Mr. Speaker, we provided a dissenting report on this. I want to thank the hon. member, who chaired an excellent meeting. This has far-reaching ramifications for future elections.
I do not have a lot of time so I will only comment on one of the three areas where we disagreed. I want to emphasize that we were very strongly in support of the work and the recommendations. except for the three we disagreed on. Much of the credit is due to the chair, who did an excellent job over the two years we have been working on this.
The one item I want to raise very succinctly is that the recommendation from the Chief Electoral Officer was that he be given the power directly to request documents that he may need to verify that taxpayers' subsidies being provided to parties were appropriately filed and that they should get that money.
The recommendation, unfortunately, did not carry by the majority. We were opposed to the fact that the recommendation of the Chief Electoral Officer was not accepted by the majority, meaning that when the Conservatives stand in their place now and talk about all the powers of the electoral officer and that everything should be turned over to that office so that office can go after it and get to the bottom of things, like we are seeing now, when it comes to giving power to the Chief Electoral Officer, the Conservatives do not want to do that.
They went the most expensive route, the least efficient and the one that will hurt smaller parties the most. On this issue we want to strongly oppose and dissent and say that the Chief Electoral Officer should always be given the powers he needs to verify all reports that are submitted, particularly when taxpayer money is being received.