic Institutions who is acting on it. Let me provide a couple of examples.

We will recall that under Stephen Harper and the unfair elections act, the Conservatives tried to tie the hands of the Chief Electoral Officer in some of the things he could do. Under the current legislation, that is now being talked about, not only inside but outside the chamber. Bill C-33 aims to restore the Chief Electoral Officer's ability to educate and inform Canadians, especially young people, indigenous Canadians, and new Canadians, about voting, elections, and related issues.

Statistics Canada estimates about 172,000 electors did not vote in the 2015 election because of a lack of adequate identity documents. Madam Speaker, you were in the last Parliament when the Conservative Party got rid of the vouching system. This legislation reinstates vouching, because we want more Canadians to be engaged in voting in elections.

We will remember the voter information cards. I sat on the committee where the Conservatives said that people could not use voter ID cards. That did not make sense, and Canadians knew that. We now have a minister responsible for democratic reform who is putting some teeth in the voting card. Bill C-33 would allow people to use a voter identification card as a piece of ID. She is also forward thinking. Think about cybersecurity. That is very serious today and will be in future elections.

This is a government that is proactively engaged in looking at ways to improve our elections going forward.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

I appreciate that. First of all, I want to be very clear that I do not mean to suggest that either you or Elections Canada, and certainly not Mr. Mayrand, had that intention. I'm drawing your attention and that of the committee to the fact that this is just the situation as it stands if the law is interpreted as it is. That's very helpful. Actually, that was all I wanted to raise on that topic.

I do have two other things I want to ask you on completely different topics. One is this. The minister has promised to provide two additional pieces of legislation in addition to Bill C-33. Obviously, you have indicated that you would like to have this legislation dealt with and enacted by spring 2018. If you had to rank the importance of these pieces of legislation in terms of which ones you need to deal with most urgently given the follow-through you have to do, would you rank...?

I'm thinking most obviously of the fundraising legislation versus Bill C-33, and the other piece of legislation not yet introduced that will capture other aspects of your report on the 42nd election. From the point of view of your own implementation issues, what priority would you suggest be given to these pieces of legislation?

[Stéphane Perrault]

There certainly will need to be changes, depending on the fate of Bill C-33, in our outreach and use of social media. That's something we will need to expand.

In terms of the delivery of ballots, people abroad will continue to be able to download application forms, if they've pre-registered, but not ballot kits. This was an initiative we were looking at, to deliver the ballot kits electronically, but we will not be pursuing that for 2019.

[Stéphane Perrault, Acting Chief Electoral Officer, Elections Canada]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thanks for the opportunity to appear to discuss Elections Canada's main estimates for 2017-18.

Before I start, I want to thank the chair and the members of this committee for the work that you have done in reviewing the CEO's recommendations and for reporting on those recommendations. Of course, Elections Canada's staff remains available to assist the committee in this regard.

Today, the committee is studying and voting on Elections Canada's annual appropriation, which is $29.3 million. This represents the salaries of approximately 350 indeterminate positions. Combined with the statutory authority, which funds all other expenditures under the Canada Elections Act, our 2017-2018 main estimates total $112.2 million.

During this fiscal year, Elections Canada is working on specific administrative changes to modernize the electoral process to address problems raised by Canadians during recent elections and meet their evolving expectations. I would like to highlight three aspects: voting services, voter registration services, and online services for candidates and political entities.

On voting services, the agency is hoping to see legislation that allows for our proposed new voting services model, which can be adapted to meet the specific needs of each electoral district. I was pleased that this committee agreed to the CEO's recommendations that would allow for the model's implementation. We look forward to the government's response.

In large urban centres, wait time is often an issue for voters, especially at advance polls. In those places, a new voting services model would allow voters to vote at any available table within their polling location, thereby reducing wait times. The new process will also improve working conditions for poll workers by simplifying their tasks and allowing them to take breaks as required, without interrupting the vote.

To implement this new model, election workers will be equipped with electronic poll books. These are applications that will run on tablets or laptops to help election workers manage voters lists, forms and “bingo sheets”. This will replace the cumbersome stacks of paper forms that they currently use and the need to cross voter names off of a paper list with pencil and ruler. It should also significantly reduce record-keeping errors, improve compliance with procedures and increase auditability. I wish to stress that we will retain paper ballots, which will continue to be marked and counted by hand.

We are currently mapping out scenarios for deploying this new voting services model for the 2019 general election, focusing on electoral districts where deployment would bring the most benefit. Deployment decisions will also be informed by a procurement process currently in progress and input from the Advisory Committee of Political Parties.

In more sparsely populated areas, travel time to voting locations, rather than wait time, was one of the main problems reported by Canadians in recent elections. In those areas, instead of introducing technology, we will increase the number of advance polling locations to improve proximity. As well, we will provide returning officers with routing data to support the selection of voting locations. This will help ensure that voters are directed to the polling location that is nearest in terms of travel time.

Since our departmental plan was published, we have decided to set aside one aspect of our transformation agenda—the electronic delivery of special ballots. While we continue to believe that legislation should be amended to provide flexibility in the delivery of special ballots, this is not something we will be pursuing for 2019.

However, based on the success of the pilot project conducted at some 40 post-secondary institutions in 2015, we will increase the number of satellite local offices. These offices will provide information, registration and opportunities for voters away from their electoral district to vote by special ballot.

Our priority for registration services is to increase the coverage and currency of the national register of electors, especially with respect to young voters. For instance, only one quarter—to be precise, 27%—of 18-year-olds are registered, compared with just over 70% for 20-year-olds.

I would note that our recommendations to pre-register 16- and 17-year-olds and to gain access to data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada on non-citizens would also improve the coverage and the currency of the national register of electors. These measures are also included in Bill C-33.

In addition, we are working to make online voter registration services more universally accessible, particularly for voters in rural and remote areas who do not have standardized residential addresses and who had trouble using the e-registration function in the last election.

We will also offer an online portal providing a number of services to candidates and political entities. This will include the ability, with proper authentication, to download documents such as maps and voter lists, or to file electronically documents such as nomination papers. I do note that this committee, in its review of the CEO's report, supported the recommendations that will facilitate the electronic filing of nomination papers.

In moving forward with improvements to our service offerings, we will continue to consult with parliamentarians, including this committee, as well as with key stakeholders.

I would note, Mr. Chair, that we traditionally have an informal meeting session in the fall, usually in early September or October when Parliament comes back. I hope that we will have the opportunity in September to look at deployment options for new technology at the polls.

Elections Canada is also in the process of replacing and improving a number of existing systems and services that enable the delivery of modern elections. For the next general election, these include new telecommunications services for local offices and our central contact centres. This includes upgrades and maintenance for our IT network and the progressive implementation of a new solution for hosting our data centres. Upgrades and additional basic functionalities are also required for the system that supports returning officers in the hiring, training, and paying of some 300,000 poll workers in a general election.

These investments will allow Elections Canada to ensure that our IT services remain reliable and secure in this changing environment. We are working with lead security agencies, in particular Communications Security Establishment Canada, to ensure that our infrastructure continues to meet all appropriate security standards and requirements.

Lastly, I would like to touch briefly on the timing of the legislation. I understand that in addition to Bill C-33, the minister intends to introduce legislation related to fundraising activities in the coming weeks. She also indicated before this committee that she intends to introduce other legislative changes in the fall of 2017, building on the CEO's recommendations. The minister recognized the last time she appeared before this committee that Elections Canada needs sufficient time to implement the changes well ahead of the 2019 general election. In this regard, assuming that enabling legislation is enacted by the spring of 2018, this should allow us time to implement our proposed new voting services model and other legislative changes for the next general election.

To conclude, we look forward to the final report from this committee on the review of the CEO's recommendations for improved administration of the Canada Elections Act. As I indicated at the outset, Elections Canada staff remain available to assist the committee in this regard.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. My colleagues and I would be happy to answer any questions from the members of this committee.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Right. I was just trying to decide. I can't recall, I just have to go back to notes.

Anyway, my point is this. Once the government accepted that the way it did it, through Bill C-33, is a non-starter going forward—don't do that anymore.... I think that message delivered, and I see certain other folks nodding heads that, yes, that's the way it's now understood. We had said that if the government were willing to stop usurping our work, we would do everything we could to try to work within her time frame. I still am, but I have to tell you that time's getting tight, and tighter.

I just leave it with you, Chair. It might also be that we talk this through in a framework and maybe we ask the subcommittee to take a look at some of the more finite deadlines that are involved and actually try to map something through that gets us close to when we still think we're going to be here. When we get to the end of June, it's never clear. There's always this: will there be deal; will we get out? Even at Queen's Park it was the same thing. There's a flurry of deals; everybody wants to get out. It depends on the mood of the House. If you get into agreement, you're out two or three days early. If not, you're there to the very last nanosecond.

There are at least three, maybe four different items that are all serious, at play, with deadlines, and in each of those cases at this stage there's a high degree of co-operation between this committee and the government and its desired agenda. I'm not sure we can do that with all of us here. We should keep talking it through, but it seems to me that at some point we're going to need to lay out all three, four, or five—whatever those pieces are. Again, keeping in mind that the House has now told us what our priorities are, I think we've agreed we can slip away with unanimous consent and do the estimates, but we have to nail that down.

I'm just concerned that, if we don't take the time now to do it in detail, we're just going to run out of runway, and then we're going to find ourselves wherever we are at the end. Then the government's going to say, “You know, we have no choice now; we're going to have to bring legislation in”. That's going to cause at least me to go crazy again, and away we go and nothing's happening. To try to avoid all of that, I think it's in our best interests to get this nailed down as to exactly how we're going to proceed to maximize our ability to achieve what we want to achieve in the time frame that we have accepted.

I'm really good at explaining the problem.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Okay. What I'm getting at is that there's Bill C-33 to deal with, and what kinds of deadlines its going to face. Additionally there is the issue of Minister Gould asking us to complete our study of the 42nd parliamentary report of the CEO to our chair, so that she could then take our report, work on legislation this autumn, produce a piece of legislation and get it to the CEO in order for the CEO to act on it prior to the next election. The CEO would be able to comment to us on that.

Finally, there is the issue of the financial reform legislation, the election finance reform, or party financing legislation that Minister Gould has promised to bring before the House. I get the impression.... Actually I had a chance to ask her this and while she was not unclear in answering, I can't remember what her answer was, to be honest, but the question was essentially, “Do you need this in place by the end of 2017 in order to have it take place in the 2018 calendar year because of the way party financing works on a calendar year basis?”

There are all of those balls in the air. All of them relate back to the CEO and I think, on that basis, it would be helpful to have the acting CEO for more than an hour. I think as well we probably should agree now that, in addition to dealing with the narrow scope of the estimates, we would give ourselves liberty to deal with those broader issues. Seeing as the CEO—I assume—watches this committee religiously, we've effectively, in today's meeting, giving notice to the acting CEO that he should anticipate our desire to have some guidance on these matters.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Leaving the editorials aside about the previous legislation, I'll just make the observation that I think Mr. Christopherson has a very good point that the CEO.... Of course, it's not the CEO; it's the acting CEO. The acting CEO and his eventual successor have a full plate and a change of command under way in a limited timeline, in addition to the concerns that Mr. Christopherson is expressing, which I think primarily revolve around Bill C-33. From his perspective, I think that would deal with the things he disliked the most about the existing legislation that was imposed in the last Parliament.

Would that be correct?

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Let me just pick it up, if I can, Chair. One of the nice things about this amendment is that it speaks to how we're making the decision, and therefore, it pretty much opens us up to talk about any aspect of what's in front of us, as we can read into the chair's latitude.

I would just like to take a second, perhaps, to pick one of the issues that the government has placed in their discussion paper as it relates to the amendment, because the amendment would be the deciding formula as to how we make our decisions. Therefore, it's applicable to all aspects of the report. In my humble submission, that would make it germane to the point, and, I hope, keep me in order.

What I would like to do is just to spend a little bit of time talking about prorogation. The government has suggested that they want to do something there. This is another example, Chair, in which there were all kinds of opportunities for the government to find common cause around prorogation had they tried.

The first place to begin on that...and I'm trying to remember if Mr. Reid was there. I'm not sure if anybody else on this committee currently was there, but in one of those Parliaments, in one of those minorities—because they kind of came quickly and were a bit blurry—this committee was seized of the issue of prorogation, the same way that we're seized of the issue of the Chief Electoral Officer's report.

We brought in experts from across the country, constitutional experts. Actually, it was a motion that Jack Layton got the House to approve that sent the mandate here to PROC, and we spent—now, it's been a few years so my memory is a little fuzzy—at least four or five months on it. There were a lot of meetings and we generated a lot of information. There was not just expert testimony, but there were submissions that were made.

It was very complex, as you can appreciate, Chair, because once you start talking about prorogation, you're talking about the suspension of Parliament. There are a lot of rules around it. A lot of it is tradition. We were taking a look at what had been the tradition, what the rules were, and what was done in other jurisdictions. It was the kind of wide, expansive review you would expect.

I raise that because it occurs to me that if the government had indicated that this work had been done and that there was a wealth of information we could all use, again, that would have provided groundwork for discussions ahead of time. Maybe it would have meant a separate process around this, and maybe we would have linked it with other.... There are so many “maybes” about what we could have done.

We probably would have done that at the steering committee, and as you know, we do that in camera. We try not to be partisan. There's no BS. It's just us. There are only a handful of us. Basically, what we're trying to do is work our way through the various pieces that are in front of us to provide some cohesiveness to them, and then, ideally.... You know how a steering committee works. It cannot make decisions. All it can do is make a recommendation to the full committee. If you don't have unanimity, then the recommendation doesn't go to the committee. It just goes to the committee as a cold item with no recommendation.

It's a really good work environment, and whenever we used it in this Parliament and in the previous Parliament, the steering committee did exactly what we hoped it would do, and that was to sort through everything and take the time to get into the weeds, get into the minutiae, try out different ideas, and take into account all of the concerns, all that was there. A wealth of work was done.

I don't know whether the government intends for us to revisit that. Are they going to want to reinvent the wheel and do it all again? Are they planning to ignore all that?

Their opposition to this motion leaves the Conservatives and the NDP to conclude that it's the government's intention, as soon as they get the opportunity and once this filibuster is over, to use their majority to ram through changes to our Parliament.

I use the prorogation because I was there for all those meetings. I know the amount of work that was done, and it seems to me we could have been halfway there by just saying we'll take a look at that as a side piece, see where it gets us, and then how it fits into the overall.... That's the kind of thing you do when it's give and take, when you're all trying to work to a common cause. In this case, it's our understanding that the deadline of June 2 is very important to the government. It doesn't really matter why. I don't know why, but that's the deadline they are married to. Again, if we had enough goodwill, then we could have attempted to work toward a process that would accommodate that. It's only the government moves that have caused all this ill will. We didn't have this before.

To be fair, we hadn't yet got to some of the heavy lifting on the Chief Electoral Officer's report. Every time somebody said they were going to have a problem with that, we would say we'd set that aside, move on to the next low-lying fruit, and find the ones we can agree on. Some of those tough things were still to happen, but I think what's important is that we were working as a team. When we raised concerns, it was often as much personal, our own experience of what we knew from elections, as it was partisan. Besides, what is partisan about deciding where you can put signs? It's hard to make that partisan.

Prorogation is much the same thing. It's really not so much partisan as it's government opposition. You know why. This all came from the great prorogation where all of Canada watched a doorway for hours and hours. That's when Jack Layton said, “This is not right. The government shouldn't be allowed to run and hide from a confidence vote”, and so those kinds of practicalities were taken into account.

As I said, what we ran into, of course, was the complex rules, but a lot of it is by tradition, so you need people who understand that history and can explain it to you. We did all that, but the way the government's presented this now and said June 2, at the same time as they just rolled in and said Bill C-33 on May 19, the next thing you know they are going to want to know where the strawberries are, because this is starting to get a little bit strange.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

There is an end to this; it's just not foreseeable really soon.

So, returning to the 23rd report, on March 6, Chair, you rose in the House and you presented this report—proudly, I would assume—on our behalf, just as you did the 11th report, proudly, I would assume, which we.... I have spelled out that we have said in here that this was all done by consensus. You'll recall the wording: in this approach to the study, the committee attached importance to reporting back to blah, blah, blah, and taking into account, and that we would only do it by consensus. I can search for the exact words if you want, but you know they're there.

Turning to the new report, I had been making some reference to the good work we were doing on the Chief Electoral Officer's lengthy report. I think it would take something like 30, 40, or 50 meetings to actually go through that entire report and create our own report. It's a big undertaking. I've done it before in previous parliaments. For the most part, it's just been hard work, not controversial in terms of how we did that work. That was with Mr. Lukiwski, who spent a lot of time on this committee.

Again, you'll recall, Chair, that I had referenced that we have what we call the low-hanging fruit process, that we were doing it in sections. There was some methodology to our approach: we were doing it in sections. The goal was that at the conclusion of each section, we would do an interim report to the House, so that the work we were doing could be fed into the.... Hopefully, ostensibly, the government would take into account what was said here, notwithstanding the uh-oh around Bill C-33. I think we got around that one. Notwithstanding that little bump in the road—put that over here—for the most part, the whole idea was that we would issue reports, I think at least three, in sections, and we decided internally that we would approach those things that we could possibly, somehow, humanly find agreement on, and put those in the report.

Those things that clearly didn't lend themselves to an obvious readily available consensus we put aside and put in another pile, to take a shot at on another day. This, I think, is the first one. Whether it was first or second, I can't recall. I don't know if you can recall, Chair. Anyway, this was the first or second one.

I see the analyst offering something. Was it the first one? Thank you very much. That confirms that this was the first of at least three, probably four, reports by the time they did a separate one trying to tackle the issues that were going to be tougher. Probably they'd be thinner reports, but there would have been at least four in total. This was the first one.

This is also, again, part of the problem with the timing, such that the minister came in and asked us to do some selective work on the rest of the report, and report to her by May 19, and then this other thing landed in front of us, and originally they wanted it done by June 2.

I mean, really, who's thinking over there, or supposed to be?

Anyway, that remains a problem. It would be nice to get at it, because it would mean we've dealt with this problem. The only way this goes away is if we, the opposition, get our rights.

As per the format of the last one, you'll recall that it was pretty much the same report that “The Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs has the honour to present....” It was the 11th there; it's the 23rd here. This was an “Interim Report on Moving Toward a Modern, Efficient, Inclusive and Family-Friendly Parliament”. This is “An Interim Report in Response to the Chief Electoral Officer’s Recommendations for Legislative Reforms Following the 42nd General Election”. Neither one is little stuff. This is all deep, complex things, and yet look: Mr. Badawey was talking about how much he enjoyed that discussion. That's because once you get into that kind of respectful give and take where you're not trying to beat each other up and you're not trying to get one better on the other party, where you're actually working together, that's where it's not only enjoyable but productive; unlike this, which is non-productive, other than it's us defending ourselves.

On the second page, we, all of us, government members, chair, vice-chairs, members, all of us said this in doing our report. Remember, this is us, the same committee, the government members, the very same people:

In conducting its work, the Committee attached importance to completing its study of the first two chapters of the CEO's report and providing the House with its assessment of the CEO's recommendations in a timely manner.

Again, I want to point out how co-operatively we are working with the government. “Timely manner”—the only thing that's timely, in terms of the government and its agenda for bringing legislation, is getting our feedback, and, if it's true to its word, taking into account what we've had to say and factoring that in to help inform its decision. That's respect.

We could have caused the government some grief if we collectively said, “You know what? We have a great chance here. We have this report that's going to take 50 meetings anyway, so what do you say we stretch it and make it 75 and really make it hard for them to get anything done?” We didn't do that. We did nothing remotely like that. It was not even suggested, not even as a joke. We all take this work seriously.

This committee is, in some ways, like the steering committee of the House. This is the only committee that meets at the same time every week. The only committee. Every other committee rotates, but we don't. Every other committee actually gets created only when we generate a report that says it should be. I'm not trying to pretend that we're making all the decisions around here; it's the makeup of the committee, and it comes from the caucuses and the whips.

But my point is that this is unlike any other committee. Everybody on here, from the newest rookie to the oldest veteran—

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

It would be even more so if that's the way it really happened, because nobody believes it. It didn't happen that way. It didn't happen that way at all. My sense is, and I can't give you the particulars, but I think we all know that the PMO's fingerprints are all over this thing. There is no way after what we went through with Bill C-33 that any of the government members would be bringing in a notice of motion as draconian as this one without the absolute 100% okay from the Prime Minister, the House leader, and the whip. The first time, it could be a mistake. You know, first time, shame on you, and that kind of thing. But here we are again a few weeks later and it's the same darn thing.

The last government didn't want to appear reasonable. They wanted to appear to be strong and winners. It was a whole different approach, so in a lot of the things they did, they were at least on brand. I'll give them that. They were very disciplined.

I don't understand the government: sunny ways but shutting things down, transparency and ramming through changes with only one...even Harper didn't try to do that. That's how bad this is. He didn't even try to do that. So here we be. The government has identified the areas in which they want change. We know what those motions are. Some of them they tried out in previous vehicles. Motion six, remember that debacle? It was the same kind of thing. Every time you guys try to play Mad Max, it doesn't work for you. It's the same darn thing then.

We find ourselves now with no alternative except to do exactly what we're doing, which is to fight to defend what is arguably the last real tool that an opposition member has in their tool box, which can at least slow down the government. We can't stop it. It has a majority. It's going to get its way at the end of the day and it's going to win votes 10 times out of 10. I used to be part of a majority government provincially, not as massive as the one we have here, but a comfortable enough one that every time I walked in the House, I had that feeling that we were the government and we were going to win this vote. I haven't felt that since.

A couple times they were in minority, which is a whole different other story that we may need to get to later to fill time as we go through this, but not for tonight.

What the government has done is to identify the things it wants, including taking away our right. Here's the thing about it, Chair. Filibusters are a lot like strikes. You will know, Chair, from our time together, that originally I'm a product of the Hamilton labour movement. That's where I came from. That's how I got into politics, and I still self-identify as someone from the labour movement. That never leaves you. I look at these things and I want to find a way to get through them. I want to find a way that we can come to grips.

But for the government to then go through these things and cherry-pick the things it wants.... There was no consultation ahead of time, no discussion of any give or take, no saying it was looking at certain things. If you're serious about co-operation, there are ways for those kinds of discussions to happen, but it's clear that this government had no intention and has no intention. I don't know why, but the knee-jerk reaction seems to be to go from trying to be the nicest people in public life in the world to suddenly being the most vicious. It's happened two or three times. I don't get it. I don't at all get it.

I understand that the calculation here is probably one of a long game. It's taken a look—because that's what you do when you're in government—and it's said, “Okay. Let's go to when the next election is and work backwards and identify the things”—we used to call them our signature pieces—“our keystone pieces and make sure that they are brought in in a timely way and they're implemented and we're watching those”. I think they have deliverology, which is the same sort of thing. You're usually working backwards from a date to identify things you'd need to do at a certain point.

I'm assuming that the calculation is that there are things the government wants through the House by the time of the next election, and that the ability to all but guarantee that they can get them, on any time frame of their little heart's desire, is worth the pain and the price that we opposition members are trying to make them pay.

I assume that this is the calculation. The budget's tomorrow. The fact that this happened today is not a coincidence. We know that. Obviously, the government's hope is that we'll blink.

The government needs to understand that there is nothing more important in front of the opposition right now than defending our rights. Again, we do this a lot, but there are members of the government benches who've been in opposition and who know that someday they're going to be back.

Trust me, if you ever achieve this, there will come a day, especially for the younger ones, when you'll be in a situation sitting where I am, let's say, or on this side, and the government's over there. You'll be reaching for every tool because of some outrageous thing that is really wrong. You'll reach into your quiver for that arrow, and it ain't going to be there. Then you'll say to yourself, “Hmm, it seemed like a really good idea at the time.” The people on the government side will say, “You know, at the time I thought it was a bad idea, but right about now I think you guys were probably right. It was a good rule change. Well done. Thank you. We appreciate that.”

What could an alternative have been? Just about anything would be better than this. I mean, for anybody who's watching....

The other thing to say to the government is that there probably aren't many people paying much attention right now, but that number will grow. There are a lot of people, especially people who used to vote for us, for the NDP, who went with the Liberals. It was for a bunch of reasons, but for many of them the signature piece was electoral reform, specifically proportional representation. They've paid a real price for backing off this. Those people are very upset, really upset. This will affect those very same people.

Why you want to do that to your brand is beyond me. That's what I'm not getting. Brand is everything. A new government spends most of the first four years building that brand, the brand of their choice. From what I can see, this is not it. Undemocratic, ramming things through, taking away rights from the opposition, forcing committees to go around the clock and filibuster to defend the right to have a filibuster—that's your brand? Really?

Is it the “Liberal Conservatives”, or “Conservative Liberals”...? The Conservatives over here would probably tell you that they wouldn't stoop this low, and not to attach their name to this idea. You have to give them their due, because they didn't do that. They did some horrible things—I was there—but they didn't do this. It was this government—I'm going to keep coming back to this, because this is the most annoying thing—that promised to be different. They were going to be respectful of committees. Where's the respect?

Bill C-33, I was willing to forgive you that one. I mean, the government was in a tough spot. I understand the politics of it. I get it. They were in a tough spot. They were taking a lot of heat. They were getting negative reports on electoral reform. They wanted to get something positive out there to provide a bit of a counter to it. I get that, but that doesn't in any way justify the ham-fisted way it was done.

The minister—the second minister, not the first one—all but said that. She came a little shy of that. Okay, I can understand what the advice was from her ministerial staff, but she came a very long way towards saying, “You know, we screwed up, and we didn't show this committee respect.”

Although I didn't get an absolute promise that it wouldn't happen again—I can see why, given what's happening today—at least what was said gave us enough, because we had the desire to get back to working positively. It gave us enough to take what was said and use that to say, “Okay, it's a pass. It's a C. It'll get us there. Let's get back to the electoral reform report. That's the primary focus. That's what's really important here.”

I wouldn't normally talk about these things, but in this context, because the government has to vilify us for what we're doing—I know it's coming—I need to publicly remind my colleagues that certainly I, as one member of this committee, did everything I could, and successfully, with others, to get us back on track. Up until even yesterday at the beginning of the meeting we were fine.

By the way, that's another thing, too. We haven't talked about all the money that was wasted today by the way the government's doing it, not just on this but all the time that the staff took, the very professional staff who came here from the Office of the Chief Electoral Officer. They did their homework. They prepped. They were all ready to go. We were all ready to go. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, I guess I can't go too far on what was said in camera, but suffice it to say, in a blink, we were public and this thing was being jammed down our throats. That's how quickly it changed.

On the motion in front of us, the amendment, again this is the kind of area where with no discussion and the government refusing to go here or to offer an alternative or to try to find a compromise, they're leaving it clear to all of us that they are prepared to use their majority to ram through changes to our House of Commons. Their majority, their ramming...our House, our Parliament. That doesn't sound like the campaign trail. It was so different on the campaign trail.

I had suggested a compromise that worked before. I suggested earlier today, Chair, that perhaps we could look at the Cullen model that was used for the special committee that reviewed democratic reform. That got us off the dime and got us into a positive venue. Now I must say for the record, too, that it was young Daniel Blaikie who actually conceived of the idea, but it was Nathan who said, “That is a good idea.” He took it, ran with it, polished it, and changed it around. I want to give Dan his due for the initial concept, but Nathan's the one who gave it life and Nathan did an excellent job on that.

Maybe that's something we could still do to get off this dime. Is the Cullen model something that would help us get through this impasse? The government says that it's sincere about wanting to have give and take, and consult. All the usual words that you use when you do mean it, they're using now. Maybe that's the mechanism that lets us get going.

But that's only if the government actually did want to have consultation, discussion, openness, transparency, and all that other stuff they talked about in the election that they don't seem to want to live up to anymore. Again, if those things had been suggested either at a House leaders' meeting or at a steering committee here, anywhere, at any venue, any opportunity, other than “our way or the highway”.... That's the way the last guy did it. This government was going to be different. They're different when it suits them, but they're not different consistently.

They're not really different. It amounts to another broken promise. We're getting quite a collection of them—biggies.

The Cullen model would also allow something that I don't think has been raised yet, but I did slip out of the room a couple of times. It may have been mentioned, but not a lot, and that is, what about the rights of members of the House who don't belong to recognized parties? We went out of our way in the Cullen model to ensure that they got a say in the election rules that were being reviewed. It's their election, too. Where are their rights in all this? Where is their opportunity to have input and consultation? The government doesn't seem to have even thought about it.

Again, you know, it's talk one game, act another game. The Cullen model would provide us with an opportunity to have a fair discussion where everybody gets their say. The structure enhances or pressures the members to find compromise, and there was a mechanism whereby less than everyone could conclude a decision and have it carried on. You had the ability to work your way through things in a way where everybody was agreed at the beginning what the rules—that new structure—would be. None of that discussion....

What we have in front of us right now.... It will be interesting to see how many amendments we end up with from the two opposition parties by the time this whole process is done. We might be setting a new land speed record with that one. For now, we have a motion that calls for a requirement that there be all-party agreement. The government doesn't agree with that. They don't agree with that. They don't agree with a compromise. They don't agree with.... The only thing they seem to agree with is that whatever they want to do, they can do it. That, they agree with.

It was also interesting, even today, to watch...and this was in public, not in camera, so I can talk about it. Mr. Chan, a government member, raised this right here just a few hours ago. He raised the idea of perhaps.... You recall, Chair, that I tried to get this committee to adjourn the debate on something that we hadn't caucused yet. That would have allowed us a chance to take it to our caucus tomorrow to get a mandate, so that when we spoke at committee, we had the support of our caucus. We would know what their thinking was and that we were speaking on behalf of our caucuses. The government said no to that.

I mean, how unreasonable. We are debating right now a motion and a policy change that affects everything we do in the House, and the government thinks it's okay that we don't get a chance to take it to caucus first. Come along. No one out there—no matter how much you decidedly look at your Blackberrys and iPads, no matter how much you try to glance away from the wreckage of this—the people out there aren't buying it. You can't defend it. How can you defend forcing members to debate one of the most important policies we could possibly debate—the rules of the House—without even having an opportunity to take the discussion paper and the motion to our caucus?

You did call it a discussion paper, didn't you? Except you denied us the chance to discuss it. How is that fair? How do you defend that one? Yet every one of the government members lined up to say, “No, you debate now. We say now”. We had people from the Chief Electoral Officer here, we were all ready to do it. We had our papers all over, ready to go, and the government suddenly said, “No, we're going to deal with this motion right away.” I asked for at least a two-day deferral and it was refined by my friend, Mr. Reid, who had the better idea to adjourn just the debate—rather than the whole meeting—and allow us to get back to do a day's work on the Chief Electoral Officer's report. That was a great idea. I accepted that as sort of a friendly amendment. It was a good improvement on what I was trying to do. What did the government say? No. The government said no.

That was early on. As question period was approaching, Mr. Chan—he's a very reasonable man and I enjoy working with him—suggested, reasonably, I guess actually forgetting that the Liberals aren't in reasonable mode right now.... I'm sorry, Mr. Schmale mentioned it and then you responded. I don't want to get it wrong. I certainly don't want to wrong you on this. I'm going to wrong you, but decidedly where you deserve it, not on something you don't. If it came from Mr. Schmale, that's fine.

But it's fair to say that Mr. Chan did respond positively and say, “Fair enough, maybe we could suspend for question period and then come back”. When we asked what time we should come back, that's when the senior staffer came over, had a huddle on the side, and had a couple of words. The next thing Mr. Chan said was “No, we're going to keep talking through”.

I have had members of the Liberal Party brag to me about how that didn't happen and was never going to happen. They said, “Remember, Dave? Under Harper, the staff was always there telling them what to do, just like a bunch of puppets and seals. We're never going to do that. We're here as independent members. We're going to think for ourselves. You can count on that, Dave; don't worry. We're far away from that nonsense.”

Not so much, because that's exactly what happened.

Mr. Chan reasonably responded, because in my opinion he's a reasonable man, and said that, yes, it made sense that way, because we were going to do this for days or weeks. For him to say, “Yes, we'll take a few minutes to go and let everyone exercise their right to be part of question period” and have it countermanded by the staff, vetoed by the staff, well, why don't the staff just sit there instead so we can get some work done directly and get rid of the middle people?

Folks, particularly the new members here, this is the kind of stuff we used to hit the government backbenchers in the Harper government with all the time, and they deserved it. Now you're letting it be done to you. It's not me. I'm the one who's doing the words, but none of this would be happening if it wasn't for your actions. You're bringing this all upon yourselves. Not all yet, but slowly and surely you're working your way through all the areas that you said you would do differently. Guess what. Watching a senior staff person come over and dictate to the MP sitting there what the decision is going to be, especially when it reverses the decision of the sitting MP, is about as far away from respecting committees and accepting that they are masters of their own destiny as you can possibly get.

Why? I don't know. All I see is a failed political calculation. Does the government have any idea how resolute we are on this side of the House? This is the closest the Conservatives and the NDP have worked for, well, as long as I can remember. I was starting to think and going further, but this is the closest for a long time. It's not because suddenly we agree on everything, but one thing we do agree on is that this is wrong and doing it this way is wrong. If you're going to try to take away one of the few tools that we have left to be effective opposition members and you think we're going to blink for any reason, the government is misreading this.

I can tell you that it goes all the way to the top in terms of the resoluteness of the two opposition parties. I know that Madam May feels the same way—she has been here once—and I have a sneaking suspicion that the rest of the independents are going to feel pretty similar, especially since they don't even get a say. They don't even get a say, and the government didn't give any thought at all about the opposition members. Who are they? Who cares? We're the majority and what we want is what matters. We have to deal with those official parties, and we will. We'll fix them, don't worry. The other ones, well, they have no power and we'll just make sure they stay that way.

You were going to be different, though; that's the thing. It's not as though I have to hold up some high ideals and make it look like you backed them. The Liberals were the ones who were giving all these lofty speeches during that bloody 11-week campaign, so you had lots of opportunity to repeat to everybody how you were going to be different. Telling people one thing and doing something else is not doing things differently. Canadians have had their fill of that. The government said, “We'll be different; you can trust us, Canadians.” They did, and now, by this kind of nonsense, the government is insulting those very same Canadians who put their trust in them.

I don't know what's going to happen to the changes to the electoral act. When I turn my mind back to a few hours ago when we were actually doing productive things, I had some sense of maybe where we were going. I have no idea now. Let's just take a second to mosey on down that trail.

The new Minister of Democratic Institutions asked us to try to complete our study of the Chief Electoral Officer’s report, which is pretty lengthy by the way, by May 19, and we really hadn't already gotten our heads around how we were going to do that except that we were prepared to try. Again, based on the idea that if it looks like timing is going to be a problem. If the government wants to give us some indication of areas that they prefer to move on earlier rather than later, then we can rejig our work so they can have the benefit of our....

That's all gone now, Mr. Chair. As long as we're tied up in this none of that's going to happen, so does that mean that the Conservatives.... I mean the Liberals. You start getting into this stuff and the old ways kick in.

Does that mean the Liberals have decided that their ability to have 100% control in the House and in every committee is more important than removing some of the Bill C-23 ugliness, the unfair elections act? Or does it mean that you're going back to not respecting the committee and their opinion like Bill C-33? Because you can't have both. You can't have us locked into this pitched battle for days and weeks on end and expect us to complete a report that we weren't even sure we could finish under the existing schedule if we're not even talking about it. So what does that mean? Does that mean the government's going to say something's got to give, and it would look like listening to the committee and respecting the committee and waiting for our report is what's going to give, which puts us right back where we were with Bill C-33. That's not that far away from the process that was followed with Bill C-23, the unfair elections act.

We already heard Mr. Reid admit that the opposition approach to Bill C-23 did damage. I didn't even have the Liberals with us fighting Bill C-23 as strongly. They did fight it but not as strongly as the official opposition is now linked with the third party to make sure this doesn't happen. There are two injustices: ram through the changes that you want, opposition be damned, and then put in whatever electoral changes you want, committee consideration be damned. Is that where we are? Is that what this committee is now reduced to? It looks like it.

We've been struggling with our work plan to try to fit everything in. I just mentioned the most acute one. We have a lot of important work and anyone who's been on this committee for any length of time knows that we don't go too long before somebody from somewhere sends us work that we have to deal with. The Speaker refers things to us. The House refers things to us. Bills come in here. Even though we've set our work plan it's always a struggle to stay, and that's when we're all co-operating, respecting one another, and fighting in common cause to get through an agenda because we believe it's in the interest of the people we represent to do so. Where's that? I'd love to hear somebody from the government tell me.

What are you going to say? Is it we're going to start meeting six days a week? Is that the solution because that only works so far? We could do something like that maybe if we were going to the Cullen model where we're, again, working together and we set out how we can do this. It may be possible, but the government doesn't want to talk about that. They have no interest. The ones I feel sorry for are the backbenchers who are sleepwalking through this.

I know some of them get it and they know how dangerous this is to their brand in their own ridings. I know some of them get it. The ones I feel sorry for really are the ones who don't get it and they're just going along and doing what the government told them. They say, “Yeah, okay, I'll support that. Sure, yeah, okay,” and they go back to their ridings and it's like whoa what happened? We all know.... I don't want go too far into this. I wouldn't raise it if it wasn't in the media but there it is, low-lying fruit. There's already a little bit of that tension that we all know exists between cabinet and backbenchers, and I've been both.

I've been the backbencher who felt frustrated, and I've been the cabinet minister who is carrying the responsibility. I get it. You have a couple of days coming up when you're going to be struggling with these things. The fact that you don't think there's maybe enough consultation with the cabinet and with the caucus before things are done is not new—trust me—and anybody who is in your caucus who has been in government before will tell you we've been here before.

Things like ministers coming into ridings and you don't know about it, and you get all ticked off because the minister is coming in and you didn't know, are not new. This is not new. You're having these kinds of stresses. I suspect that, especially among the ones who really get politics on the ground and have a good political gut, they're going to go into that caucus meeting tomorrow morning or the quasi-retreat on the weekend and there's going to be a lot of expression of serious concern about what's going on, because this stuff is hard to defend, not because it's complicated but because it's so wrong.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

On division? I think it would be unanimous.

I say all of that again, and I want to try to end on a positive note. It's hard, given the subject matter in front of us, but I do put that forward, and I mean it very sincerely. If it changes, I'll let you know. If we cross the Rubicon where, “You know what? I don't want to talk to you guys anymore. Forget about it”, I'll let you know. Up until then, it's a standing offer, because I don't find this particularly fun. I don't find this particularly productive, and I don't think taxpayers are going to be all that impressed either.

I think the government's going to have a heck of a time trying to blame us. Maybe they could accuse us of being obstructionist or something. Good luck! Given your own background on Bill C-33 and on the whole approach, especially when you compare it with the approach that could have been taken. Why did you miss that opportunity? I don't get it. Why didn't they sit down and try to find some common ground so that even if we're at odds, it's maybe on a few little things that we could try to.... Even if we had to have a bit of a set-to over it, it would be narrowed. Right now, it's the whole thing. We're in the ditch. We're in the middle of a filibuster defending the right to filibuster.

I'll just go so far as to say that I choose to believe that there are quite a number of government members on the other side who are not feeling good about this, because this is not exactly sunny ways. This is not exactly consultation. This is not co-operation. This is not respect. All the things the government promised, and I will go so far as to say that when my colleague from Hamilton, Filomena Tassi spoke about those things, I believe she believed it and came here believing that was the way her government would act. In some ways they have. It's not as if it has always been like this, which is another reason it's so surprising.

I don't expect anybody to comment, but I have to believe this is not sitting well with a lot of Liberal members, especially the new ones who came in, in the last Parliament. Everything before then was the olden days and this is the new era and they've certainly tried to conduct themselves in that fashion. This has got to be one of those things in the pit of your stomach where they think they really don't want to defend this back home. However, that's their decision to make.

I would again reiterate the offer to have any kind of offline confidential discussions so that if they break down nobody is losing face. I've been around a while and I know how these things are done. I know how we got to “yes” back in the seventies, but it doesn't happen this way.

Chair, I would just urge any influence you have as a bona fide, full-fledged member of the government caucus to influence that, because you've been doing an excellent job as chair. You had big shoes to fill. Joe Preston was probably one of the best chairs of PROC to come around in quite some decades, not just Parliament, and it was mostly through the force of his personality.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

That's great. Thank you very much, Chair. I appreciate that.

I want to say how much I've enjoyed the last few hours, and I say that only partly tongue in cheek. I do enjoy hearing from Mr. Reid. It's always interesting. He knows his history, and I like history. I'm no expert, but I enjoy it. I'm pleased to pick up where he left off and to continue to point out why what's going on is so unacceptable.

Maybe to warm to the subject, I would start on a positive note; that is, I want to say to the government that this is not where we want to be. I can't speak for others, but the proof for my own motivation is the leadership role that I played in helping us get back to the Chief Electoral Officer's report, even though I was the one who blew it up the first time. The fact was that once we had dealt with that, the minister came in, and we got as much out of the minister as it appeared to me that we were going to get, and it was sufficient—barely—to allow us....

Then, colleagues on the government side, in camera and in public, you know that I was one of the leading voices for getting us back to work, and we did so. Very quickly, we managed to set everything aside. We were working, but now we're back into it again, for the same kind of problem, which is the government just dropping something out of nowhere in the middle of the floor and causing all this kerfuffle.

I said that I was going to try to start out by being positive, so what I want to do is just to reaffirm this. I like negotiating. I'm an old negotiator—and now I am old—from way back. I love negotiating. I love the give-and-take. It's like a poker game and I love playing poker. I don't win much but I love playing the game.

I want to say to the government that if there is any way at all that they are interested in the House leaders getting together—or whips, or members of this committee, or a combination thereof for any group at all that the government would like to identify—we in the NDP certainly are quite prepared to sit down, and I suspect my colleagues are, but I'll leave it to them to speak for themselves, and to try to find a reasonable compromise that recognizes the government's right to set an agenda but also respects the right of opposition in our role. I think we could find that if we came together in goodwill.

I want to say—and I say this much more in sorrow than in anger—that I wish that approach had been taken in the beginning. I have a sneaking suspicion that we wouldn't be here like this. As bad as we are, this is the worst I've seen it. This is worse than Bill C-33. It's worse because we're going around the clock, and the government knows.... They were with us in opposition and they know what we do. They know that we already have rotations, we already have schedules going, we have people who are going to be coming in through the night, and we're working on schedules for next week. We see where we are.

This is serious. Also, it's not very productive. It's not going to get us anywhere, other than two forces staring at each other. That's where we are right now, unnecessarily so. That's what is upsetting. I's that it didn't need to be this way. If the government wants to review these things....

Again, when the minister came in and said that she'd like us to try to get our work on the chief electoral report done by—what was it?—May, I think it was, our heads exploded, and we asked how we were going to do that. We didn't suddenly say, “No way—nothing.” I offered that we would do what we could. I said that to her privately. I can't say anything more than that as it was a private discussion, but I did offer privately and reaffirmed publicly that if we could find a way where this committee, if the government worked with us to identify areas where they wanted to bring in legislation.... I'm supportive of a lot of things the governments wants to do, not all of it but a lot of it, especially the removal of some of the ugly Bill C-23 stuff.

If we could have sat down and worked on an approach that would let us get through this and deal with it in a fair-minded way.... I was saying that I offered to the minister—and I think the official opposition was onside—that if we could, we would accommodate the minister's schedule, even though we don't have to do that. We're masters of our own destiny, but hey, we offered to do that, and we said that if they wanted to identify to us areas where they wanted to bring in legislation and would like the benefit of the thinking of this committee, then we would take that. If it was out of sequence with how we were going to do it, we were open to that.

I still remain open to the idea of moving our work so that we get at that in a timely fashion, which helps the government in terms of informing them of our thinking, so they can then introduce legislation. We get away from this Bill C-33, dropping a bill in the House before you've even heard from the committee, and then out the other side of your mouth telling us how important the committee work is. That just doesn't wash.

It's not like there's no evidence that we could work together, or there's no evidence that there's desire on the part of the opposition to be co-operative. Part of our mandate is to review the Standing Orders anyway. I would have been open to having that discussion, but I have to tell you, the ham-fisted way that this has been dealt with really feels like the last government. This feels a lot like Bill C-23, which really should inflict horror in the government members to find themselves sitting right where Harper's MPs sat. They're doing much the same as what Harper did on Bill C-23, only this time, instead of the election laws, it's how we run our House. It's the same attitude, that same bully approach.

I never thought I'd see anything like that, especially with the new government. I have to tell you, I'm not understanding any of this. I don't understand how the government thinks they're going to win on this, or how they think that ramming through changes to our Standing Orders is going to make the House work any better. There comes a point, Chair, where no matter how much we might want peace, if the government absolutely refuses to extend the olive branch of peace, then what I worry about—and, Chair, I say this to you as someone who is as non-partisan as our system allows—is that I'm not sure this committee can continue to function if we keep having things like Bill C-33 and this motion happening at this committee. I would be a fool, as one member, to continue to be co-operative with the government when all they seem to do is kick us in the arse. Why would I do that?

That's not my preferred way. I've been doing this for over 30 years. Having fights with the government, or fights with the opposition if I'm the government, is not new or exciting. I'm tired of all that. I have to tell you. I don't get a lot out of it.

What really turns my crank is when we get together with disparate political beliefs, different experiences, but come together in goodwill. Then we collectively try to find—like when we're doing reports—language that accommodates your concern and my concern. That I find stimulating because it goes against the grain. That's not easy to do in an adversarial system. Therefore, for me personally, after all these decades, that becomes a far greater challenge than just standing on some soapbox screaming and hollering. I've done that for decades, everybody's heard it, and we're all getting a bit tired of it, I suspect.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Don't confuse me. It's easily done.

They would come by and have input. We believed that it was meaningful, like it mattered that we would take the time. We struggled. We don't just agree with everything automatically. Usually it takes some kind of change, but really, with such positive work and a good combination of veterans and new members, so that we had a good mix, we were doing good work. I think every one of us would say that we were doing good work on behalf of Parliament and on behalf of Canadians.

Then, when they dropped Bill C-33 on the floor of the House, it was as if it was all a ruse, just a joke, a make-work project to keep us busy, or it was pro forma.

I just went through 10 years of that, of a government that looked at committee work that way, and I was really looking forward to getting back to a world where committees mattered, to the important work that the mother of Parliaments perceived when this kind of Westminster parliamentary system was put in place. The whole idea was that the real work would happen at committee. That's why we're a little looser with the rules. That's why we can call each other by our names and not just our ridings.

That's why at committee you can speak until you're done, so that if we're going to talk about water quality and my riding represents a good part of the Hamilton Harbour waterfront, I'm going to have a lot to say about it, or I may have a lot to say. The one nice thing at committee is that once you take the floor, you can go until you're done. That doesn't mean that everything is a filibuster, but it means that if you want to take your time and spell out an issue that affects your constituents as it relates to the matter in front of you, if you're going to build that case, it's complex, and you want to break it down so it's understandable, that may take 20 or 30 minutes or maybe an hour, or maybe a little longer depending on the subject matter.

That's one of the beauties of committee, and we don't have that time in the House. Remember that we come here believing that our main priority objective is to reflect the wishes and interests of our constituents. Because there is so much going on in the House, we all accept that there are going to be time constraints, as difficult as that is.

If I may say so, though, Mr. Chair, at least in the House in the early part of a new bill or motion, you at least get 20 minutes plus 10 minutes of questions and answers with colleagues, for a total of 30 minutes that you have to deal with an issue that your constituents consider important. I want to point out that under one of the proposals the government would make, that would be eliminated. That whole idea dies here: at committee, you get 10 minutes at a time. It doesn't matter how complex the issue is. It doesn't matter how much you need to break a whole lot of.... Nothing matters except that time limit, and now it starts to become a very different creature.

I again want to express how disappointing it is at that level that we're here. I'm trying to be fair-minded, but on balance I couldn't even give the government a fifty-fifty to say that they've honoured 50% of the commitments they made to committees. They've made some. They did honour some, but I have to tell you that when the rubber hits the road, when real politics start to take over and we have real issues in front of us and the government is feeling the pressure, whether it's from entities or the clock, they're acting more and more like the previous Harper government in terms of their lack of—

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I did, because we couldn't continue with what was going on before. That had to come to an end. I guess a minority would have been even better than the current one, for obvious reasons. Anyway, I won't get too much into what could have been. Those tears are gone.

I will talk about what did happen, and that was that a party got elected that said they were going to respect committees once again, because Parliament used to have respect for its committees. Of everything we do here on the Hill, I consider committee work to be my favourite part. My top thing, of course, is being in my riding, which is same for all of us, but here, I love committee work. This is where stuff happens. It moves quickly. You get a chance to be far more personal in interactions and to work together.

We still have our battles from time to time, but the whole idea was that committees would now be respected and that we wouldn't see this business of moving in camera, with vicious stuff happening in camera, and then having to come back out and not being able to say anything because the rules tie your hands. We were going to have transparency and respect. I was really looking forward to that.

In some ways and in some areas, they've delivered, but right from the get-go on this committee, the first thing I had to do—I think it was even at the first meeting we had—was to mount a mini-campaign of my own to get the parliamentary secretary off the committee, whereas the government had promised that the parliamentary secretary wasn't going to be there in the first place. You can talk about a voting member but where is he now? I haven't seen him for a long time, so it looks like message received.

You know what, Chair? The government members of the day argued. They were so incensed when I accused them of needing him to ride shotgun.

Of course, I was baiting all of you and you all rose, as I would have, too, and responded with —I'm paraphrasing, no names—“Hey, I can make my own decisions, I'm an MP.” That's fair enough. Mr. Graham talked about being here before too and how that was all insulting. Anyway, we got through all of that, and lo and behold, look around: we don't have a parliamentary secretary anywhere within earshot of this committee. But they had to be chased. That was a little disappointing.

I was hoping that it was a one-off, because they have done some other things that are important. They have increased the resources for the committee, which is the first thing. Of course, the previous government was slowly strangling the ability of committees to do their work. Certainly, they never left Parliament Hill, except on the rarest of occasions. Heaven forbid that Canadians would actually get a hands-on opportunity to talk to their own government.

Mostly it was going to be about tone and respect, and then you'll remember, Chair—it wasn't that long ago—that we went through the issue of the report from the Chief Electoral Officer regarding changes that he would recommend we make to the election laws, having reviewed and learned lessons from the election we had just had in 2015. It's a regular undertaking. We do it every year.

We were actually working very well together under your leadership, Chair. It's an in camera exercise, so I can't speak in too much detail, but it's certainly fair to say that we had a great esprit de corps and that we recognized that the election laws don't belong to the government, or the official opposition, or the third party, or independents. The election laws belong to everybody.

We were working our way through it. We were following a process that we've used before here, starting in other Parliaments. You can call it the “low-lying fruit process”. All it means is that where we can agree on things readily or with a minor change to wording, we would include that in a report and move on to the next item. We would go through those as quickly as we could. As soon as we got to an item where one of the caucuses or even one of the members said that they had a real problem with an item and it was going to give them real pause for concern, we would take that signal as meaning that it was not low-lying fruit and not easily agreeable, so we needed to set it aside. We had that second track.

It meant that when we got to those, a lot of the political give and take was yet to happen, but it's amazing how many things we could agree on that would then allow us to give an interim report to the House, which would then allow the government to consider the opinion of this committee on the changes recommended by the Chief Electoral Officer.

With the government having promised that they were going to treat committees with respect and give their work serious consideration in the development of policy and legislation, everything seemed to be going fine. Then I walked in one morning—I think it was a Thursday—at 11 o'clock, and within that hour, because the House usually starts at 10 o'clock, the government had dropped Bill C-33 on the floor. Now, Bill C-33 was about election laws. In and of itself, it's not a huge issue, other than the fact that some of the changes they wanted to make in Bill C-33 were items that either we were currently seized of or hadn't dealt with yet but were on our agenda to do.

Let's wait a minute. Let's have a look at this picture. The government says they're going to respect the work of committees. They're going to consider their work important input in the development of government policy.

Oh, I've just been advised that it's scheduled for debate in the House next Thursday. That should be fun.

Take the work we're doing. The government says they're going to listen to us, and then they drop this bill, which by its very existence is insulting to this committee, and they break their promise. How can you say on the one hand that you're going to respect what committees have to say and consider what they have to say in the development of policy and legislation and then turn around and drop a bill on the floor that deals with those very issues? The committee has not even finished with it and, in some cases, hasn't even started on it. Where's the respect in that?

To some of us, that was such an egregious action that it seized up the work of the committee. At that moment, we stopped reviewing the Chief Electoral Officer's recommendations, and for this simple reason: why bother? It would seem that, foolishly, all of us, including me, members of the Conservatives, the government members, anybody else who came by, independents who dropped by the committee, the Greens—I'll give you your Greens, Madam—the Bloc, the other independents—

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

You just reminded me of an item for our agenda that came up today.

I set out the schedule for the rest of the week, but if Bill C-33 does come before Parliament this week, because that bill is coming to our committee, I'm going to suspend during that discussion in the Commons so we can all be there to hear whatever they're talking about. I say this just so people know. It might be on Thursday.

Sorry to interrupt you.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Mr. Chair, you can see where we are, especially, sir, compared to where we've been, notwithstanding our little kerfuffle over Bill C-33, which derailed us for a short period of time. Some of us went out of our way to help get this committee back on track, if you'll recall. Most of the time, we've been very respectful of each other and of each other's rights. We've listened to one another politely, even when there is no media, nobody, around. That's the way we've been functioning. I've been on this committee for quite some time—not as long as Mr. Reid—and the committee works best, Mr. Chair, when we have that. You're our leader, helping us work collectively as a team, a team that includes each of us in the opposition too. It's easy from the government side, but we in the opposition have offered up that willingness to be part of a team and to work collectively on the issues that we have, especially on this committee because most of the things we do are non-partisan. The rule changes in the House should be non-partisan.

Mr. Chair, I'm appealing to you in your capacity as our chair. You have the authority to adjourn. I am personally, as a matter of privilege, asking you to please step in, preserve what's left of the ability of this committee to work as a single entity, and allow us to approach these rule changes in a way that's as fair and respectful as we've done everything else. I'm asking you to use your unilateral authority as the chair to adjourn this session. Allow us to get to our caucuses tomorrow to talk about this. Then let's come back on Thursday. That is not some gymnastics of parliamentary athletics. That's just polite common sense and respect. We haven't even had a chance to take this to our caucuses. Where on earth does the government think it's going to get the credibility to go out into the public and defend not just what you're doing, but how you're doing it? I'm asking you, Mr. Chair, to save the government from itself. Preserve the good work of this committee, the spirit of co-operation that exists, and adjourn this meeting. Let some fairness, common sense, and real democracy enter into this procedure. Mr. Chair, I implore you to please do that on behalf of this collective.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Mr. Chair, before the break, I was in the midst of reading the letter that I'm sending to Minister Gould today with regard to essentially the scheduling conflict we have between the items on the agenda for this committee that are coming from that minister's office, because we are the committee that takes care of the democratic institutions portfolio, and the Standing Orders review that we've been given.

I went through a series of four questions, one of which has four subsidiary items. The four subsidiary items are the items that are coming from her to us: the CEO recommendations report from the 42nd election; Bill C-33, currently at second reading; her proposed bill on political financing; and then, of course, our Standing Orders and how they work together.

Now we'll come back to my actual text of the letter I will write to her, continuing on from where I left off:

As you know, [the procedure and House affairs committee] can always be seized with questions relating to matters of privilege at any time, which can serve to disrupt pre-planned study schedules. Two such matters have been debated in the House of Commons just this past week.

I would be grateful [to you] if you could convey a response to my questions herein to the Clerk of [the procedure and House affairs committee] for the information of [all] committee members. You are, of course, under no obligation to make reference to this letter.

Then I go on and say some other stuff. I may as well finish it off here:

On the matter of your offer to meet in-person, I would like to take you up on your offer in the short-term, however the unpredictable but largely-continuous...meeting schedule [of the procedure and House affairs committee] does not presently allow me to commit in advance to being available to meet you at a particular time. That said, my staff are happy to work with yours to find a time that would work with both our schedules on short notice.

I think I'm going to add a little note in there to her as well to say that I'm also available to meet during off weeks because, unlike many members of this committee—most notably yourself, Mr. Chair—I don't have a riding that is far, far away. Perth feels like it's a million miles from Ottawa, but it's actually a one-hour drive from wherever you're sitting right now, if there's no traffic. I could come in and meet with the minister if she's in Ottawa. As a minister, she might be here during the break week.

Anyway, that was what I said to her.

As I was going through this, a thought occurred to me regarding the—

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I'm kind of merging the two. I can understand why my friend might be confused, but I was talking about the Liberal election. The Trump election plays into this too; there is a merging of the thoughts. I can appreciate where I'm maybe not being as clear as I need to be when I'm talking about mandates and newly elected people.

Thank you for that, Mr. Reid. I will be on guard to try to be clear in my differentiation.

No, it's quite the opposite. Again, I'm talking about the beginning, which almost seems like it was a different party or, at the very least, a political lifetime ago. Really, we're only talking about weeks, not even months, since they suddenly became as vicious as they are now. There had been indications. We saw things, such as, for example, Bill C-33 and motion number six. This stuff was already there. It just hadn't burbled to the top.

In reference to the Star editorial, I'll read it again. It's good for the government. Where is it...?

Sorry, Chair. I'm not trying to deliberately delay.

It says:

This jibes with an Ekos poll that found that, after decades of erosion, public trust in government spiked after Trudeau’s election win.

I was commenting on how well they played that out, just like a symphony, for days, weeks, and what became months. It looked like it was going to be years. It was politics at its best.

Again, I remember some of those heady days. Our honeymoon didn't last quite as long as this one did, and most don't, but, boy, the government just played it brilliantly. I give the government full marks. There was nary a stumble. Where there's a stumble, a picture of the Prime Minister underneath a headline that attacked the government, just like the Star editorial, takes a lot of the sting away.

This is the only thing that has really stuck in a big way. There have been some other things.

We should have known when we saw motion six. That was unreal. It practically suspended every right the opposition had. The only saving grace was that there was a time limit, but that doesn't change the fact that for a period of months the government was about to give itself spectacular omnipotent powers to run roughshod, at will, over the opposition.

If anybody thinks I'm being a little histrionic in that, go take a look at motion six. Find out what ministers could do by declaration alone. I haven't visited it in a while, and I stand to be corrected. I believe a minister could actually end debate by a declaration. If that's not accurate, there was a similar application. It was, like, unbelievable, let alone having it come from a Liberal government, let alone a Trudeau-led Liberal government.

The only thing that caused the government to back away was the explosion on the floor of the House, when there were accusations of people being manhandled. That brought everything to an acute head. The Prime Minister had to apologize. To his credit, he said that he would take action to ensure that the tone changed and that we would see that action imminently.

To the Prime Minister's credit, within a couple of hours, the government House leader, who I referred to earlier in terms of his respectful request of this committee, Mr.Dominic LeBlanc, rose in his place and announced that the government was withdrawing motion six. That took all the sting out of it. That took the air out of it. Everybody calmed down. That did give us a chance to get back on track.

Most of us thought, okay, that's the last we'll ever see of that ugliness, because even Harper, in his wildest dreams, would never have suggested that he take that kind of power—raw power—and remove what little rights the opposition still had. Lo and behold, motion six finds itself in a reincarnated form known as a “discussion paper”. It's not quite as ugly as motion six, but it is politically ugly in its own right in terms of what it suggests the government would like to do to the nuisance opposition.

To continue with the editorial:

Canadians embraced Trudeau's positive vision and took hope from early signals. His openness with the media, for instance, is a clear improvement over his predecessor.

It was a pretty low bar, which he more than cleared, I will say, but it was a low bar.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Yes, my friend would like that. There is a point at which you and I will honestly separate, and that's why democracy is so wonderful: to allow us to do that.

I had to learn. That's why I'm passing on this free.... I have the scars to show how I learned this. When the new government comes in, for the longest time you're going to be elbowed, you're going to be reminded, because it's the comparison that makes the case. Over time I learned to stop being so sensitive about it, certainly stopped defending every little attack, and stopped owning it. As people took their shots, I wished I'd had a BlackBerry then: it would have been easier to disappear into, but as I said, suddenly there were very important documents that needed very close attention, and that's all I looked at until it was done. I waited until it was done and then I came back.

That's how I got through it. I strongly urge my colleagues to do that in the Conservative caucus, especially those of you who weren't here. Every time you say something, you take a piece of ownership of it. Don't do that. You still have lots of room to take credit for the things you want to brag about that the previous government did and, when there's any criticism flying around, get your head down. There's nothing to gain in defending a majority government that just went down in flames. In this matter I know whereof I speak, truly.

We shall, then, continue.

while we don't endorse the opposition

I keep repeating that part. I keep doing that, and it's not good.

While we don't endorse the opposition's histrionics, we do share its cynicism regarding the government's proposals. Some of them are clearly designed to make life easier for a majority government. And that is unacceptable.

Keep in mind the changes they want to make.

We haven't reached the part where there's a reference to the fact that the changes they want to make, they want to make unilaterally.

Any majority government like Mr. Trudeau's controls the House of Commons, which means it holds almost all the parliamentary marbles. It can pass the bills it wants, and cut off debate when it suits it. It typically also uses its majority to control committees, further ensuring that little gets in the way of its legislative agenda.

Again, Chair, I harken back to the fact that in two instances this committee acquiesced to the request of the government that we focus on something that was important to it. We did so willingly. The first time—and again I won't go to great lengths, but you'll recall—the former government House leader, Dominic LeBlanc, came here and very respectfully laid out his case, laid out what his government was looking for and asked us to join in making it a priority, and spelled out some of the things they were hoping our committee could achieve.

Within days, we were doing that work, resulting in a report that we all supported, which went to the House. You, Chair, presented it to the House on our behalf. That was without the government having to use power once—nothing. It didn't even have to look askance. It didn't even have to hint that if we didn't do what it wanted, there was going to be trouble. There was none of that. I was there.

I've been on this committee in other parliaments. I know the difference, and I know you do, Chair. Normally when a majority government, a new government, especially when it's a big change, comes in, there is some recognition on the part of the opposition that it won the election. We get reminded of that only 60 seconds of every minute.

To hear some of the government members tell it, you would think our purpose in being here is just to disrupt everything they want to do. Yet I can point to consistent evidence that we have done exactly the opposite, that this committee has worked well together even to the point where we're in this pitched battle, and yet Mr. Reid and you and everybody else was doing what they could shuffling around, coughing, looking at their shoes, to give me an opportunity to get in from the traffic and get in my place. That's how much residual goodwill exists in this committee. Even in this kind of environment that decency is still there. It gives you just a little bit of an idea of how effective we can be when we're all working together.

We've done some good work. I asked last night, and I ask again, if anybody can show me where this committee has been anything other than positive and moving forward and trying to work in tandem with the government, other than on Bill C-33 when it dropped that on the floor. I won't revisit that in detail, but you will recall, Chair, that it disrupted all the work we were doing because it was disrespectful of the committee's work. It basically made it a make-work project. It tabled a bill without waiting for our input into it.

This government promised that committees were going to matter, that it was going to respect them, and it was going to respect their input. I can't think of a better example than to reinforce the fact that within days—not motions, and squabbling, and off to the subcommittee, and fighting there, and taking forever, and us not wanting to give the government the benefit of succeeding at implementing its agenda—none of that was there. The evidence is in what we did. I will stand by the evidence that has to be there in Hansard to show how we approached this.

That's what the government can achieve just by asking. That's before we even get to the all but omnipotent powers of a majority government in the Canadian parliamentary system.

When The Globe and Mail makes reference to it having its majority on committees further ensuring that little gets in the way of its legislative agenda, that's again at the point where it has to actually use that power to force the opposition to follow in a direction it doesn't want to go.

Such was the goodwill on this committee. None of that was needed. In fact, we were quite pleased to do the work, because it did reflect some of the values and priorities coming out of the NDP caucus and, I suspect, also out of the Conservatives. We had lots of good reasons to want to do it, but my point in saying that is to show that when this committee, because of the nature of the work we do, is in non-partisan mode, which is probably 80% to 90% of the time, we do good work.

When The Globe and Mail makes reference to the amount of control that a government has at committee, that's before we even get to the part where it can get things done just by asking nicely.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

I haven't heard any evidence that Bill C-33 is there, so we're unlikely to suspend before 11:00.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

On a point of order, Mr. Chair, just regarding the times we're going to suspend and reconvene at, our plan had been to go from 9:00 until 11:00 a.m. today. There had been talk of suspending early at 10:00 if Bill C-33 is in the House. I'm not sure if Bill C-33 is there or not. There was some talk about that. That's the first thing I want to clarify. Is Bill C-33 there?

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

It has come up. There seems to have been very limited coverage. If you're looking for media coverage of it, you normally find it mentioned as a subsidiary item in articles about how—because we're a collegial committee here, I always want to put these things in non-partisan terms—it has been suggested that it's inappropriate that there be cash for access fundraisers, or at least that's how they're characterized. The minister is present. You pay something close to the maximum allowable contribution and then have the opportunity to have some face time with the minister. That's the practical impact of those. The government has been responding to it and saying it's taking action.

The Liberal Party on its own has said that it is now going to make public about 48 hours in advance, I think, where the events are occurring: the dates, times, and locations of any meetings at which this kind of interaction is taking place. That's what gets the coverage—their response—but sort of hidden in the middle of the article will be something else about the minister saying that she intends to introduce legislation to deal with this. Typically, further up in the article, it's mentioned that they won't be changing this contribution limit, which is obviously one of the ways in which it has been suggested one could deal with this issue. She mentioned in a fairly recent article about a week ago that the intention was to introduce that legislation this spring.

I was quite surprised by that. It was actually drawn to my attention by our party's chief fundraiser, who said, “Hey, what's up with this?” He phoned up and said that I was her critic so I was to find out whether that was happening. Former senator Irving Gerstein was the one who called me. I actually told him, “Irving, it's not happening in the spring, but look, I'll go and confirm it with the minister.” I went over to her desk and asked her, and she said, “Oh, yes, it's this spring.” Then she reminded me of an earlier meeting where she had told me. I had simply misheard. It hasn't received much publicity, but it is intended for this spring, absolutely.

At first I thought it seems precipitous and hasty, and then I thought it through and realized that to get this piece of legislation through so that it has royal assent by December 31, given the fact that the schedule over in the other place does not always move with alacrity, I actually can see why she would want to have it in the House and, for that matter, entirely through this House by the end of June.

There are other scenarios I can imagine. I have thought of this. In fact, I was going to raise this. It's not in the letter, but it's a good question that all of us on this committee have to think about, which is, given the amount of material we have before us, whether we're going to have to consider having this committee sit during the summer. Now, that doesn't deal with every issue. It doesn't deal with something that has to go through this committee and then back into the House by June.

If, for example, her goal, and I'm not saying this is her goal.... Well, let's take Bill C-33 as an example. I think it is her goal to have Bill C-33 through this committee, back in the House, and then through third reading in the House by the end of the spring. I haven't asked her that, but I assume that's her intention. Maybe it's the House leader I should ask.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Thank you.

Yes, thanks for at least thinking about that. You have Bill C-33. It's got to go through second reading, and then it will get referred to this committee. It is conceivable that the bill will wind up before we've gone into the summer, and that could be an issue. I'm not saying that will happen, but it certainly is feasible.

I assume that the House is going to vote in favour of Bill C-33 at second reading, which inevitably sends it back to us, and that creates an issue, given the fact that we're talking about the Standing Orders right now.

There's a third piece of legislation from same minister that is highly relevant. Minister Gould indicated some time back—about a month back or perhaps a bit longer—that she would be producing election finance legislation to change aspects of how financing is done. We don't know all the things that are going to be included in this legislation. We do know certain things that won't be contained and certain things that will, but we don't know all the parameters of the legislation. I only know what has been reported in the media. It will not, for example, change the donation limit currently set at $1550—or $1500 set for inflation, which puts it currently a $1550.

It will deal with a requirement for the public reporting of fundraising events at which a minister is present. The logic there for the advance notification is that this does not serve... I think I'm characterizing Minister Gould's comments correctly when I say this means that fundraising events at which a person has paid, let's say for the sake of argument, $300 for a ticket, will not involve confidential access to a minister who is present. You still get access to a minister, but you wouldn't get access that the public doesn't know about until after the fact. You'd be able to know in advance.

My understanding is that the Liberal party has recently adopted this approach voluntarily, and, indeed, it looks like the attempt is to take a process that the Liberal party has adopted and codify it to make it required of all parties. Now, of course, only the Liberal party has ministers at the moment, to state the obvious, so I have a suspicion that this would also involve all members of Parliament. Anyone who is paying for attendance at any event at which the MP is present will be covered—except that they say purely local events won't covered. I don't know how they're going to do that exactly. Maybe it depends on whether the funds are going to the riding association or to the party. That's not clear to me. At any rate, last week I saw a newspaper article saying that this legislation was coming forward this spring and that the minister was in the process of consulting with the other parties about it.

I had somehow managed to get the idea in my head incorrectly that this legislation would be coming forward this autumn, not this spring. So I took the newspaper article and buttonholed the minister in the House, sat down beside her, and started chatting. It was meant to be brief chat. It wound up being a very awkward period for me because, almost immediately after I went over to sit with her, Kevin Lamoureux stood up, and I was in the camera shot. He proceeded to give a talk that was harshly critical of my House leader, so I had to sit on the floor and try to keep my head hidden behind a desk, but none of this is Minister Gould's fault. It was just bad timing on my part.

What she said was, yes indeed, she was planning on introducing that legislation this spring. She indicated that she had already consulted with one of the parties and was trying to line up a meeting with representatives of my party. I know that meeting hasn't happened yet, because I would be present at it as the relevant critic, but she then went on to lay out a bit of her timeline. She said, “You know, I don't control the times on these things exactly; it has to go to cabinet for approval.” I'm assuming that the cabinet process she has to go through is like the cabinet process that governments in the past had. It usually goes to the cabinet committee first, which meets and approves it, and then a presentation is made by the chair of the cabinet committee with the relevant minister present. Then if it gets approval, it comes back and is introduced in the House—but that happens this spring.

It could be that it will simply be introduced this spring, have first reading, and not get second reading until the summer is over. We did not get into discussing that, and I think in all fairness she doesn't know. However, in the event that it does, we could find that piece of business before this committee. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that this item of business would be before this committee this spring, and I say that for the following reason, because as a piece of legislation, it has to go through this House and then through the Senate. As you know, one of the complaints that the government has been making is that the Senate does not move with alacrity. Indeed, this has been a complaint of all governments through the entire history of our confederation. If you go back and read debates from the 1860s about what it was like before Confederation, we had the Legislative Council of the Province of Canada, and you realize that they had the same complaints about that body too. So this has been going on since time immemorial, or at least since we have had Hansard records.

There is a legitimate worry that what would happen is something such as this: if this committee and the House don't deal with this particular item until the autumn, and the House comes back in mid-September, we will deal with this item of business, this new piece of financial legislation, through the remainder of the month of September. Yet if we don't start dealing with it in this committee before September, it would be optimistic to hope to get it out of the House of Commons before the end of September. It would be hard to imagine its getting out before the October break, the Thanksgiving break. So we're talking now of mid-October when it would come back. It would go to the Senate, and the chances of it getting that legislation through so that it would get royal assent by the end of 2017 are pretty remote. That means the financial rules, which are set on the calendar year, will remain in effect for all of 2018. So I can see her wanting to get this legislation through promptly, which means that it could wind up on our agenda in June as well. That is a realistic scenario. So you now have three pieces of legislation all coming from Minister Gould to us, all of which have to be dealt with by us this spring.

I should take a step backwards and concede the point that, in terms of the recommendation we are making vis-à-vis the as-yet-unwritten legislation that will respond to the review of the Canada Elections Act, it's not a legislative process that we're talking about. It is a practice that has arisen in this place to deal with elections act reform. So we're not trying to get legislation through by the end of June; we're trying to get a study and recommendations through, which then lead to her introducing legislation in the autumn. She was quite clear about that in her March 10 meeting here. She's not talking about introducing that piece of legislation this June; she's talking about having the summer free to design, with her officials, legislation that conforms as best it can with our recommendations. However, she has the right as a minister of the crown to disagree with some of the recommendations and say either, “I think the CEO was right to recommend X, while the committee recommended not X, but Y”, or “I disagree with both of them and I'm introducing something else.”

It is very likely, and I'm certain that this is the case, as it has been the practice in the past, that she would take our reports, read them thoroughly, as I'm confident she does, and would go with her officials to meet with the Chief Electoral Officer and the officials at Elections Canada, presumably on more than one occasion, to discuss whether what she's drafting in response seems workable from their point of view. Actually, there is no Chief Electoral Officer at the moment, so it would be the acting CEO.

I can see how that would take a whole summer. That's really easy to imagine. So she comes back, the House reconvenes around the 8th, 9th, or 10th, somewhere in that range, and she could introduce that bill at first reading immediately. In fact, I'm virtually certain that this is exactly what would happen with that piece of legislation. She went through with us on March 10...a discussion of some of the things that she would try to achieve. It's clear that she was hoping to get that legislation through the House and the Senate, and to have royal assent by December 31 so this, too, could be in effect—although, in all fairness, when it comes to that legislation, actually having it in effect is not as important as having a certain message that it will come into effect. If Elections Canada can be confident that it is going to go through, the legislative process on this issue being generally non-partisan.... I think that, on a technical piece of legislation like this, it's likely to be largely non-partisan. The things we would be doing would be picking up on technical errors. We are now reviewing a piece of legislation designed by the minister and her staff in co-operation with the CEO, after we've done a review and after the CEO has done a review. Presumably, the really big bugs have been worked out of the system by that point, so hopefully we can proceed with more speed here, and in the Senate.

That would hopefully make it possible for this to move through with some speed, but we still have to deal with it. It still has to happen. We have no control whatever over how things happen in the other place. Complicating all of this a bit, as I mentioned, is the fact that we don't currently have a CEO. We do have a CEO hiring process under way. It's a public hiring process, which moves at its own speed, so there is an additional wrinkle there in terms of how fast the response of the CEO will be. Not having a permanent CEO, and then having a new CEO presumably by some point midway through this process, will not speed up the adoption by the Chief Electoral Officer and Elections Canada of the recommendations made here, which encourages us to have greater speed. Certainly, I would think that no interim CEO would be comfortable putting something into effect, knowing that it doesn't have the approval of someone who will be appointed shortly and who will be the boss. If I am on the staff of Elections Canada, I would not want that person to walk in and discover that there have been a bunch of faits accomplis that the new boss might not approve of, which have been done, in a sense, in order to push that person into losing their decision-making authority over those changes. Those are some of the practical issues that exist.

With all of this in mind, all of these problems that relate back to the Minister of Democratic Institutions and the workload that she has given us, I drafted a letter to the minister, asking her how she ought to deal with this and also encouraging her to consider dealing with some of her colleagues in the cabinet to cause them to shift the direction they are taking with regard to the high importance they are placing on reviewing the Standing Orders by a June deadline so that we can deal, in as businesslike a manner as possible, with the matters that we were dealing with and that we are going to have to deal with—the workload that was already great in margin and that has grown, depending on how you measure it, threefold since that time.

This is a letter being sent off with today's date on it. I'll just read it verbatim. I think it would be helpful for members of the committee to see exactly where I'm coming from so that they'll know what she is receiving. If they want to communicate with her—either because they agree with what I'm saying, or because they disagree—they can do so. I think that makes this germane to what we're doing here.

Dear Minister Gould,

Thank you for your invitation, sent to my office on April 3, 2017, for an in-person meeting. I appreciate your regular and continuing openness to meeting with me to discuss your portfolio and matters pertaining to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs (PROC). Both of those things are germane to my letter today.

During your last appearance before PROC, on March 9, 2017—

Mr. Chair, I have to stop here. I think I've been saying all along “March 10” for Minister Gould's appearance. It was March 9. That was a Thursday. March 10 was the date for Minister Chagger's discussion paper being introduced and Mr. Simms' motion. That's right.

I'm going to make a note to myself, because I want to return to the dates on those. I think there's a point of significance that I had not realized earlier in our discussion, which I think helps explain some of the problem we're facing here. Sometimes the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and it can lead to problems further down the line. I think that may have occurred here through no individual fault.

Okay. To go back to the letter:

During your last appearance before [the Procedure and House Affairs committee] on March 9, 2017, you asked the committee to provide our next report on the Chief Electoral Officer's report entitled, An Electoral Framework for the 21st Century: Recommendations From the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada Following the 42nd General Election—

I then give a quote from the minister about reporting back, as follows:

—“before the House rises for the summer, preferably by May 19” so that you would “be well positioned to advance some significant reforms that would improve the electoral process for Canadians”, namely through legislation that you hope to introduce this coming autumn.

So far, PROC has spent 16 meetings to produce two reports on the Chief Electoral Officer's report. When you asked [the procedure and House affairs committee] on March 9 for a further report by May 19, [the procedure and House affairs committee] would normally have had 12 additional meetings in which to prepare that report. [Four] of those 12 meeting times have elapsed without further progress on the report having been made.

Seeing as I'm sending this letter off today, I'm going to have to change that to five. Let's see: is that right? Yes, today's meeting would be five. I'll continue:

At this time, it is uncertain how many meetings [the procedure and House affairs committee] will be able to devote to this report, or whether the committee will be able to provide you with a report at all by the date you identified.

I won't repeat my comments. I'll simply draw attention to them again, which is that I already think that we have to accept that May 19 is a lost cause, although I think June is still achievable for a report back to the minister if we do some triaging.

To go back to the letter:

This uncertainty is on account of events precipitated by your cabinet colleague, the Government House Leader, [Bardish Chagger] on and since March 10, 2017, the day after your last visit to [the procedure and House affairs committee]. ...These events have brought to a halt the committee's ability to work on the Chief Electoral Officer's report.

The letter continues:

In light of the situation presently unfolding in [the procedure and House affairs committee], I am writing to ask you whether you could give [our committee] indications on a number of questions, namely:

1. Whether the May 19 date for a report is flexible;—

I actually think the answer to that from her was that yes, it was—that it was a preferred date—but I'm hoping her response would give some indication of the degree to which there's flexibility and at what point she has what I think of as a drop-dead timeline.

For example, you mean to go and cast your ballot at a certain time. You mean to do it in the mid-afternoon and something comes up—you have to take the kids to day care and then something else comes up—but we all know that there's a point at which the polls close. That's your drop-dead deadline for voting. Well, there's a drop-dead deadline for getting this thing back to her. I'm hoping to elicit a response as to what that is. Or if she wishes to give a more nuanced response about which parts should come first—if there are going to be multiple drop-dead deadlines—that would be just fine.

That was number one. I'll continue:

2. Whether you would still accept a report before the House rises for the summer, as you indicated;

3. What alternatives you might suggest in order to provide you with feedback in time to be considered for your fall legislation;

4. Your view of how [the procedure and House affairs committee] should prioritize the business it has in front of it, or will have in front of it, to the extent that those items conflict. Those items being:

a. the CEO recommendations report;

b. Bill C-33, which...[at time of this writing] is at second reading stage in the House;

c. your planned bill this spring on [the financing of political parties]; and

d. the on-going discussion over proposed changes to the House of Common Standing Orders, based on [the] discussion paper released by the Government House Leader on March 10, 2017, and presently subject to a motion calling for a report to be completed by June 2, 2017.

As you know—

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Yes, that makes a lot of sense actually.

If Bill C-33 comes up Thursday, I will probably suspend for the time that bill is in the House, because everyone on this committee should be in the House for that. We're the ones who will deal with that bill.

Thank you, Mr. Reid.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Right. And that bill is up in the House at what time? Does anybody know? Does anybody have an idea when Bill C-33 is up in the Commons on Thursday? Is it 10 a.m.?

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

All right, nothing tripped. Presumably when we're over in West Block, we will have fewer of these sorts of issues.

At any rate, returning to the subject at hand, the cycle is to go through the Chief Electoral Officer's review, our recommendations on the CEO's review, and from there move to the minister then designing legislation.

The ever-vigilant Rachel Aiello, who is sitting over at the media desk right now, along with her colleague Laura Ryckewaert, has written a number of articles for The Hill Times about the progress being made on that file. It's slow progress, but that's the nature of a detailed discussion on detailed legislation.

Although there is a minister responsible, as there must be under our Constitution, this one statute, unlike all other statutes in Canada, is not dealt with by the minister and his or her public servants working on developing the first draft of legislation internally and then revealing it. Rather, we assume that essentially the people who would fulfill the role normally fulfilled by those public servants is this committee. When we act collegially and as a whole, we are collectively fulfilling the role that the minister has in terms of providing material for new elections legislation.

That wasn't the whole basis, but it was part of the basis for the objection that a number of people had—Mr. Christopherson most volubly—on the subject of Bill C-33, which popped out before we'd finished our review.

We have a process that was violated by introducing Bill C-33 in the manner in which it was introduced. That is without regard to the issue of the content of Bill C-33, to which I think Mr. Christopherson had less in the way of objection. I know certainly that was true for me. While I don't agree with everything in Bill C-33, I do think that the way in which it was introduced, too early in the process, was itself an issue.

It was introduced in December. That was too early. However, in all fairness, there's comes a point at which it is too late to put in place some of the changes that need to be made to the Canada Elections Act, because it just takes time to implement some of these systems.

That, of course, was the very same issue that existed with regard to the electoral reform legislation. It was always a question of whether we could we get a new system in place in time for the 2019 election, given the amount of time it takes to do all the different things that would have had to be done on that issue.

I'm aware that we're not discussing electoral reform legislation here. I use this merely because it is an analogy that I am very familiar with from having sat on the electoral reform committee for a number of months. I got the chance to ask the Chief Electoral Officer and also the former Chief Electoral Officer, Mr. Jean-Pierre Kingsley, quite detailed questions about the amount of time it takes to engage in various processes that would be engaged were we to change to a new electoral system. Some of the changes they pointed to, some of the ones that take the longest, are not, strictly speaking, relevant. They're not relevant at all to the kinds of changes to the Canada Elections Act being contemplated here. The longest and most complicated was undoubtedly the 20 to 24 months required to engage in a redistribution. That was the hard limit, the outer limit that they faced.

Then I asked them a series of questions at the various meetings of the electoral reform committee and also of this committee. I asked both those gentlemen about other issues that might arise: designing ballots, designing manuals, and so so. These issues, while they are less time-consuming than that of the actual electoral redistribution, are the areas in which we see direct analogies to what is going on with the proposed changes to the Canada Elections Act.

That takes some time to implement. Everything, of course, has to be prepared by Elections Canada for distribution to all 338 of our constituencies, some of which are quite remote. Any new procedure has to be worked through, and an education process has to happen—all before the writ is dropped—with one returning officer from each riding. They then, of course, during the writ period or in the immediate period leading up to it, have to educate many deputy returning officers and poll clerks, so that this can all be executed seamlessly in literally tens of thousands of polling stations across the country.

Not every procedure has to be executed at every polling station. Some are done only at, for example, the 338 locations where advance polls are counted, or the smaller number of locations at which ballots are being mailed out for those who are voting overseas and so on. There is a lot of work. It's all being done in parallel, and it all takes time.

With these considerations in mind, Minister Gould approached this committee on March 10 and asked us to try to wrap up our work by June. She actually said preferably by May 19. This is referring to our work on the Canada Elections Act. I guess it depends who you're asking, how difficult it would be to accomplish this.

Mr. Chair, in speaking of The Hill Times, you indicated that we've picked the easiest things and have already dealt with them, and we're actually getting into the more difficult work. You didn't say the following, but it implies that the more time-consuming work—in trying to get through the remaining areas of the Canada Elections Act that we haven't yet dealt with—is still to come.

My own view is that we are getting educated and are therefore building up a body of expertise that allows us as a group to move more quickly, so we might actually make some unexpected progress. Those are my public remarks, which have been published in The Hill Times.

Additionally, my private thoughts have been that we also could go through a triage process, in which we say here are the things that really need to be studied by the committee. There may be other things about which we can say, if we don't get to this, it's actually not as critical. This allows us potentially to deal in more depth with some of the areas in the Elections Act and not others, or deal with some in more detail and others in less detail.

The reason I say this is that we are confronted by deadlines that are increasingly difficult to meet. The minister recognized at the time—I don't have her remarks in front of me, but I hope to get them and bring them back to the committee and share them with you in greater precision, because what I like about her is that she is very precise in her thoughts. You have clearly defined deadlines to work towards, and that's a valuable asset when one is trying to deal with the problem we ultimately have of limited time, limited human resources, and an important area of subject matter. She actually went off, saying we have x number of items to deal with subsidiary to our review of the Elections Act. We have, ideally, from her point of view, May 19 as the deadline.

I think we'd have to concede that the May 19 deadline could not be met by this committee under any circumstances. If we were, for the sake of argument, Mr. Chair, to resolve to cease all activity on the matter of the Standing Orders and set it aside until after the review of the Canada Elections Act were done—something I actually think would be the sensible way to go—and we were to just stick with our scheduled meetings, we'd have, of course, a two-week break beginning.... I guess we'd get one meeting in on Thursday, we'd then have a two-week break, and then we would reconvene and it would be May. It does take some time, typically two meetings, to get the actual report written, as opposed to putting together the recommendations.

So getting the report written and out the door to the House by May 19.... What have we got? We'd have four meetings I think before May 19. It might be six. No, I think it's four, Mr. Chair, and two of those would be eaten up with something that is not really adding to our subject matter—designing the report. I think the May 19 deadline is already not achievable.

She also said, “but I could live with June”. I think that's what we're talking about. Getting that done by June would involve a very substantial amount of work. That is the first item we have to deal with.

A second item we have to deal with, Mr. Chair, is Bill C-33 itself, which deals with some of the same subject matter. What the minister now has to do when she's designing her legislation is to work around Bill C-33, and it's by no means certain that Bill C-33 itself exhaustively with the sections of the act it is amending.... It was designed to deal with certain problems that the government felt had been introduced to the Canada Elections Act by the previous bill that had been introduced in the wake of this committee's hearings in the last Parliament, that is to say the Fair Elections Act.

The way Minister Monsef described this was that it would be dealing with what she characterized as the unfair features of the Fair Elections Act. I think from her point of view that was a sincere characterization, because I noticed in looking at Bill C-33 that there were aspects of the Fair Elections Act that it did not repeal. That suggests to me that Minister Monsef and the whole cabinet, which I assume had to agree to this bill, felt these were fair aspects of the Fair Elections Act. This deals, for example, with a number of areas regarding overseas voters and there are other areas as well that have been left intact, but it went through in an order that is different from the order in which we're approaching things.

The new piece of legislation would, presumably, have to be crafted to take into account the areas of the Elections Act that have been dealt with in the Chief Electoral Officer's report and have become the subject matter of the reports this committee is working on, but that have not been dealt with through Bill C-33.

There's the question—which we haven't really dealt with yet—of what we do with areas that the Chief Electoral Officer's report does deal with and that have also now been dealt with by Bill C-33. That's possibly one place area where you could engage in the triage exercise and just say, look, given our limited time, given the fact that the government has already dealt with this in Bill C-33, maybe we should just excise these areas from our study. That would allow us to somewhat compress the time we need to go through the Elections Act.

Here you are, the minister has got the new law she's working on, Bill C-33, which will go before the Commons this Thursday. If I might add, Mr. Chair, this raises a point that is of some concern to me. I think the hours we are scheduled to meet on Thursday may overlap with the period when that bill is before the Commons. I'm not sure that's correct, but given that Thursday's hours have been changed—

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

I have a couple of closing points that are mostly administrative.

Elizabeth May mentioned a point about the bells being for 10 minutes in at Westminster. Just for your interest, one thing they have there is an apartment building for all the MPs. They have bells in the apartment building, so you can go back to your apartment, have your 8-minute bells, and still get to Westminster.

Tomorrow, as you know, in the House of Commons, we have caucus in the morning, and then it's a special day. There's a speech. The only other thing that day is question period, which will end at 4:15. We will reconvene—“unsuspend”—at 4:30, barring anything unusual, 15 minutes after question period finishes.

Then, for Thursday, once again, hopefully we'll have come to some agreement before then, but if we haven't, we will meet from 9 o'clock to 11 o'clock, with the caveat I mentioned earlier. If Bill C-33 comes before Parliament on Thursday—and for any time it does—we'll suspend so that this committee, which that bill is going to come to, can hear that debate.

Last, remember that the buses are running for one half hour from now to take you to the parking lots.

It being 12:02 a.m., we will suspend until 4:30 p.m. tomorrow.

[Arnold Chan, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

Thank you, Minister.

I really want to express my appreciation for your being here today.

I want to follow up on the line of questioning that my colleague David Graham had started with respect to timelines. You specifically mentioned a May 19 deadline. The committee has received some information that there may be other substantive work that we need to consider as well. I'm following this line of questioning simply because I'm trying to figure out a process for dealing with what might suddenly be a very heavy workload for all of us. I want to understand. Is your deadline of May 19 when you want us to have completed the review of the Chief Electoral Officer's report and to report that back to the House?

That is my first line of questioning. My second piece is with respect to Bill C-33. Of course, we have not yet received that piece of legislation from the House for review. Would it be helpful for us to potentially prereview it on the assumption that it will come to us fairly intact?

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

The other thing too—sorry, Ms. Kim, I didn't mean to exclude you in this conversation—is that it also leads into the fact that one of the other things that Bill C-33 would do is to empower the CEO to be more involved with the educational aspect and publicizing some of the facts about voting. I guess that leads in well to allowing young people to register to vote. I commend you for that.

Ms. Kim.

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Burlington, ON]

I also agree with that. I think it is very important. That's why in Bill C-33 we are proposing measures within that legislation to make the voter identification card one piece that could serve as a piece of identification in future elections. I think it's incredibly important.

I'm sure many of us in this room and in this Parliament have stories to tell of people who were turned away at the polls because they didn't have proper identification. We know that about 120,000 Canadians cited their reason for not voting as the lack of proper identification.

I think it's one way to ensure that people who have the right to vote are able to vote, and can do it as efficiently as possible.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Minister, for being here.

I want to go to Bill C-33, if I may, and focus on the substance of it. I appreciate the other parts if it, including the tabling, as Mr. Christopherson brought up. I appreciate Mr. Christopherson's comments about that, and yours as well, but I do want to talk about what this is.

To me, there are two parts to it. There are things in there that we talked about when we campaigned and in terms of what we would do as part of the mandate letter. The other part, if I can try to describe it subtly, is to “untangle the tangly bits” that were left over from the unfair elections act from the last time. I've often described it as being a solution to a problem that never existed.

One of those is the voter information card. I am a huge fan for several reasons. The median age in my riding is high. We have a lot of seniors. It's also a rural area, so a lot of people lack the identification required for addresses and so on and so forth. I'm sure a lot of the opposition would say, well, you have to have a certain amount of identification to vote. A certain amount of identification is required. That I understand. But by doing that, and by creating so many barriers, and lifting these barriers, to a point where we violated a charter right, which is your right to vote....

The voter information card was essential. Perhaps I could describe it this way. Many seniors would take this card and put it on their fridge or somewhere in the kitchen to remind them about voting. They'd rely on that so much to be able to walk into the booth and say, “I want to cast my vote”.

I appreciate that, and I'm wondering if you could comment on that.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair.

Minister, thank you again for your attendance. I also want to thank you for the recent meet-and-greet we had in your office. It's appreciated.

I'll take a brief moment to comment on the process you're offering. I want to say publicly that I am as impressed with the change in approach with regard to the government, your ministry, and the work of this committee, as I was outraged at the way that Bill C-33 was so unceremoniously dumped on us in the House. There was a commitment made that this was going to change, and we're still in the process of getting through that, but I do want to say publicly that I've been very impressed with the attempt by the government members and you to get us back on a positive track, where we are working hand in hand, as you promised in the campaign and as is best for Parliament when we—on this committee in particular—can work that way. I want to say that I'm very impressed.

You continue, however, to load up the agenda of the committee. I want to remind you that it's going to take an even greater effort at coordinating and talking, because you're not the only source of our work. We get it from all over. Some things trump—and I refuse to stop using the word—other things, and that can slow us down on our own well-intentioned agenda. That's still going to be a struggle. There's a lot of work in front of this committee.

Again, I want to emphasize that I was incredibly outraged at what your government did with Bill C-33, and I am as impressed now with the government's recognizing they were wrong and their attempt to make it right. I hope that continues. I look forward to working on this file that is critically important for all of us.

With that, Chair, I would like to give the balance of my time to my colleague Mr. Cullen, who is also our democratic reform critic, sir.

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Minister of Democratic Institutions]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

It's a pleasure to be back just a little over a month from the last time I was here. It's good to see all of you. I'm looking forward to this conversation as well.

Thank you for inviting me to speak to the committee again. I'm pleased to have this opportunity to appear before you today, and I'm happy to contribute to your proceedings to the best of my ability.

Yesterday, we celebrated International Women's Day. I was very proud to have been invited to speak on March 7 at the Daughters of the Vote gala. The Equal Voice organization held the event to highlight the significance of the day. The Daughters of the Vote initiative brought young women aged 18 to 23 to Parliament. They came from each of our 338 federal electoral districts to represent their community and share their vision for Canada. Yesterday, these young women had the opportunity to meet with their MP and sit at their MP's place in the House of Commons.

It was inspiring to see the House full of young women and to look into what the future holds. All of us who have the privilege to serve also have the duty to support and encourage young Canadians to engage in our democracy. In particular, this committee has the unique opportunity to reflect on how to ensure that all Canadians are best prepared and able to participate in civic life. Your study of the CEO report and its recommendations positions you as stewards and champions of the franchise. The Daughters of the Vote who are in Ottawa today, and all Canadians, are counting on your reflections.

This is why I would like to take this opportunity to thank you, specifically, for your work so far on the Chief Electoral Officer's recommendations report. I read with interest your interim report, which was tabled on Monday. I am going to spend more time reviewing it and reflecting on your recommendations as the government considers its response.

I am very happy to see that you have reached a consensus on the key recommendations that are the core of the Chief Electoral Officer's proposed voting services modernization efforts. In addition, you have collectively supported a range of other recommendations, including recommendations to improve the delivery of voting services to non-resident Canadians and enhanced information-sharing authorities to improve the quality of the national register of electors, the latter being something that may come before you for consideration as part of Bill C-33. These are important recommendations that will improve our electoral process.

There was also consensus on many of the Chief Electoral Officer's recommendations related to ensuring an accessible electoral system for electors and candidates with disabilities. Enhancing inclusion as a defining value of our democracy stands high among my priorities for the coming months and years.

I look forward to your upcoming work on the recommendations set out in the Chief Electoral Officer's report.

I'll highlight a few, I hope to hear your thoughts on the issue of the length of the election period and on the polling day, recommendations A21 and A22. These recommendations have implications for the political financing regime and the participation of Canadians in the voting process.

Recommendation A25 would address the question of partisan nominees for poll staff and promises improvements in Elections Canada's recruitment processes. In light of your support for recommendation A1, your view on this recommendation would be informative.

Recommendations A33 and A34 would provide additional tools for the Commissioner of Canada Elections. My mandate letter includes a commitment to enhance Canadians' trust in the integrity of our system, and I would value your thoughts on these recommendations.

Recommendation A39 concerns adjustments to the broadcasting arbitration regime. The way that political parties communicate with Canadians and the nature of media have changed considerably over time. These provisions have hardly been modified in recent years.

Recommendation B9 has a significant impact on gender non-conforming electors. In relation to Bill C-16, I think it warrants consideration, since equality could be ensured in all aspects of the federal government.

Recommendation B15 would affect the process in place to help electors with a disability.

Recommendations B12, B24, B18, B26, B27, and B43 are all related in different ways to the integrity of the process and Canadians' trust in that process. As trust is paramount to the success of any election and the peaceful transfer of power, I would welcome the committee's thoughtful input on these as well.

Finally, recommendation B44 raises the important issue of how we adapt to a fixed-date context for elections in a Westminster system. I would ask the committee, if you think it of merit, to reflect on how this and other recommendations are impacted, and what the challenges and opportunities are in relation to fixed-date elections in the Canadian experience.

All of these recommendations raise a variety of questions that would benefit from the expertise of this committee. They seek ways to keep our electoral laws up to date with the expectations of electors and political actors. Your considerate review of these matters is valuable.

As I noted during my last appearance, my mandate letter includes a commitment to enhance the transparency of fundraising activities. In meeting this commitment, I intend to introduce legislation that makes fundraising events public, and to require additional disclosure of who attends, and when.

We have heard Canadians' concerns in this regard, and we intend to act. I hope to introduce legislation this spring, and if referred to your committee by the House, I would very much appreciate your consideration of the bill and any recommendations you may have.

Of course, there's also Bill C-33. Your work so far on the recommendations report will well position you in considering this bill and its measures to reduce barriers to voting while enhancing the integrity of the electoral process. Bill C-33, I believe, complements the work that you are undertaking with the CEO recommendations.

The road to the 2019 election is getting ever shorter. I am committed, as I know all members of this committee are, to improving our electoral system before the next election to the benefit of all Canadians. To accomplish this goal, Canadians need us to work together. I hope to continue to receive your valuable input to inform the direction of improving our electoral process to make it accessible, efficient, and equitable for voters.

Elections Canada needs sufficient time to implement any changes made to the Canada Elections Act before the next election and would like to be election-ready well in advance of an expected writ. The more time Elections Canada has to prepare, the better.

We must also take into consideration that other legislative changes may be necessary to implement your recommendations.

The development and preparation of this bill, and the important discussions and debates in the House of Commons and Senate, shouldn't be rushed.

To give Elections Canada the time it needs, as well as to give parliamentarians the time they need, my hope would be to introduce legislation before the end of this year that would build on your hard work with respect to the Chief Electoral Officer's recommendations. It is our responsibility to take the time to get this right. It is also our responsibility to get it done. It's what Canadians expect. If the House could have your next report before the House rises for the summer, preferably by May 19, I think we would be well positioned to advance some significant reforms that would improve the electoral process for Canadians.

I am sharing my thinking with the committee because I sincerely want to work together with you. I respect this committee's independence and know the committee will set its own agenda. I hope my remarks today help provide insight to you about my thinking and perspective on the matters before this committee.

Thank you again for inviting me here today. I look forward to working with you on these important issues.

Thank you.

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Minister of Democratic Institutions]

Mr. Speaker, as I said today, it is important that all members of the House and all of Canada's political leaders do everything they can to encourage young Canadians to participate in democracy. What is more, we introduced Bill C-33, which will create a register of young Canadians between the ages of 14 and 17. We know that once young people vote once they vote for the rest of their adult lives.

We are taking steps to get young Canadians involved, and I look forward to working with my colleagues in the House in order to increase youth participation in our democracy.

[Andy Fillmore, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Democratic Institutions]

Mr. Speaker, our government believes that electoral reform, indeed all democratic reform, should be about pursuing the most broad public interest possible. We believed and we continue to believe that potential reforms must be judged by how they will help Canadians. This is why the Prime Minister said that we are not prepared to move forward with something so fundamental as reforming our electoral system without the broad support of Canadians.

Listening to Canadians is absolutely fundamental to our role as parliamentarians, and this is why the government initiated a national consultation process on electoral reform last spring. First, we asked a special all-party committee of the House of Commons to study the issue. The special committee consulted broadly with relevant experts and organizations and conducted a national engagement process that included travelling to every province and every territory and hearing from 196 experts and 567 open-mike participants, and receiving 574 written submissions and more than 22,000 responses to its e-consultation survey.

We also asked MPs to hold their own town halls to hear the views of their constituents, and MPs held 170 such town halls. The government held public meetings in every province and every territory to hear directly from Canadians, and we sought to ensure that every Canadian could have his or her view heard through an innovative online engagement and educational tool that asked Canadians what values and what principles they wanted to see reflected in their voting system. More than 360,000 people in Canada took the time to participate and have their views heard in this important initiative, and I urge all of my fellow MPs to read the report.

As the Minister of Democratic Institutions has noted, it is clear that despite all of these important efforts to listen to Canadians, the broad consensus needed for change of this magnitude simply does not exist. The government respects and is thankful for all those Canadians who came forward and took the time to share their thoughts about our democracy and have their voices heard. When we hold public consultation we have to be ready to listen to what we hear, and we listened to what we heard.

This of course does not put an end to the important work our government is doing to strengthen our elections and build confidence in our democratic institutions, and I would like to highlight three of the government's priorities moving ahead. First, we will be continuing to move forward with Bill C-33 to make it easier for eligible voters to participate in elections as well as to improve electoral integrity. Second, the minister will be working with her colleagues, the Minister of National Defence and the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness to help protect our voting system from the threat of hacking. Third, notwithstanding that Canada already has one of the best-regulated political finance regimes in the world, we will take steps to make fundraising even more open and even more transparent.

These are only a few of the items in the mandate letter of the Minister of Democratic Institutions. Our hard-working colleagues on the procedure and House affairs committee are also doing important work to review the Chief Electoral Officer's recommendations for improving the electoral process.

Clearly, there is still much work to do to further enhance our electoral process, and I look forward to supporting these efforts to reinforce Canada's strong democratic foundations.

Opposition Motion—Commitments Regarding Electoral Reform

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Madam Speaker, I would like to thank all of my colleagues who have taken part in this debate, which is a very important one.

I also thank the hon. member of the opposition for having raised this question. I well know that his dedication to the issue of electoral reform is sincere. I congratulate him for his dedication to the vitality of our democracy. I must say that all of the parties share that dedication.

First of all I would like to acknowledge the fact that, in my riding of Hull—Aylmer, some of my fellow citizens are going to be disappointed by the lack of consensus in Parliament. I would like to take formal note of their disappointment.

I must also say that the issue of electoral reform is not confined to changing the voting system. There are many other important steps we could take.

We need only think back to a few years ago when the previous government tabled Bill C-23, or the Fair Elections Act. We all know that there were numerous measures in that bill. We know there was a fairly big consensus in our Parliament on making certain changes. I would like to raise a few of those changes, and also to congratulate the Minister of Democratic Institutions for having proposed them in her speech.

I shall start by setting forth a few principles.

Canadian democracy, at its core, requires and relies upon our ability to set aside partisan interests and if we disagree to disagree honestly, but to have an honest debate, a respectful debate, especially on matters that affect us all.

As I said, I had a town hall in my riding of Hull—Aylmer. I would like to thank the 35 residents who showed up at this town hall, who joined me at the Université du Québec en Outaouais to discuss this issue. It was a great discussion and it was a valuable one. As I reported to the special committee on electoral reform, “the participants at the consultation held a diverse set of views” and that my constituents wanted to continue to improve and evolve our democracy.

That is a fair discussion of what we had. That is a fair summary of what we had that night. That is why I am so grateful to my constituents for participating. This why I feel there are so many other elements that we can pursue to improve the electoral system.

Let us talk about some of those issues.

As I said, Bill C-33 contains amendments that are intended to make the views of young Canadians heard and to indicate what we want to change in the regulations.

I would like to focus first on one of those measures, which consists of establishing a register of future electors, in which Canadian citizens 14 to 17 years of age may consent to be included. That measure will reflect the recommendation made by the Chief Electoral Officer after the last election, and goes even further.

The Chief Electoral Officer had asked that he be authorized to retain information about persons 16 and 17 years of age so that they could later be added to the national register of electors.

I would note that this measure also reflects one of the recommendations made by the Special Committee on Electoral Reform. If it receives the support of the House, this legislation will be a formidable tool for young Canadians and for Elections Canada.

Elections Canada could then communicate with young people in order to register them in the national register of electors. In addition, students could be registered in advance, in anticipation of their turning 18.

[Arnold Chan, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Humber River—Black Creek has been a mentor to me since I have had the privilege of joining her in the House.

The procedure and House affairs, the committee on which I sit, will be dealing with many things moving forward. As we know, we already have Bill C-33 before the House, and there are important elements in that which would certainly strengthen participation among our citizenry. In the minister's mandate letter are issues with respect to fundraising. That issue will likely emerge in legislation. We already have some of the toughest laws in the world on political fundraising, but this would make them even more stringent. We are going to be bringing forward other changes, for example, with respect to dealing with cybersecurity threats, again which is found in the minister's mandate letter.

Those are important issues that Canadians should have confidence in and will help address and alleviate any of the concerns they have about their participation.

[Arnold Chan, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to join the debate. I want to thank my hon. colleague from Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie for introducing today's motion.

For me, it is always important to join the debate, particularly on issues of democracy. When I became a member of Parliament, I deliberately chose this topic for my inaugural speech in this place. Therefore, it is always a pleasure to come back to this topic, which I hold quite dearly. I have always tried to contribute to this place by having an engaged debate with my colleagues, and to contemplate the many different points of view that are reflected in debates that relate to our democratic practices.

I want to stress to colleagues that, at the core of this issue that is before us, and as part of this government, one of the things that is central for us is our ambitious agenda. We have been very ambitious in terms of our expectations for ourselves and for Canadians. This was also reflected in the aggressive platform we advanced in 2015. I recognize that when we are dealing with something as ambitious as what we were attempting to put forth, sometimes when we get into government there is the practical reality of some of the issues we have to face, and we have to look at the evidence before us and then to reconsider whether there is an appropriate path forward.

I want to get my comments out to those who are concerned about the recent decision we made that there is no path forward with respect to changes to the voting system, and make some recommendations as to how we could do this in a different way, and how we can create a process that depoliticizes what has become a highly politicized conversation.

First and foremost, when we are talking about something as fundamental as changing the voting system, we have to create a timeline and a process that can be achieved. It has to be done in such a way that it makes it less partisan. To some degree I acknowledge that from the government side there was probably a flaw in the process. In trying to do this within one electoral cycle, and the fact that we did it through a process of consultation and a committee of parliamentarians, it has become a highly charged partisan process. That is not helpful in getting to a consensus position on a change to our elections system.

My recommendation for those who continue to advocate for that change would be to do so through a process that takes it out of our hands as politicians and puts it in the hands of a panel of constitutional experts or possibly a constituent assembly, as was suggested for Ontario, and was the process that was followed in 2007, to come up with a binary question, such as, “We have the current system, and this is the other system that we are proposing to consider”, and to do so in such a way that it has a timeline and a time frame that takes it out of our hands as politicians, who have a vested interest in the outcome, whether there is a change or no change. That would be my recommendation for those who are very passionate about changing our voting system.

I have not had the opportunity to catch all of the debates. I sit on the Standing Committee for Procedure and House Affairs, which is charged with looking at changes to the Canada Elections Act. However, prior to us meeting as a committee, I had the opportunity to listen to the Minister of Democratic Institutions, who stressed what I think was a really important point, and which I said at the beginning of my debate: here will be times where we will have strong disagreement on particular points of view, including on the path to move democratic change forward.

The point of this place is to have those kinds of conversations, and from my perspective, we have to distill those kinds of conversations. At the end of the day, when it comes to democratic reform, we should still be driven by what is in the public interest, to the benefit of all Canadians.

I want to do a shout-out to all my colleagues on the procedure and House affairs committee. We generally work very well, on a consensus basis, moving forward on most items, where we are trying to make participation in our democratic process better, and trying to remove barriers to democratic participation, where possible. Of course, there are going to be instances where we do not agree. We have done so. We set those kinds of issues aside. However, we will ultimately come with the lens of what do we have to do and what will it take to make Canadians, or our citizens as a whole, feel that this place and our democracy belong to all of us, not to a particular set of narrow partisan interests.

I apply that particular lens to moving forward on democratic change. My friend from Ajax, the parliamentary secretary for public safety, most aptly noted we have moved forward on Bill C-33 with a number of changes to undo some of the aspects of the so-called Fair Elections Act of the previous Parliament that made it more difficult for citizens to more fully participate in the democratic process. He has already laid out what those elements happen to be, so I will not repeat them, but that is exactly the kind of work we are doing. It is difficult work, but it is work that we have to continue to push forward at all times. It is work that I know the Minister of Democratic Institutions will continue to do on further aspects of strengthening our democracy and looking at continuing challenges to our democratic practices. Whether it is with respect to our fundraising rules or the possibility of external threats to our democratic system, we have to constantly work at it together in order to further strengthen our democracy.

As the member for Ajax noted, many of us held town hall meetings. I held a town hall in the electoral district of Scarborough—Agincourt, where I heard from constituents on a wide range of concerns they had with the democratic system and with the potential changes to our voting regime. Like him, I heard divergent views. There were those who wanted to keep the current system, those who wanted proportional representation, and those who wanted a different system, like a mixed member proportional system that we might see in places like Switzerland or Germany. As we can see, there is a wide range of possible electoral systems that are available to us. The only caution I would add to that is, regardless of what system someone wants to advance, we need to keep it within the context that we operate within a British parliamentary Westminster model.

I am going to table my particular bias. I have always strongly favoured the democratic accountability that each of us as members has to the single member constituency model that we have. A number of the other systems, whether they are blended systems, or proportional representation systems, particularly in closed list systems, would erode that level of accountability if we were to adopt those particular systems. It would be highly detrimental to the system of democracy that we have developed here, following the Westminster model. Regardless of the changes we try to make to make things better and more participatory for our citizens in the democratic process, I have always believed strongly in a system that has myself, as an elected representative, accountable to a specific constituency or body of individuals I have to answer to in an election. That is my bias, and that is the frame from which I come.

At the end of the day, it is that level of accountability that holds us each in this place, and I would be, and continue to be, of the view that model is still one that serves us well.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Mr. Speaker, in the few Liberal speeches we have heard so far, all of their time is being spent talking about Bill C-33, which is a bill that is standing before Parliament at some point for debate. We look forward to that debate, and we will engage on all the issues about which my friend and other Liberals have talked.

The opposition motion today is very explicit. It is about the commitment on electoral reform, changing the voting system. Bill C-33 does not change the voting system. While they are tangentially connected as one is about voting and the other is about voting—

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, I know my colleague is near the end of his time, and I could say mercifully, but he has spoken much about Bill C-33, which Parliament will debate at some point. He knows that as deputy House leader. It will come at some point whenever the Liberals decide to put it on the agenda. However, the opposition motion we are dealing with today is—

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, as I have said in the past, it is always a privilege to be able to rise in this beautiful chamber and express some thoughts. I have a number of opinions I would like to share with members on this specific issue.

There have been a great number of consultations, and no one should question the number of consultations that have taken place. The minister made reference to the fact that it is quite likely one of the most exhaustive consultation processes that we have witnessed in many years, and it has taken all forms. I know the former minister and the parliamentary secretary visited every region, province, and territory in the country where there were town halls, round tables, and all forms of discussions that took place, all in an attempt to get some feedback on an important issue.

We know that the Special Committee on Electoral Reform did an outstanding job at reaching into the different regions of the country. They met publicly over 50 times and heard numerous presentations. I have had the opportunity to take a look, although I have not read the entire report but I am very much aware of the feedback that has been provided on that report. As I said earlier when I was asking a question, I do not underestimate the value of the minister and parliamentary secretary and the work they did or that of the special committee.

I want to go back to an issue that has always been important to me, to reflect what I believe the constituents I represent truly believe on different issues. It is important for me to raise it here because I concur with what was stated in the Prime Minister's mandate letter and given to our new Minister of Democratic Institutions. Let me just read it into the record. The mandate letter states, “A clear preference for a new electoral system, let alone a consensus, has not emerged. Furthermore, without a clear preference or a clear question, a referendum would not be in Canada’s interest.”

I am just going to base this in my discussions within Winnipeg North. I circulated thousands of cards. I put out thousands of phone calls. I am not overestimating or underestimating; it was into the thousands. I had two town halls. They were not overly well attended, but that is as much as I could do in terms of communicating and trying to encourage people to come in. Most important, I met with constituents in different types of fora, and I can honestly say, as the Prime Minister indicated in that mandate letter, there was no consensus coming from my constituents.

Yes, there was a group of constituents who really felt the need to see change. I am hoping that we will be able to achieve some of the changes, maybe in a different way that would at least allow them to feel good about what our current Minister of Democratic Institutions is taking on. There are some wonderful initiatives, and I would challenge members across the way to maybe share some of their ideas, whether on Bill C-33 or on other aspects that the minister has talked about, because there are many other aspects to reforming the system that we can take where we could build that consensus. However, let there be no doubt that there was no consensus.

How do we take all the different ideas and thoughts and formulate them into a referendum question? I do not think there would have been the value that members across the way believe there would have been. Had there been a clear consensus or something that we collectively in this House believed would be a positive option for Canadians to look at and pass through a referendum, then possibly we might have. I do not know. I am not a big fan of referendums myself, unless the need could be well demonstrated. Having said that, if there had been, we might have been able to move forward on this, and I suspect we would have. It is clear that there really was no consensus.

Over 350,000 Canadians participated in MyDemocracy.ca. There were all sorts of discussions. The member across the way asked to what degree we talked with other members. I recall sitting inside this chamber having a discussion with the leader of the Green Party about this. I have had the opportunity to meet with many members to talk about this issue.

At the end of the day, the consultations were in fact extensive. We take some pride in knowing that we did our homework in ensuring that, as much as possible, we reached into our communities, the nation at large, to see if we could come up with something. An honest effort was put forward. At this point in time, it is also important to recognize that there was no consensus. Seeing that, we need to move on and see if there are other issues about which we could talk.

The minister made reference to something that is a real threat to our democracy, and that is cyber-threat through the Internet. The minister talked about what we should do to protect our political parties that have these website, or the Elections Canada websites. Cyber-threats are very real today, and it occurs. We have seen or heard of cyber-threats in other elections in other jurisdictions. We should be talking about that.

The minister made reference to the way in which we raise funds. The opposition has been talking about changes. We have had rules now in place for many years, and it is time we look at ways to ensure there is more openness and transparency. The Prime Minister has said that we can always improve and make things better. Let us take advantage of what the Prime Minister and the Minister of Democratic Institutions have talked about and look at ways we can make it more transparent and open. If one is the leader of the Conservative Party, or the leader of the New Democrats, or a federal minister, or even the Prime Minister, if there are fundraising events, then those events should be made public.

There are many ideas that members across the way could contribute to this debate. I have a number of ideas, many of them come out of discussions from the town halls I have had within my riding.

Bill C-33 will go before PROC at some point. We are being afforded an opportunity to make some positive changes, and I would encourage members to do that.

One idea is having more people engaged. I believe Bill C-33 talks about allowing teenagers to get on the voters list before they turn 18. I see that as a strong positive. Why would we not accept that? If we want more young people engaged, at least allow them to get on the voters list as opposed to waiting for the election to be called or after they turn 18. Opportunities—

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Minister of Democratic Institutions]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise to speak to the motion by the hon. member for Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie.

This is an important debate. Many important affairs of state and issues that matter in the day-to-day lives of Canadians are debated thoughtfully in this chamber, but debating policies and ideas related to Canada's democratic institutions, to the very way we govern ourselves, are foundational to our democracy itself and are among the most important, and they should also be among the least partisan. That is what Canadians expect of their members of Parliament. Canadians want their parliamentarians to work with each other and to co-operate on policy. They want their government to be accountable. They want their MPs to act in the interests of their constituents.

Canadians also believe that major reforms to the electoral system should not be made if they lack broad support. We agree. That is why listening to Canadians is so important to us, to hear from Canadians about their democracy and to do all we can to make sure that as many Canadians as possible can participate in the conversation.

We entered the conversation a year ago with an open mind. We chose to listen to Canadians, to create opportunities for their voices, not ours and not narrow partisan interests, to dominate the discussion.

We said we would strike a parliamentary committee to study electoral reform, and we did. The all-party Special Committee on Electoral Reform was created in June 2016, and over the next six months, it dedicated itself to hearing from Canadians. There were 57 meetings, 196 witnesses, and 567 open-mic participants across Canada. Over 22,000 Canadians participated in the committee's online survey, and its thoughtful, detailed report was submitted to the House on December 1.

I have read this exhaustive, nuanced report. Great effort went into preparing this report, and I encourage every member of the House to read it.

The government listened to Canadians through its own concurrent consultations. Town halls and roundtables were held in every province and territory last spring, summer, and fall. Thousands of Canadians took part and shared their views on our democratic values and other important issues related to Canadian democracy.

We encouraged members of Parliament to hold town halls in their own constituencies as well, and we are so thankful that so many hon. members did just that. Some members of the House even held more than one. I held one in my riding of Burlington, and I am grateful to the more than 90 residents who joined me at Mainway arena for a thoughtful discussion.

It is important to recognize that these town halls were held by members representing every party in the House: the Conservatives, such as the member for Sarnia—Lambton, the member for Haldimand—Norfolk, and the member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes; the New Democratic Party, such as the member for Hamilton Centre; the Bloc Quebecois, such as the member for Rivière-du-Nord; and the Green Party, represented by the leader, the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands.

This process was non-partisan and important to members of all parties in the House.

The members of the official opposition presented a joint brief to the special committee. They decided to engage 81,000 Canadians in 59 ridings. They sent mail to their constituents, including polling data, a letter from their MP, and other documents. Members from the third party also presented a joint brief to the special committee.

According to that brief, 37,000 Canadians made comments about electoral reform through 40 town halls, telephone surveys, mail-in surveys, and petitions.

We hired Vox Pop Labs, who created MyDemocracy.ca, in order to give as many Canadians as possible the opportunity to take part in this conversation. We are extremely grateful to the more than 360,000 Canadians who took part. Whether by phone or online, Canadians from every province and territory accepted our invitation.

The consultations launched on electoral reform made it one of the largest and farthest-reaching consultations ever undertaken by the Government of Canada. On behalf of the Government of Canada, I thank those many thousands of Canadians. I thank them for spending the evening with their neighbours at town halls, because they wanted a chance to ask a question or share their opinion about our democracy.

I thank them for filling out an online survey, for taking the time to tell us what they believe. I thank them for getting involved, and for their honest participation. Their opinion matters, and their perspectives are valid.

Canadians have given us a lot to think about, and we will continue to respond to their concerns and perspectives. For example, Canadians shared their valuable ideas about online voting, mandatory voting, and how we can make voting more accessible for persons with disabilities. I am looking forward to formally responding to the special committee's report on these and other issues soon.

Above all, we learned the passionate, personal connection Canadians have to their democratic institutions, and how important it is to them that the government and their members of Parliament focus on strengthening and protecting those institutions. That is exactly what we are going to do.

If we want to improve our country's democracy, we need to ensure that the political parties are more transparent when it comes to fundraising. We currently have strict federal legislation governing fundraising. Contributions from corporations and unions are banned. There is a limit for individual contributions and there are strict rules regarding lobbyists.

Our government intends to introduce legislation to make political fundraising more open and transparent. If passed, it would apply to fundraising events attended by the prime minister, cabinet ministers, party leaders, and leadership candidates.

These fundraising activities cannot be private events. They must be publicly announced. It is also important that these activities be transparent. After these types of events take place, the political parties and leadership candidates must quickly make information about them public.

I look forward to working with the members of every party to debate and discuss this legislation.

Our government will also take steps to protect the integrity of Canada's democracy by defending the Canadian electoral process from hacking and cyber-threats.

If the political parties' computer systems are hacked or compromised, it could jeopardize our democratic system. Political parties constitute vital democratic infrastructure.

We will ensure that Canada's democracy is better protected by helping the parties protect their information. We will ask the Communications Security Establishment to analyze the risk that Canada's political parties' computer systems could be hacked and to make the results of that analysis public. This plan will help us better protect Canada's democracy by helping the political parties protect themselves.

As well, CSE will reach out to political parties to share best practices on how to guard against hacking.

These new initiatives will build on the important work that our government is doing to strengthen our democracy. We introduced Bill C-33. If it is passed, we will break down barriers to voting and strengthen the integrity of our electoral system. We will also give more than a million Canadians living abroad the right to vote.

We are keeping our commitment to Canadians to bring this legislation forward, and listening to the Canadians who called on us to take this action.

If passed, Bill C-33 would restore the Chief Electoral Officer's ability to educate and inform Canadians, especially young people, indigenous Canadians, and new Canadians, about voting, elections, and related issues. Restoring the mandate that was in place prior to 2014 would allow public information and education programs for all Canadians. Studies show that the more electors know about their electoral system, the more likely they are to vote. We trust Elections Canada to help inform Canadians about their democracy.

While more youth voted in the 2015 election than ever before, we cannot take it for granted. Bill C-33, if passed, would provide Canadian youth from age 14 to 17 the ability to opt in to a new register as future electors, so that when they turn 18 they would already be registered to vote. Many countries around the world allow youth to preregister to vote. It is an opportunity to learn about our democratic process and would promote democratic engagement among our future generations.

Bill C-33 represents positive, progressive reform to the way we vote. There are many examples that highlight our dedication and commitment to improving and strengthening our democracy within Bill C-33. I hope I can count on all members of this House to support our legislation.

I will leave members with one more example.

Statistics Canada found that an estimated 172,700 electors did not vote in the 2015 election because of a lack of adequate identity documents. The lack of these documents disproportionately affects groups with traditionally low participation rates, such as seniors, youth, indigenous Canadians, Canadians with disabilities, and the homeless.

Vouching is one way that we can reduce barriers and include more Canadians in our democracy. Our government committed to making voting more accessible, and if passed, Bill C-33 would deliver on the commitment by restoring vouching.

The Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs is continuing to examine the recommendations made by the Chief Electoral Officer following the 2015 election. As I said earlier this week when I appeared before the committee, I recognize the work that the committee members are doing and I look forward to reading the committee's report.

As the Minister of Democratic Institutions, I will also work on recommending options to create an independent commissioner to organize political party leaders debates, reviewing the limits of the amounts political parties and third parties can spend during elections, proposing measures to ensure that spending between elections is subject to reasonable limits, as well as supporting the President of the Treasury Board and the Minister of Justice in reviewing the Access to Information Act. I am confident that members share a desire to work on these important matters with us.

I will also continue to work with all members of this House on Senate reform. We have already introduced new measures and reforms for Canadians, including the non-partisan, merit-based Senate appointments process to fill Senate vacancies.

These are important issues, and by taking action on them we will ensure our democratic system is ready to face the challenges of the future, ready to face those who would undermine our system's legitimacy to threaten the very underpinning of who we are. Taking action in these areas will build public confidence in our democratic institutions and ensure Canadian democracy and democratic institutions remain examples to the world.

Over 922,000 young people participated in the student vote program in their schools during the last federal election. In fact, I remember organizing the first student vote at M.M. Robinson in Burlington when I was in high school. I am sure there are many hon. members in this House who took part in their local campaigns. In the 2015 election, I participated in all the debates organized by Aldershot School as part of its student vote initiative.

Our democratic principles and values are being sparked today in the hearts and minds of young people all across Canada. Democracy is alive and well in this country, and I am optimistic and hopeful about our democracy's future. It is our job as leaders in our communities to do all that we can to ensure that young people, indeed all Canadians, whether we agree or disagree, embrace that proud Canadian democratic tradition.

Debates on any subject in the House of Commons are an essential component of our democracy.

I will vote against this motion, but I do respect the fact that we are having this debate today. We may not always agree, but when we do and we work together, we can make great progress.

This House can reflect and embody the very best of Canada and can accomplish great work, such as universal health care, the Charter of Rights, peacekeeping, old age security, and even expanding the franchise. Those who were in this House before we were put aside partisanship, listened to Canadians, and did the hard work the public demands of us.

Important work lies ahead of us to strengthen, to safeguard, to improve our democratic institutions. I look forward to doing it together.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thanks.

Quickly, could we have a recognition that Bill C-33 was wrong, please, to allow us to get down to our work? You can't say you respect the committee and the government, and then insult the work of this committee and not have some kind of an apology or a recognition that it was wrong to do that. Please.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Very good. Thank you, Chair.

Minister, thank you very much for coming. I've congratulated you privately. Let me publicly congratulate you on your ascension to cabinet.

While I have a moment, I will also give my public congratulations in addition to my private ones to my colleague Filomena Tassi, who has also been appointed deputy whip of the government. I wish both of you well. I know you'll do a great job.

Minister, thank you so much for being here. As you can appreciate, this is like the last meeting with your predecessor. These really aren't meet-and-greets, hi-how-are-you courtesy meetings. We specifically called you in to deal with a couple of issues that are affecting our work. I can't go too far. We're limited because it's in camera work, but I don't think it's any big secret that the work at committee has seized up until we get these issues resolved. I can't get into the specifics, but we need some answers here that will allow us to get back to work, so I'm going to be dealing with some rather mundane issues to most people, but they are critically important for us.

You stated that you have deep respect for committees. I've heard this from the government. The Prime Minister enunciated it during the campaign all the way through and said committees were going to matter and were going to be respected. That's the issue. One of the big issues was that we were in the midst, as you rightly alluded to, of going through the Chief Electoral Officer's report. We were doing good work. We had our sleeves rolled up. We were identifying things that we could quickly agree on and setting aside the harder things that we needed to spend time on. Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, Bill C-33 landed with a thud in the middle of our work.

It left us with a real problem, because if you say you respect the work of the committees, then it would have made sense for you to wait until we had issued at least some reports to give some advice on legislation you might be considering. But the way it was done, there was total disregard for the work we're doing. It left us—me anyway, I'll speak for myself—feeling that it is a make-work project. Why bother doing all this if the government is going to ignore it and just do what it wants?

There is that issue. Then the second, somewhat attached issue is this. I appreciate Mr. Graham's raising it, and you did allude to it in part, but I really need something clear on this, Minister, with respect. The second part of this is going forward. I had said we wanted an absolute guarantee that you aren't going to do that again. Mr. Chan and Mr. Graham argued that we could appreciate that the government can't give that kind of a blanket assurance in case we get bogged down. I understood all that. Again, I think you made some reference to that in your remarks.

What we were looking for was respect for our process, to find some way we could communicate so we would know what you are considering and you would ask us if we would turn our attention to that particular area to give you our thinking and to help advise you. You can choose to take it or not, but to just continue to produce electoral reform bills—and, by the way, as you know, getting rid of some of that awful unfair elections act stuff is a priority.... But procedures matter and committees matter, so we need some assurance that the work we are doing is actually meaningful and that the government is considering it; otherwise, why would we bother doing it? We would just go on to other things.

I'm looking for two things, if you will. One is an acknowledgement that the government was wrong. An apology would be nice and not that difficult, because it really was so wrong and disrespectful. Second, I'd like a further undertaking that there will be more dialogue so that we can actually do work that does help inform your decisions in a timely way.

Thank you, Chair.

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Minister of Democratic Institutions]

Okay, great.

Thank you very much.

Good afternoon everyone.

I am delighted and honoured to be here with you today.

Good afternoon, and thank you for your invitation to appear today.

It is an honour to be before the committee this afternoon. I was appointed minister just four weeks ago today, and this is my first appearance as a minister before a committee of the House. I'm delighted that it's with all of you today.

I would like to introduce my parliamentary secretary, Andy Fillmore, member of Parliament for Halifax, and my deputy minister, Ian McCowan, who is the deputy secretary of governance of the Privy Council Office. Also joining us are Allen Sutherland, assistant secretary to the cabinet, and Natasha Kim, director of democratic reform.

I am pleased to be here before the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs with its valuable knowledge and insights on many of the electoral matters mandated to me by the Prime Minister. I have a deep respect for committees and the important role they play in our Parliament. I'm eager to engage, consult, and work with the committee to improve Canada's democracy. The studies you conduct and the years of experience you bring to the table are a few of the many reasons I will particularly value working with all members of this committee and hearing your contributions to these files.

I would like to focus my remarks today on my new mandate letter, as well as on BillC-33, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act. If it pleases the House to adopt the bill at second reading, I would, of course, look forward to returning to this committee to discuss it in more detail.

I will turn now to my mandate letter. As you know, my overarching goal, as Minister of Democratic Institutions, is to strengthen the openness and fairness of Canada's public institutions. I have been mandated to lead on improving our democratic institutions and to restore Canadians' trust and participation in our democratic processes.

I have been mandated to lead on improving our democratic institutions and to restore Canadians' trust and participation in our democratic process.

In terms of my specific mandate, allow me to begin with the topic of electoral reform, a topic on which I know there are strongly held views. Much has been said about this already.

Our government consulted broadly with Canadians on electoral reform over the past year. Any proposed changes to the foundational values of how we elect our representatives should have the broad support of Canadians. More importantly, Canadians would expect to be consulted before embarking on a change of this magnitude.

Public consultations came in many forms. In reaching out to Canadians, there was tremendous work done by the Special Committee on Electoral Reform, several members of which are here today; by members of Parliament representing all parties in the House; by the cross-country ministerial tour; and through the government's engagement of over 360,000 individuals in Canada through Mydemocracy.ca.

In fact, the consultations launched on electoral reform make it one of the largest and farthest reaching consultations ever undertaken by the Government of Canada. This conversation was at times spirited, and it was a conversation in which many had legitimate and passionate views. I respect and thank each and every Canadian who participated in these discussions on something as fundamental as how we choose to govern ourselves.

I appreciate the diversity of views. It was our responsibility to listen to what Canadians said in these consultations and to take that into account.

A clear preference for a new electoral system, let alone a consensus, did not emerge from these consultations.

Without a clear preference for change, much less a specific preferred alternative system, a referendum could be divisive and not in Canada's interests.

Consequently, changing the electoral system is not within the mandate the Prime Minister has given me. We listened to Canadians and made a difficult decision, but I am confident it was the responsible one. The first past the post system may not be perfect. No electoral system is, but it has served this country for 150 years and advances a number of democratic values Canadians hold dear, such as strong local representation, stability, and accountability.

My job is to strengthen and protect our democratic institutions. We remain committed to improving this country's electoral system in many ways, which I will turn to now. There is much useful work to be done to improve Canada's democracy, and I look forward to working with the committee on this important responsibility.

First, I would like to highlight new items in my mandate letter to strengthen and protect the integrity of the democratic process. As we have seen globally, there is increased concern that Canada's electoral process could be susceptible to cyber-attacks in a bid to destabilize Canada's democratic governments or influence the outcome of an election. We must guard against this.

In ensuring the integrity of our democratic institutions, I have been mandated, in collaboration with the Minister of National Defence and the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, to lead the government of Canada's efforts to defend the Canadian electoral process from cyber-threats.

This will include working with the Communications Security Establishment to analyze risks to Canada's political and electoral activities, and to release this assessment publicly. As well, I intend to ask CSE to offer advice and information to Canada's political parties on best practices they may wish to consider when it comes to cybersecurity.

As I've previously stated, this is about assisting parties to protect themselves. Ensuring the safety of our democratic system is a non-partisan issue. It is vital that we protect Canada's democratic infrastructure from cyber-threats. I hope you will agree that we must protect our democracy from emerging threats.

I've also been mandated to introduce legislation to examine and tighten the rules surrounding fundraisers attended by the Prime Minister, ministers, party leaders, and leadership contestants.

Federally, Canada has among the strongest and most stringent political financing rules in the world. Nonetheless, it is essential that Canadians continue to have confidence in our political finance and fundraising laws, and we must seek ways to ensure such confidence in the strength of our system is regularly enforced.

One such way to do that is to bring even more light to fundraising activities. We believe that Canadians have a right to know even more than they do now about political fundraising. We will take action to ensure that fundraisers are conducted in publicly available spaces, advertised in advance, and reported on in a timely manner after the fact. These changes will increase openness and help ensure that Canadians have continued trust in their political financing regime and in their political system generally.

I look forward to discussing with other parties any additional ways we can enhance transparency in the fundraising system. This is an area where all parties have an interest and experience to bring to bear.

I will also work on recommending options to create an independent commissioner to organize political party leaders' debates, reviewing the limits on the amounts political parties and third parties can spend during and between elections, proposing measures to ensure that spending between elections is subject to reasonable limits, as well as supporting the president of the Treasury Board and the Minister of Justice in reviewing the Access to Information Act. I am confident you share a desire to work on these important matters with our government.

In addition, I am the lead minister in relation to Senate reform, including the government's non-partisan, merit-based Senate appointments process to fill Senate vacancies.

I am also responsible for working to pass amendments to the Canada Elections Act to make the Commissioner of Canada Elections more independent from government and to work to repeal the the elements of the Fair Elections Act that make it harder for Canadians to vote.

In terms of this final point, as you know, the government has already introduced Bill C-33, which proposes seven measures in this regard. This bill is designed to increase voter participation by breaking down barriers to voting while enhancing the efficiency and integrity of Canada's elections. These elements are at the heart of our electoral system and I am pleased with the legislation that has been put forth. Should the House refer Bill C-33 to committee after second reading I would look forward to working with the committee in its study of this legislation.

While not a specific item in my mandate letter, as I noted earlier, it is my overarching mandate to strengthen and protect our democratic institutions. That includes continually working to improve the Canada Elections Act and the administration of elections. I am very pleased that this committee is charged with the same goal particularly in relation to your current study into the Chief Electoral Officer's recommendations report following the 42nd general election. I know this committee has been working quite diligently on this report, which includes 132 detailed recommendations to further modernize and strengthen the integrity and accessibility of our electoral system. Your work will help inform the government in the next step of modernizing our electoral system. I welcome your insights into these matters and improving the Canada Elections Act with you.

I'm eager to begin the hard work necessary to achieve these mandate commitments given to me by the Prime Minister.

Canada's democracy remains the envy of the world, but we should never become complacent. Our system is trusted by Canadians and renowned worldwide because we are constantly working to improve it.

I hope I can count on your expertise and your contributions on Bill C-33, on your contributions and expertise on the recommendations from the CEO of Elections Canada, and as I continue to work to fulfill the mandate set before me.

Thank you again for inviting me here today. I look forward to working on my mandate, I look forward to working with all of you, and I would be happy to take your questions.

Democratic Reform

[Andy Fillmore, Liberal, Halifax, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I want to be very clear. This government fundamentally believes that more Canadians should have the ability to vote. We are committed to enhancing participation by Canadians in the democratic process, as evidenced in the updated mandate letter for the Minister of Democratic Institutions.

I certainly appreciate the member opposite's commitment to this issue. Coming back to the reason we are having this discussion this evening, I will again say that we have tabled legislation in this House that, if passed, would enable more than a million new electors living abroad to vote.

We appreciate that many non-resident citizens care deeply about voting in Canadian federal elections. I, and many others in this House, look forward to debating Bill C-33.

[Andy Fillmore, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Democratic Institutions]

Mr. Speaker, I am thankful for the opportunity to speak to the issue raised by the member for London—Fanshawe back in October, which is why we are here this evening. That is the issue of non-resident Canadian citizens voting in federal elections. I would like to start by saying that this government is firmly supportive of enhancing electoral participation of all kinds.

The right to vote is a fundamental democratic right, enshrined in section 3 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The constitutional enshrinement of this right reflects the centrality of voting in our democratic system, as well as its essential link to Canadian citizenship. The charter protects and promotes the right of each citizen to play a meaningful role in the political life of our country. As Chief Justice McLachlin stated in the Saskatchewan Electoral Boundaries reference, “the Canadian tradition as one of evolutionary democracy moving in [gradual] steps toward the goal of universal suffrage..” .

The special voting rules in the Canada Elections Act, which set out how non-resident Canadian citizens may vote, constitute one such step. Before 1993, the only non-resident Canadians who were able to vote in federal elections were generally members of the Canadian Forces and the federal public service. The special voting rules marked a watershed moment in the enfranchisement of non-resident citizens. Introduced in 1993, the rules extended, for the first time, voting to non-resident citizens who did not fall under the two exceptional categories.

At the time, after much debate in this place, Parliament saw fit to impose three limitations on non-resident voting: namely, first, a requirement of prior residence in Canada; second, a requirement that the non-resident elector have resided outside of Canada for fewer than five years, with certain exceptions; and, third, the requirement that the elector intended to resume ordinary residence in Canada at some point in the future.

After the latter two limits were challenged in July 2015, the Ontario Court of Appeal held that the five-year cut-off and the requirement of an intent to return constituted reasonable limitations on the right to vote under section 1 of the charter. That judgment has been appealed to the to the Supreme Court of Canada. On October 20, the Attorney General of Canada filed her factum defending the right of Parliament to make the choice that it did in 1993 as being within the bounds of constitutionality.

The Minister of Democratic Institutions is firmly committed to enhancing the participation by Canadians in the electoral process. That is why we have just introduced Bill C-33, legislation that, if passed, will enable electors who have lived for more than five consecutive years outside of Canada to vote, and electors will not need to state their intent to return.

The government believes that Canadian democracy should be inclusive and in tune with the realities of an increasingly interconnected world. I look forward to the hon. member's contribution to the discussion when we debate Bill C-33 in this House.

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

But are you going to make a change if the committee decides...? Will you make the change? If the committee decides that something in Bill C-33 isn't something that the committee would like, would you amend the legislation?

[Maryam Monsef, Liberal, Peterborough—Kawartha, ON]

I don't think you can do something else. You're mandated to study the recommendations from the Chief Electoral Officer, and I'm counting on you to do that.

One area with Bill C-33 is the piece around expats voting.

Another area is around the commissioner of Canada elections. For example, do we grant them the power to compel testimony to address election fraud in a more comprehensive way? That's an area that I believe is really important for this committee to study.

I can assure you that if we do what we've discussed here today, which is to come up with processes that work for everyone, then moving forward we're going to continue to improve the working relationship between this committee and me. I'm very much open to that.

[Maryam Monsef, Liberal, Peterborough—Kawartha, ON]

The elements that are outlined in Bill C-33, as I've mentioned, are rather straightforward. Many of us campaigned on them. This is in my mandate letter.

I knew that you folks were reviewing the recommendations that came before you from the Chief Electoral Officer, not knowing which ones you were studying at what time. I knew that the work you were doing on this committee would allow you to provide that further level of detail to the bill once it came before you. I remain open to any amendments that you believe will further strengthen this bill.

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

Based on that response, and since you're expecting a report, and given the fact that this happens in every Parliament after every election, why did you move forward with Bill C-33 before we were done our study?

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair.

I do disagree, unfortunately. I like you a lot, Mr. Chan, but I do disagree with what you're saying. But I'm not going to waste my time in debate.

Minister, I do apologize, since my time is short, that I may jump in here and there.

In order to move this committee forward, we want to study this legislation. I agree with everyone here that we're doing good work. We didn't agree on everything, but we were, I think, doing some good work.

At the end of the day, although I doubt this will happen now because the marching orders have been given, if the committee does disagree with a recommendation that you have already included in Bill C-33, will you amend the legislation to reflect that?

[Arnold Chan, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

A lot can happen in two minutes.

Minister, I just want to thank you for coming.

Of course, I didn't have the pleasure of being there when Bill C-33 was introduced in the House. I wasn't present and I apologize for that. As a result of my absence, I inadvertently missed it.

I might be in the minority relative to all of my colleagues, but I'm not fussed, David, by the minister's introduction of Bill C-33 in the House. From my perspective, the minister has a clear executive mandate, which is very publicly accessible. She has every right to introduce legislation that the political executive deemed is important.

We have clear work, which is mandated legislatively and through the Standing Orders, for us to review the results of the previous Parliament and the report from the Chief Electoral Officer, and as legislation comes to this particular committee, when it finally gets referred to it from the House, we pivot accordingly. I actually don't see much substantive divergence. I think folks here are a bit fussed with respect to the process and the minister is committed to finding, I think, a better way to communicate that better.

I'm here to work with you. I think we want to achieve the same substantive outcomes at the end of the day and I think we should just get on with it and get that particular work done. When Bill C-33 comes from the House, we'll make adjustments accordingly. As I've already indicated, I am not fussed by what has transpired.

I think there are substantive questions that my Conservative friends would like to ask and I think the government has already demonstrated more than it's willingness and openness to deal with any substantive questions that they want to pose, so we'll get answers from the minister accordingly.

My invitation to my colleagues on the opposite side is, when we come back in the new year, let's get back on to the work that we're doing and when Bill C-33 is referred to us from the House, we will then pivot accordingly. Until the House has spoken and we are seized of that legislation, I think it's premature for us to get into a lot of the details, without knowing the substance of what we're allowed to actually review and study. From my perspective, the work that we're already doing is good work and let's get on with it.

[Ginette Petitpas Taylor, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Okay.

Are you satisfied with the process with regard to Bill C-33 and if not, what would you do differently?

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Thank you.

Thank you, Minister, for being here with us today.

Bill C-33 is great legislation. I've been long awaiting for these changes to take place, but I think, as Mr. Christopherson said, that the upset was the timing of the legislation, not so much the content of the legislation.

I'm very much in favour of the content of this legislation. I just want to hear from you why you felt it was important to put forward this legislation and to reverse those portions of the Fair Elections Act at this time. What was the thinking of the government, or the ministry, behind that?

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Thank you.

I'd also like to ask about an element that is not in the Chief Electoral Officer's report, but is in Bill C-33. It is one that is of personal interest to me, having worked overseas for many years with the United Nations and other organizations. There are some very good Canadians who are abroad, who are doing work promoting Canadian values. In my case, I even received a peacekeeping service medal from the Governor General for the work that I was doing in Kosovo with OSCE, and yet, had I continued that work, I would have become ineligible to vote in Canadian elections, as have many other Canadians, because of the changes that were made by the previous government.

I understood you to say earlier that you were looking to our committee, not only to look at that aspect of Bill C-33, but to decide on some of the parameters and how this would actually apply.

I also know there is a court case right now, a charter challenge, Frank v. Canada.

Could you elaborate on why it is important that a young generation of Canadians who are going around the world and starting businesses...? We have doctors and teachers who are going around the world. There are all kinds of Canadians who are doing very good work around the world. To lose your right to vote because you have gone abroad to promote Canadian values, I think, is wrong.

Could you elaborate on that and tell us what you see our committee doing in that regard?

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Thanks very much, Minister, for being here today and for being so willing to come before our committee to answer our questions.

I'd like to take a moment to pick up on what Mr. Christopherson said. My understanding from your testimony just now is that you are very open to having amendments to Bill C-33 that could be informed by the discussion that we have been having. We can't discuss what we've been doing in camera, but if there are aspects where we've had deliberations and dialogue, the work that we've done is going to be useful when we receive Bill C-33, and we're able to put forward amendments.

Could I clarify that you would be open to amendments that are informed by the dialogue we've been having?

[Maryam Monsef, Liberal, Peterborough—Kawartha, ON]

Mr. Chair, I want to thank my colleague for his work and clarify that the repealing of the unfair aspects of the Fair Elections Act did not come out of nowhere. They were very much publicly shared through my mandate letter, as given to me by the Prime Minister.

I continue to have a great deal of respect for the work that you do. There are areas within Bill C-33, which I outlined earlier, that I'm counting on you to do further analysis and study on.

Can we do things better? Absolutely. Am I committed to that? I can guarantee that to you, Mr. Christopherson.

I will end on this. In March 2014, I watched you advocate for the very changes that we brought forward in Bill C-33. That's the important work that we're here to do. Mr. Christopherson, I'm going to count on your expertise and wisdom to make sure that more of the recommendations from the Chief Electoral Officer make it into legislation so that we can improve access and engagement for all Canadians.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Minister, thank you very much for coming. We very much appreciate it.

I have to tell you, you being here is a complete shemozzle. I am so confused. I am further confused as to why you're here talking to us about this bill.

The fact of the matter is there's only so much I can say in terms of our in camera talks, but there are smart people in this room, such as Kady O'Malley, who can look very carefully at the chronology of what has happened to get some idea of why you're in front of this committee. I can assure you that it wasn't to talk about the pleasantries of Bill C-33.

The fact of the matter is you say things such as “eagerly awaiting”, “walk the same path”, “if we all work together”, and “collegial”. The fact is that we started an excellent process of working together on this committee to review the recommendations of the Chief Electoral Officer. We were going along working, and we have dual tracks and lots of stuff. We're doing good work; we thought we were doing good work. We're feeling good about it. That's not to say we've agreed on everything, but in terms of process, we were working as a team trying to come up with rules that everybody thought would be fair. Then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, thump, and Bill C-33 lands in the middle of the floor of the House of Commons on the very same day that we're about to meet and continue working. We're left, or at least I was left, wondering what the hell? What is going on?

On the one hand, we have a committee that's working together. Your government, Minister, promised that you were going to treat parliamentary committees with the respect they deserve, that you were going to bring back the importance of parliamentary committees, yet all we've seen are insults, especially with this committee as a result of Bill C-33. Then, I won't dwell on it but I have to say, we watched the absolute disgrace of the government's response to the electoral reform committee's tabling of that report, where you were on your feet apologizing.

Again, I'm kind of stuck here because I can't talk about what was said in camera, but I can say—and if somebody wants to hold me for telling tales out of school, fine, but I think I'm walking the line carefully—that Mr. Graham, to his credit, came to me immediately afterwards, when we were seized of the bill being tabled, and said, “How can we fix this? What can we do?” I said my goal was to get us back to work, that after all these decades in public life I didn't need another headline, and that what I wanted to do was some good work.

Then I happened to bump into you, Minister. I won't talk about the full conversation, but I think it's fair to say that we actually bumped into each other twice in the hallway on that day, and you were asking the same as Mr. Graham, “How can we fix this?” My response was the same, that an apology would be a good way to start. I still haven't heard one.

You go on and on about Bill C-33. We didn't call you in here, Minister, to talk about Bill C-33, because it hasn't been referred to us yet.

What I as one member of this committee want to know is how do we continue to do the work that we're doing—which is supposed to show the respect and importance that this government was going to return to committees—when you drop that bill on the floor, looking for all intents and purposes as nothing but a diversion to get you and your government out of trouble for the heat you were taking on the broader file that was going down in flames?

If it's not that, at best it's a lack of respect or consideration for this committee. At worst, it's a total disregard for committee work, which happens to have been reinforced by the comments. I accept that you've apologized; nonetheless, it happened. I happened to walk into the House as you were beginning and I couldn't believe that was the response.

Minister, I am still angry about the process. At least the previous government didn't pretend to want to make the committees important. They at least were clear about their disdain for parliamentary committees and the work they do. Fair enough; that has been dealt with. Those chickens came home to roost, and that's why you, Minister, are sitting where you are sitting, in large part because of that attitude. You can say you're going to do something different, but so far we hear talk, talk, talk, but none of the walk.

So, Minister, I need a couple of things from you, starting with an apology to this committee, as you apologized to the last committee, for the way you have treated the work of this committee. Second, I'd like to get some idea of how you think this parliamentary committee is going to continue to do its work in light of you dropping bills on the floor that cherry-pick issues we're working with.

I'll end on this final point. When you say things such as, “When will your report be ready,” it is a very good question, but that is the kind of question that should be asked at the beginning of the process of our work if your ministry is serious about coordinating it with the work of your government. Right now, there's a disconnect.

I need to hear from you, Minister, how you think we are going to respond and get back on track, or are we not going to be able to? Are we just going to continue to have this government pitted against its own parliamentary committees?

[Maryam Monsef, Liberal, Peterborough—Kawartha, ON]

Mr. Chair, I want to thank my neighbour for his question. The work that I'm doing is guided by my mandate letter. I think it was the Clerk of the Privy Council who said that, of all the government web pages, the page with our mandate letters is the most frequently visited one. So there's some interesting trivia for you, if that's helpful in any way to guide the work that you do.

Repealing the unfair aspects of the Fair Elections Act is part of my mandate. Putting together a process for appointments to the Senate has been part of my mandate. The establishment of an all-party committee was part of my mandate. Moving forward, creating the office of a debates commissioner is something that is going to require significant deliberation, coordination, consultation, and study. That's something that I'm counting on this committee to help support. Moving forward, areas around the review of the Elections Act itself as it pertains to various ways that our elections are governed is in line with my mandate. I'm looking forward to working with this committee.

The changes that we proposed in Bill C-33 were relatively straightforward.

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

It's nice to see you again. Given the fact that you're here at this committee to talk about Bill C-33, and the fact, as Mr. Reid was saying, that it kind of jumped ahead of the study we're doing in committee, you also mentioned in your speech that there is further legislation coming. I think Mr. Graham asked the question, but I just want to clarify a little sooner, based on the timeline that we don't come back until the end of January, and you said, I believe, that in the spring you're coming.... That doesn't really give us much time to get the study done, get the information to you or to Parliament, and allow that to be incorporated into your legislation. Given the fact that you're here because you kind of jumped ahead, how are you going to have the correct information in front of you and be able to get in a piece of legislation in time to actually make our work worthwhile?

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. We were at one minute and 45 seconds when we stopped.

First of all, Minister, thank you for coming here to talk about Bill C-33.

Minister, I've been on this committee for over a decade, through a number of election cycles, starting under the Chrétien government, and every election cycle, the minister, or rather, I correct myself, the Chief Electoral Officer submits a report on recommended changes subsequent to the election and the experiences that he—it's been a he so far, so that's not sexist language—Mr. Kingsley or Mr. Mayrand, thinks ought to be made based on the experience.

Then the procedure and House affairs committee engages in an exhaustive review of that report, makes recommendations based on a riffing off, if you like, of the CEO's recommendations, submits those, and the government responds. It may respond in a way the committee judges to be satisfactory or unsatisfactory, but the fact is that you wait for that process.

You moved ahead without waiting for our report, and although we're not permitted to say what we were discussing, I can tell you that some of what we were discussing in our report was, I thought, of enormous use, and cannot be dealt with in some supplemental piece of legislation because it very much featured some of the key issues that you're dealing with and setting in stone in this piece of legislation.

May I ask why you didn't follow the precedent of all your predecessors in this regard and wait until our report had been submitted? If I may say so...well, let me just stop there and ask that question, Minister.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

That's fantastic.

I do want to move to Bill C-33. In order to facilitate that, now that we know you'd be willing to come back, Mr. Chair, I move:

That the Committee invite the Minister of Democratic Institutions to appear for not less than two hours to answer questions regarding MyDemocracy.ca and the government’s planned agenda for electoral reform.

I take it, Mr. Chair, because we moved off the topic, that we can conclude that I haven't used up my seven minutes yet. I'm not using up the time for the questions to the minister.

[Ginette Petitpas Taylor, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Thank you.

Once again, thank you so much, Minister, for joining us this morning. I realize you're busy, and we appreciate having you at the committee.

Over the course of the summer, I had an objective that I was going to have one town hall on electoral reform. When I had my first town hall, I realized that many people at that town hall were oftentimes the same people I had at most of my town halls. I took it upon myself, however, to go out and to meet with different groups of people I wanted to meet with, specifically our marginalized population, our youth, and people who are oftentimes not engaged in the political process. Could you please specify how this legislation, Bill C-33, would involve more Canadians in the electoral process, especially among disproportionately under-represented groups?

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

The last three sections of Bill C-33 deal with the Frank decision and repositioning the elections commissioner. None of those topics were addressed in the election officer's report. What I'd like to know from you is, what approach you think we should take to reconcile our recommendations, which we cannot disclose at this time, with the bill that is already out. You're open to amendments, but they could become quite significant, so I want to get your take on that.

[Maryam Monsef, Liberal, Peterborough—Kawartha, ON]

Mr. Chair, I thank my colleague for his very thoughtful question.

While I'm not privy to the conversations you folks have through your in camera deliberations, I understand that reviewing and making recommendations on the Chief Electoral Officer's report is very much within your mandate. It's something I'm counting on. These changes we put forward in Bill C-33 I believe are straightforward. I'm not sure where you are in your review of them, but you're right that there's quite a bit more work to be done. I understand that you will be providing a report to the House in the new year. We're eagerly awaiting your recommendations.

On this particular bill, too, there were areas where we could have gone further, but the decision we considered to be the most thoughtful one was to just wait. An example is expanding the right to vote to Canadians living and working abroad for more than five years. We've expanded the right to those Canadians who have at one time lived here in Canada, but something that we're counting on this committee to study further and provide its recommendations on is the status of the children of those Canadians living abroad who are still Canadians but who have never lived in Canada. Do we expand the right to vote to them?

Ultimately, I believe my main goal with my mandate letter, the reason we all work very hard every day, is that we want to see more Canadians participating in their democratic process, whether as engaged and informed voters or as active participants and candidates. That is an area of key priority for me: accessibility and inclusion. That is something I think we can do in the months, if not years, ahead. That's something we can improve upon. These are some of my priorities that I think are important for you to know, but I'm also happy to have conversations with colleagues around this table about what you would collectively like to see moving forward.

I know that what you do in this committee, one of the things that's quite impressive, is you're able to work collegially. You're able to put partisan interests aside. You see the big picture and you move forward based on what's in the best interests of all Canadians. That's the spirit that I think we need to work towards to improve democratic participation. If there are areas you believe need to be at the heart of our focus, then talk to me.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Thank you, Minister, for being here.

I find Bill C-33 is a very important bill. As staff to the Liberal critic for democratic reform in the last Parliament, I was very heavily involved in fighting the unfair elections act. That said, you are aware that we were studying the election office's report and from the announced report there are five overlapping sections of the bill with our study.

I don't want to get too much into that, but I wanted to make sure you're aware of that part, which you've addressed, and I thank you for that. There are 132 recommendations in that report, of which there are 127 left. You just said there are going to be more bills coming. I'd like to get a sense from you of what the priorities are for us to study so we don't have the situation again where the bill comes before our study is complete.

I'd really like to make sure that we have the opportunity to study it in advance. I'd like to know, of those 127 remaining recommendations that didn't get addressed in Bill C-33, where your priorities lie for us to get through.

[Maryam Monsef, Liberal, Minister of Democratic Institutions]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you, colleagues, for your invitation to be here with you today.

The last time I was here we talked about the Senate appointment process and the government's mandate and commitments on ways we can improve our democracy and our democratic institutions.

I'm very much grateful for the opportunity to be here with you today for a number of reasons. You've had more than 40 meetings; it has been about a year since this Parliament began sitting, and you and I very much walk the same path. We have the same challenges and we have the same goals of protecting what's working and what we are so fortunate to have and improving it further.

As always, your input and perspective are greatly appreciated. As my parliamentary secretary Mark Holland and I have travelled the country and studied the work we're doing, time and time again the testimony that has come before this committee comes up, around a family-friendly Parliament, for example. The work this committee has done and the conversations you've had come up again and again. As you know, my work on this file is shaped mostly by a desire to make this place more inclusive, to make the voting process more accessible. I know that together we share these objectives. We have a lot of work to do, and we've begun some of that work.

I also know that you have been reviewing the recommendations our Chief Electoral Officer made based on the results of the last election. I'm really looking forward to the results of that study. I'm looking forward to the possibility of hearing more about that work today. As I've said, we're very proud of the phase one reforms that we've introduced through Bill C-33. We believe it's a strong bill, but I'm also mindful of the fact that the bill could be further strengthened, and if your committee and the work you've done could contribute to that, I think we would serve Canada well.

Now, before I move on I think it's really important, given that it's the middle of December, Mr. Chair, that I take this opportunity to express how much I value—and I think we all share this—the work we've been able to do with our Chief Electoral Officer. He has served this country and Canadians for a decade, and his professionalism and dedication to this country and to the health and integrity of our democracy, I believe, are a model for public service. I'm sure we all wish him well in his retirement, which is imminent.

As you know, Bill C-33 proposes amendments to the Canada Elections Act. We introduced it in the House recently, and it's important to talk a little about the current Canadian context for Bill C-33.

You've been involved in this conversation, colleagues, as has the electoral reform committee. What Mark Holland and I have heard across the country is that, while it's important to enhance the way we vote, it's also really important to make it easier for people to get to the polling station, to prove their identity, to have the right information, and to remove unnecessary barriers that exist. This is in line with what we've heard across the country.

As we work towards electoral reform, while it's clear there are sometimes contradictory perspectives on process and many different perspectives, I think something we can all agree on is that our democracy is connected very much to who we are as individuals and to our sense of identity as Canadians. Canadian democracy continues to be a model for the world.

That's why I think it's really important that any improvements we make be in the best interests of all Canadians, and that's what Bill C-33 is all about. The changes we're proposing in Bill C-33 are about empowering Canadians with the knowledge they need and encouraging greater engagement in our democracy.

Bill C-33 is about helping more Canadians learn about the value of voting. It's about empowering more Canadians who qualify in casting a ballot. It's about breaking down barriers that don't need to be there, that currently prevent too many Canadians from voting. While it's true that the democracy and culture we have here in Canada are the envy of the world, and they work, we can't be complacent. The pressing challenge for us ahead I believe is to make sure that our democracy works for all Canadians without exception.

We want to make it easier for Canadians to vote, because when that happens, democracy is better. This is a goal that I believe we can all agree on. It can only be accomplished if we all work together. You may recall the conversation I had with the good folks at the press gallery after introducing Bill C-33, when I mentioned how important it is for me for this bill to have benefited from the expertise and contributions of all parliamentarians. I want to reinforce that here today. I am counting on your deep expertise and knowledge of electoral reform to achieve that.

To paint the picture of this suite of reforms that I have been mandated to ask for, I'm going to set aside Bill C-33 for just a moment, just to let you know what we've done in the past year and what's ahead of us. I have a feeling I'll be coming back to this committee again and again, and I think it's helpful for you to know what initiatives are likely to come before you for deliberation.

As you know, the Prime Minister set a rather ambitious agenda for democratic reform. While it brings many complex challenges, we are making progress on this agenda.

A non-partisan, merit-based appointment process for the Prime Minister to be advised on Senate appointments so that accomplished Canadians from all walks of life from across the country would be considered for the Senate has been established.

A parliamentary committee has studied electoral reform. The committee's report was received on December 1. The government will be responding in detail to that report in the new year.

The matter that brings me here today is an item that is in my mandate letter. As you know, the Fair Elections Act has unfair aspects which were controversial in nature but also unhelpful in engaging Canadians and allowing them to participate in their democracy in their ability to vote. These are things I have been asked to address through repealing those elements of the Fair Elections Act. These again are things that make it harder for Canadians to vote and easier for lawbreakers to evade punishment.

With Bill C-33, the government has introduced some amendments to advance these commitments. The focus was on making changes to those areas that we heard most loudly on from Canadians. We've heard from the debates that took place in the House and in committees like this one, during the last election, and from people, frankly, who I've met across the country in talking about electoral reform, that changes need to be made. There was no good reason why some of those changes were introduced in the first place.

There are other changes that have been suggested and the government will be looking to introduce further legislation going forward. I look forward to the input and advice of this committee to make sure that we're putting the best possible legislation forward to benefit all Canadians.

What is Bill C-33 about? It responds to the concerns that I've just shared with seven important reforms.

The first two reforms focus on making it easier for eligible Canadians to vote. Ultimately, it would increase voter participation through reinstating the voter information card and the vouching process.

The third reform is about engaging Canadians through education about Canada's electoral process.

The fourth, and this is something that I've heard across the country, is about engaging youth further by providing an opportunity for Elections Canada to pre-register youth ages 14 to 17, so that they can be invited to be part of the democratic institutions at an earlier age.

The fifth reform is about building more integrity into our voting system by giving Elections Canada the resources it needs to clean up the data in the national list of electors.

Our sixth reform would make the administrative adjustments necessary to formally return the commissioner of Canada elections to Elections Canada.

Finally, our seventh reform would make it easier for Canadians working and living abroad by expanding the right to vote to over a million Canadians, even if they've been away from home for more than five years.

Again, I want to be clear. I believe these are strong reforms that we've introduced. There's more work to be done and we'll be introducing further legislation, but Bill C-33 is the first of a series of reforms that will come before you for consideration.

Another area that is a priority for Mark and me is to focus on ways to improve access to the democratic process for Canadians who are often on the margins of our society. I'm talking about homeless people, young people, seniors, indigenous Canadians, new Canadians, those with physical disabilities, those with various abilities and exceptionalities, and of course, those who come from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

Bill C-33 aims to address some of those challenges for these groups by making voting easier for groups that traditionally and consistently experience difficulty proving their identity. There is also a great deal invested in enhancing youth participation through a future list of electors being generated, but as always, there's more work to be done.

Something that we can look forward to in the future is a commitment to bring forward options to create an independent commissioner to organize political party debates. The options that we present need to be informed by the input of Canadians, political parties, broadcasters, journalists, and others as we work towards this goal. We've learned that knowledge is key to democratic participation, and leaders' debates are an important piece of the puzzle when it comes to educating Canadians. I know that the Chief Electoral Officer's recommendations are before you. You'll be working together to enhance the accessibility of our elections. I very much look forward to hearing your recommendations on the Chief Electoral Officer's advice.

I want to thank you, again, for the opportunity to be here, Mr. Chair. I'm very happy to answer any questions that colleagues may have.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

I call this meeting to order.

Good morning, and welcome to the 46th meeting of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. This meeting is being held in public and it's televised.

Pursuant to the order adopted by the committee on November 29, we have with us today the Minister of Democratic Institutions, the Honourable Maryam Monsef, to discuss the provisions contained in Bill C-33, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act and to make consequential amendments to other acts.

The minister is accompanied by Natasha Kim, director, democratic reform, Privy Council Office; and Robert Sampson, senior policy adviser, counsel, democratic reform, Privy Council Office.

Before giving the floor to the minister, I want to make a couple of points.

I'm sure you all received the document sent to you by the Library of Parliament researcher comparing the recommendations in the Chief Electoral Officer's report and the items in Bill C-33.

Although Bill C-33 has not been referred to our committee by the House, the committee has invited the minister to discuss the content of the bill, pursuant to its permanent mandate under Standing Order 108(3)(a). Members will note similarities between some of the provisions of the bill and the recommendations contained in the Chief Electoral Officer's report, which the committee has been studying. Much of that study has been carried out in camera so members should exercise caution if they refer to the committee's deliberations.

The Chief Electoral Officer's report and all the recommendations are public. You could talk about them and talk about Bill C-33, which is public, but not what we discussed about the Chief Electoral Officer's recommendations.

Minister, welcome. Thank you for coming. The floor is yours.

[Maryam Monsef, Liberal, Minister of Democratic Institutions]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the hon. member for the opportunity to talk about Bill C-33, but also about the passion I have for making sure that more persons with disabilities and exceptionalities have an opportunity to participate in their democratic processes. The Chief Electoral Officer in his report following the 2015 election made excellent recommendations. I met with his advisory body on persons with disabilities with our own Minister of Sport and Persons with Disabilities and I connected with advocates across the country. I am committed to making sure that we address this and I look forward to working with the committee members of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs to address this too.

[Cheryl Hardcastle, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the government recently put into legislation Bill C-33, which the Minister of Democratic Institutions said would break down barriers to voting. This is extremely important, but the legislation left out important aspects for people living with disabilities. They still face significant barriers when it comes to participating in elections, including access to qualified assistance during the act of voting itself.

Will the minister keep her word to people living with disabilities and commit to addressing these issues?

[Maryam Monsef, Liberal, Minister of Democratic Institutions]

Mr. Speaker, it has been a while since I received a question from the hon. member. I thank him for the opportunity to talk about Bill C-33 in the House, where we repealed the unfair elements of the Fair Elections Act, and extended the right to vote to those Canadians living and working abroad.

Our Chief Electoral Officer, to whom we are all indebted, has provided a report based on the results of the last election. The Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs will be delivering its report and recommendations, and we will have an opportunity to debate them in the House.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

Mr. Speaker, last week, in shocking testimony before a Senate committee, the Chief Electoral Officer said there is no way to restrict or prevent foreigners or foreign organizations from trying to influence Canadian elections.

There are no restrictions on unlimited spending for things like polling, canvassing, phone banking, or election websites. Yet, we see nothing that addresses these concerns in Bill C-33.

Is the democratic institutions minister not concerned about this kind of foreign interference in Canadian elections?

[Maryam Monsef, Liberal, Minister of Democratic Institutions]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the member opposite for his work on the committee. I am looking forward, in this House, to receiving that report on December 1.

The member asked what I was doing on television over the weekend. We introduced Bill C-33 in this House. We repealed the unfair elements of the Fair Elections Act. We extended voting rights to those Canadians living abroad. That is what I was doing.

[Maryam Monsef, Liberal, Minister of Democratic Institutions]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the member for Pickering—Uxbridge for this very thoughtful question.

I am pleased that today in this House we introduced Bill C-33. This bill is intended to repeal the unfair elements of the Fair Elections Act. We are going to remove unnecessary barriers for young people, seniors, indigenous persons, and homeless people who do not have access to proper identification, for example.

The bill will be debated in this House, and I am counting on our colleagues in this place to help further strengthen this bill.

Canada Elections Act

[Maryam Monsef, Liberal, Minister of Democratic Institutions]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-33, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)