Debates of March 3rd, 2014

Reference to Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

Mr. Speaker, some of the comments made by my colleague, the parliamentary secretary, are intriguing.

As the House Leader of the Official Opposition said earlier, my colleague is speaking about rhetorical tools. We do use words that are sometimes inflammatory, and we can have a debate about their use. However, whether our colleague got carried away in the heat of the moment or he really thought about it and wrote down what he said, the fact remains that he spoke with confidence and he knew what he was saying.

This is such a sad state of affairs that I have to defend a Liberal colleague. The member for Markham—Unionville was talking about the budget deficit. Of course, when a member talks about numbers, he may make a mistake. Sometimes, I forget a friend's birthday, but no one is going to accuse me of lying. However, when a member rises in this place and says with confidence that he saw a crime being committed during an election, there is a serious problem.

That was clearly stated in the Speaker's ruling. The parliamentary secretary should think about his comparisons, which are rather dubious.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I completely reject the premise that any comments I was making were devious.

I would point out, however, that when he speaks about forgetting his friend's birthday, I can assure the member opposite that if I ever forgot my wife's birthday—and I have at times—it would be considered a crime.

Let me again point out the example I used here. The member referenced it in his question. The question posed by the member for Markham—Unionville today in question period stated that our government had come in with eight consecutive deficit budgets. He knows that not to be true, yet he said it anyway.

Does that mean we should find him in contempt? This happens all the time. I am not defending it. I am not suggesting it is right, but it happens. I certainly encourage my colleague from Markham—Unionville, perhaps even as early as tomorrow, to set the record straight. I doubt that he will, however.

What should happen in cases like this is the exact action taken by my colleague from Mississauga—Streetsville. Members should come in to this place, apologize, and set the record straight. He did the right thing. The NDP wishes to punish him for it. I find that, to say the very least, unfortunate.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I do believe right from the get-go that it is very important to recognize that to intentionally mislead the House of Commons is against our rules and to do so would be in contempt of Parliament.

It is very important that we make it clear what the member stated. I go back to February 6, and this is what the member for Mississauga—Streetsville stated:

Mr. Speaker, I want to talk a bit about this vouching system again. I know the minister represents an urban city. I am from a semi-urban area of Mississauga, where there are many high-rise apartment buildings. On mail delivery day when the voter cards are delivered to community mailboxes in apartment buildings, many of them are discarded in the garbage can or blue box.

I am about to read the important part that needs to be highlighted. This is exactly what he said on February 6:

I have actually witnessed other people picking up the voter cards, going to the campaign office of whatever candidate they support and handing out these voter cards to other individuals, who then walk into voting stations with friends who vouch for them with no ID.

That is what the member stated. That is not a misspeak. This is during very important legislation, Bill C-23, in which the government speaks right from the Prime Minister's Office, as much as possible. Things coming from the Prime Minster's Office are consistent, and this particular member perhaps fell a little bit outside of the speaking notes, and he gave what was at that time, he believed, an accurate statement.

Let there be no doubt that it would have misled individuals if it turned out not to be true. He said that back in early February. I found it very interesting that a few weeks later he stood up to apologize to the House. That was on February 24. He stated at that point:

...I rise on a point of order with respect to debate that took place on February 6 in this House regarding the fair elections act.

I made a statement in the House during the debate that is not accurate. I just wanted to reflect that fact that I have not personally witnessed individuals retrieving voter notification cards from the garbage cans or from the mailbox areas of apartment buildings. I have not personally witnessed that activity and want the record to properly show that.

On the following day, a matter of privilege was raised. On behalf of the Liberal Party, I had the opportunity to respond. I will go to exactly what I said when I addressed the issue of the matter of privilege on behalf of the Liberal Party. I said then:

We should get more clarification from the member on why he waited so long to apologize. Is it because Elections Canada approached the member after reviewing what he said? It is a very serious allegation. Did the member share his concerns with Elections Canada prior to raising them here in the House?

It seems to me that the reason the member stood yesterday is he felt that his statement in the House was going to be looked at seriously by Elections Canada and other stakeholders because the accusation that he made during second reading was serious. There was illegal behaviour within that election which the member would have been aware of, if we believe what he said actually took place.

That is what I said in response to the matter of privilege.

The following day, a story appeared in one of the media outlets. I believe we should give credit where credit is due. I will take this as allegations or concerns raised through a media report. It comes from Stephen Best, the chief agent of the Animal Alliance Environment Voters Party of Canada. He complained to Canada's Chief Electoral Office, Marc Mayrand, about Mr. Butt's claim and was told the case would be referred to the Commissioner of Elections Canada.

I have a quote from that particular article. He said:

“I have asked that EC’s records to be searched to see if the matter of possible fraudulent voting had been brought to our attention either here at HQ or at the Returning officer office for Mississauga—Streetsville. I have also forwarded your information to the Commissioner of Canada Elections for his review and independent consideration of any possible action that may be warranted”, Mr. Mayrand replied, according an e-mail provided by Mr. Best. Mr. Best made the complaint on Feb. 7, the day after Mr. Butt spoke in the House of Commons.

I posed the question to the parliamentary secretary. Straight up, did Elections Canada, the commissioner, or anyone from within Elections Canada, contact the member in question? The parliamentary secretary had indicated that he was not aware of it and that he did not talk about it.

The member for Mississauga—Streetsville should come clean on this issue. We should afford him, as much as possible, the opportunity to approach the PROC committee, on which I sit, in an open fashion and come forward. It would be good to have Elections Canada come before the committee as a witness. It might even be appropriate to ask Mr. Best to come before the committee. What we are interested in is getting to the truth of the matter at hand, which is whether the member for Mississauga—Streetsville intentionally misled the House.

When I look over the information provided to me, with the experience that I have acquired over the past number of years as a parliamentarian, I believe that there are grounds for us to have a thorough look at the matter and ultimately come up with some consensus. I want to underline the word “consensus”. We recognize that the government has a majority. We need to achieve consensus in the procedures and House affairs committee in a manner in which we can deal with this in order to come back to the House.

There is so much more that I could talk about. There is the whole issue of the lack of confidence that Canadians have in what we are currently debating at committee today, regarding the fair elections act. That is the legislation that the member was talking about.

We have some very serious issues. We trust and have to have faith that when members stand in their place, they are in fact reporting accurately. I know that, at times, innocent mistakes will be made. I would suggest that this goes far beyond some sort of innocent mistake. That is what it would appear to be. That is why we in the Liberal Party support the motion going to the PROC committee. We would like to ultimately see this issue dealt with as quickly as possible.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I have been here listening to the debate this afternoon on this question of privilege. My question to the member from the Liberal Party is simple.

I recall being here in 2010, when the member for St. Paul's, which I believe is a Liberal riding, posted on her website details of a bill that had not yet been presented in the House. That is against the privileges of everybody in the House. The member for St. Paul's understood that she had made that mistake and came to the House to apologize. That apology was accepted by the House.

As for the eight and a half years that I have been here, people do make mistakes. Members of Parliament make mistakes. We are human, by the way. We do make mistakes and when we do, we come here, we apologize, and we correct the record. That is what the member for Mississauga—Streetsville has done.

If we accepted the apology from the member for St. Paul's for violating everybody's privilege by posting information about a bill that had not yet been presented to the House of Commons, why should we not also accept the apology and the correction of the record from the member for Mississauga—Streetsville?

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, one cannot compare apples to oranges in this situation.

What makes this issue unique is that we actually have the Speaker of the House recognizing that there is something wrong. There is no doubt that if we were to rise on every piece of misinformation, whether intentional or not, which is sometimes the challenge in that whole area, we would probably be rising quite a bit in the House. We question the government in a lot of things that it says. The issue before us has crossed a line, and even the Speaker has recognized that.

To that end, I would suggest that this issue needs to be discussed in the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, and that is why I would encourage swift passage of the motion, so we can do just that.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am finding it very concerning that the Conservatives across the aisle—though I guess I am not surprised at their behaviour—seem to forget that we are here to make laws. This is a place of law. When one walks into the House of Commons and attempts to mislead the House on a bill that would set the laws about the democratic rights of this country, that is a serious issue. What we see across the aisle is a clown act by the Conservatives. If someone comes into the House and lies to Parliament, that is contempt, because contempt means the interference of the work of the House of Commons.

The Conservatives are saying they embellished and they torqued. They are now victims over there. They are always victims when they get caught committing criminal acts and other misbehaviour. I want to ask about the motivation. It was the motivation of the member to mislead the House, claiming he had witnessed crimes.

I want to ask a question of my colleague, who has been a parliamentarian for 20 years. Has he ever seen a parliamentarian stand in the House and claim to witness crimes that never happened?

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, it underlines the fact that it is a very serious allegation that was made on February 6, which begs the question of what the member would have done after witnessing that sort of voter fraud.

There must have been something that caused the member to come back to the issue several weeks later. There are two people that we should be very interested in hearing from at committee. One is the member himself, to provide details on what he said and the motivation for him to apologize. I suspect that the motivation might have been that he found himself in a bit of awkwardness, to put it nicely, or trouble, quite possibly. We understand through at least one media report that, in fact, Elections Canada had been made aware of the allegation he made here on February 6. If that was the motivating factor that caused him to apologize, that is quite different and it is very serious.

[François Choquette, NDP, Drummond, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I have been listening to the debate and the speeches on this issue for a little while now, and I am stunned by the subject we are discussing.

I think we need to start by saying that what happened and what the member did, what we are talking about right now, is absolutely unacceptable. No one can deliberately lie to the House, then say it was an error in judgment and just apologize. No, this is very serious. We need to understand how something like this can happen in the House of Commons.

It all goes back to the Conservative government's ill intentions. This electoral “deformation” bill, a bill that is very hard to justify, an indefensible bill, is causing problems because the government is using false arguments in an attempt to convince people.

That is the comment I wanted to direct to my hon. colleague about the issue that was raised today.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, last Tuesday I was in the PROC committee. The member for Mississauga—Streetsville is a member of that committee, and that is one of the reasons why I believe it is fairly important that we allow the motion to get dealt with today. It is important for us to clear the air on this particular issue.

I appreciate the member's comments. I hope that we will deal with this issue as quickly as possible, in fairness both to the member and to the PROC committee, which has a great deal of work on its current agenda.

[Murray Rankin, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Mr. Speaker, whether one characterizes the conduct as lying or misleading or prima facie contempt, really the question for the member is, if a member knowingly misstates something, with the intention to mislead, and then comes back in a subsequent sitting of Parliament to correct that statement, I would invite my much more experienced parliamentary friend to comment on the implications for parliamentary debate if that were not, in fact, contempt of Parliament.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, the key here is whether the member intentionally misled the House. Many mistakes are often made inside the House during debate, and often members will stand in their place and apologize. What makes this unique is that there is so much evidence giving the impression that there is just cause to believe that there was an attempt to intentionally mislead the House, which ultimately is a contempt of Parliament. By allowing this debate, the Speaker has recognized just how important this issue is.

The other thing that members have to be reminded of is not only is it an important ruling for the House of Commons but we also must think of the ramifications on other jurisdictions, whether it be provincial legislatures or even other Commonwealth jurisdictions that have a parliamentary system.

We witnessed a very important ruling here today. It is important that we ensure that the matter gets dealt with in a timely fashion.

[Craig Scott, NDP, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I do not rise with a light heart to participate in this debate.

The member for Mississauga—Streetsville is a member of the committee on which I sit. I do want to make sure that I am as fair as I can possibly be.

I think it is important that we know a couple of things about the chronology, and that will help explain why the Speaker felt it was important that we actually have this matter go to committee.

The first thing is that the misleading statement was made twice on the same day, in more detail the first time and in general terms the second time.

The second thing is the retraction. I am not going to call it an apology because that is not the way it was phrased. It was a statement that what he had said before was not accurate. That is the way it was framed. It was 19 days later, on February 25.

We have 19 days and something that was said twice. It really does lead us into the territory of needing to know more from our hon. friend from Mississauga—Streetsville, which is why I think it is entirely appropriate that the Speaker believes this should be remitted to committee.

We do need to know because, to be fair to us, the member for Mississauga—Streetsville did not offer any serious explanation as to how it is that he could have made that kind of mistake. It clearly was misleading the House, so the impact is there. However, I think we have a right to know what was behind that, by way of a fuller explanation before the committee.

This is why I do take a different tack from my hon. colleagues across the way when they ask why we do not let water flow under the bridge and not pursue it any further. This is very important.

I do want to say that I was personally misled. I was not actually there for that part of what was said, but it got to me quite early on. I spent a little bit of time sending out emails, asking researchers to start looking for the real world evidence that what had been described in the House could have happened, asking if there had been reports to Elections Canada of this kind of behaviour, or if there was any social science evidence that what my colleague had said was true.

I believed him, in the sense that that was my presumption. It was only that evening when somebody, who was maybe paying more attention than I to exactly what had been said, wrote something as a journalist that let me know there was something wrong. Whatever the motivation was, this could not be right. That is simply because what was said did not make sense.

I am referring to an article by Justin Ling that was written the night of the two statements by my hon. colleague from Mississauga—Streetsville. It is called “Building Poilievre's Electoral Fraud in the Sky”. It is not about—

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[Craig Scott, NDP, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it does not refer to the minister engaging in fraud. It is how the minister is imagining fraud on the part of ordinary citizens.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

For the hon. member and all others, I just want to remind members that they cannot do indirectly what they cannot do directly. I did not quite follow the argument, but the bottom line is that members cannot use the names of other members in the House during their speeches.

[Craig Scott, NDP, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I do apologize. I thought the concern was that I was using the rest of the title. I was simply trying to get it on record for the sake of the translators. It was not intentional. I was unfortunately too clear.

I was referencing Mr. Ling in this piece just for accuracy's sake. It basically said the minister has yet to explain why he feels there is a danger of citizen fraud. He said that the minister had not explained, and then he said:

...[the] MP for Mississauga—Streetsville, made an attempt during the debate. He told the House that he's seen campaign workers scoop up piles of voter identification cards and then hand them out to dummy voters, and then take them all to the polls.

...unless...[the member for Mississauga—Streetsville] is a superspy, and was stalking those campaign workers (or, unless it was his campaign that was doing it) that's entirely absurd and made up.

You still need a second piece of ID to use those voter identification cards.... It has not been, nor can it be, the sole piece of identification for a voter.

The government should get props for expanding the list of usable IDs, but they've utterly failed to explain why these two changes are necessary.

It was only in reading this that I realized there were some internal contradictions, because the voter identification cards can be used, and have been in recent times in 2008 and 2011, along with another piece of ID. They are a second piece of ID, and they are there primarily to show the address, but they also have the person's name on them.

Therefore the idea is that all of these cards are coming into some, say, apartment buildings; and people receiving them, living in an apartment where it is addressed to a previous tenant, cannot do anything with it because they would then have to say, “I have just been mailed this. It has Joe Smith's name on it and my name is Jim Brown, and now I'm going to have to go and forge some other piece of identity in order to use that card that I just received randomly in the mail, not addressed to me, and put those two together so I can go vote and commit fraud”. It is just completely implausible. So Mr. Ling has picked up on that.

Then the rest of what my hon. colleague was referring to in a couple of his statements, including later on February 13 in PROC, was speculating, because at that point the hon. member was talking about how this was an anecdote. He had heard this about others. He was no longer referring to it as something he had seen. He was talking about how these people must have been taking the voter ID cards in order to go and vouch.

They are two different things. In fact, the minister in his testimony, in response, maybe to this question or maybe to another person's question, made it clear that there are two different things going on. Voter identification cards would be prohibited by Bill C-23. They need a second piece of ID; they are part of formally identifying oneself. Also, vouching is something that occurs without ID; one person is entitled to vouch for another under certain conditions.

So when our friend from Mississauga—Streetsville was, in both his original statements and later statements, linking voter identification cards to their being used to vouch, it just struck me that none of it was accurate, quite apart from whether the eyewitness part was correct. Therefore, I stopped running around, as I had been doing that afternoon and early evening, trying to figure out how much evidence there was of what our colleague had said. I want to make clear that, in a very real-world way, I was misled because I believed the member.

What I believe is going on is probably best captured by my colleague from Saskatchewan, the parliamentary secretary, when he said something about our all going overboard and then, “That is how we are conditioned”. I have only been here for two years, but I honestly do not believe everybody in this House is conditioned to torque, if that is the verb we are now going to use from our friend from Saskatchewan.

We can make mistakes. We can exaggerate, but when we go to the level of telling an eyewitness tale twice on the same day and not thinking the second time that the first time was not right and asking ourselves why we are saying it the second time, then we are in another universe. The universe we are in is that, one way or the other, the minister sponsoring the bill has a severe deficit of evidence when it comes to his professed concerns about fraud, by way of risk or some actuality, because of the use of voter identification cards and the practice of vouching, he would have us believe. He has not been able to come up with one piece of evidence other than a comedy stunt from Montreal.

Therefore, some of his colleagues came to the rescue and said that we need evidence. What better evidence than anecdotes? If it is not them doing this on their own, it could have well have been that there was some kind of a situation where folks were told that they had been around for a while and if they could not prove it, they should just say it anyway and call it anecdotes. That is what we have been getting. If we go through the record of the very short debate at second reading on Bill C-23, it was not simply my colleague from Mississauga—Streetsville who told his anecdote. That is what I am going to call it now. It is an anecdote that he misrepresented initially as an eyewitness account and later at committee indicated was an anecdote.

At some level when we are told to help create an evidentiary basis where there is no evidence, it creates the conditions for someone to step over the line. I went on record before the media a couple times saying I am not prepared to say this was a lie. It was a clear misleading. It was untruthful. I was being fairly harsh, but I said maybe he was just hallucinating, just fantasizing. However, one way or the other he was being stoked by the need somewhere to help the government provide evidence for the fact that it turned Bill C-23 into a bill that makes ordinary citizens a source of fraud in our elections and puts in deep second place organized fraud such as the sort that we do know has happened in our recent history through the activities or databases of at least one political party.

It is indisputable that Bill C-23 has turned everything on its head. The huge focus in it is on somehow cleaning up this problem of irregularities that then get spun as creating the risk of fraud. Initially the minister would have had people believe that irregularities were fraud until he realized that people caught on early that it was not a good connection to make.

My view of the statement that we are all conditioned, from my colleague from Saskatchewan, who I do really respect, is that I will accept that we are conditioned to act in a partisan and sometimes overly partisan way, but I have a very hard time accepting that there is some kind of universal conditioning of us as the elected representatives of Canadians to come anywhere close to uttering the inaccurate words of our friend from Mississauga—Streetsville.

It is very important to know that this is not a minor misleading. I am not here to just talk about the fact that I set off on a path to try to figure out how much truth there was in it. It was partially corrected, 19 days later, because the retraction did not retract everything he said. I will come to that if I have time.

The fact of the matter is that this statement single-handedly would have created the impression, once it was reported, and it was reported among many Canadians paying attention, that there was that kind of problem he presented.

He was an eyewitness, a member of Parliament, to people taking voter cards that had been discarded, probably because they were mis-addressed or someone was so upset with our political system that they had no intention of voting, or something along those lines, and somehow ending up at unnamed campaign offices and handing those out to unnamed individuals. Then, at that point, the eyewitness stuff stops and there is some supposition that they are then used to vote, with the mistaken association between that and using the card for vouching, which I have already explained would be a mistake.

Huge confusion was created by that statement.

I realized this only because I happened to read Mr. Ling's paragraphs that told me that this did not work internally and that it was therefore probably not true. For some 19 days, journalists and Canadians were paying attention to this and wondering how true or not it was. It was serious.

I have to add that it does not make it a whole lot better that two weeks later, 17 days later, our colleague in PROC transformed what had been an eyewitness story into an “I have heard” story. It was really just a matter of saying, “Okay, I'm going to stand my ground. I should have told this as an anecdote. However little evidence there was for it, I am now going to tell it as an anecdote.” He did not just give it a rest and say he had said something extraordinarily inaccurate and step back and not keep digging with his example, especially as a member of PROC, which was considering the bill. He did not.

I think it actually helps to circle back on the fact that, on the government side of House, one way or another, MPs are being encouraged to live in a world of anecdotes to try to give some evidentiary foundations that are not there for a decision by the current government to prohibit the use of voter identification cards and vouching.

It is not a small thing. The figure that everyone in the House probably can recite by heart is that there were 120,000 instances of vouching in 2011.

People may not know there were over 800,000 uses of the voter identification card by seniors and residents of long-term convalescent homes, and by something like 75,000 by aboriginal persons on reserve. Moreover, of the students who were given the opportunity, in a whole series of campus experiments, 62% of them used that opportunity to use the voter identification card as a second piece of ID.

In no instance that I am aware of, and I would love to hear the evidence to the contrary, was there any hint that in any one of those virtually one million there was any fraud. There was not one hint or instance of the one million Canadians using voter identification cards having somehow been involved in fraud.

That goes to what I was saying earlier. Unfortunately, the words of our colleague, the member for Mississauga—Streetsville, did have an impact because they made it look as if that enfranchising practice by Elections Canada was subject to fraud. Elections Canada had determined that it would start using, on an experimental basis, in 2008, which it then expanded in 2011, voter identification cards as a second piece of ID because it was the easiest way, in some instances, to show an address.

However, the member, in one fell swoop, undermined that whole system and indirectly created confusion because the average person had no idea that a voter identification card could not be used on its own. He created confusion, as well, when he somehow indicated that the single card had something to do with vouching, which it had nothing to do with.

I will end there by just going back to my original point, which is that the Speaker has made a correct ruling that this does need to go to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. We are all owed a more fulsome explanation than we have received.

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of International Trade]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Toronto—Danforth, who has clearly taken the time both to read the bill and pore over the Neufeld report.

My question is a deeper one based on his comments apparently recognizing the error rates. He quoted some of the error rates involved in vouching. Whether those error rates are a result of fraud or just error in the system is not ascertained in the reports, but the error rates are there nonetheless. What he is referring to is the voter ID card, which has been a pilot in recent years. It has not been a staple of elections in Canada for the last generation, but as a pilot in the last two elections, and the cards themselves have a one-sixth error rate.

The bigger question I would like to ask the hon. member is this. In the modern age, there are multiple forms of voter identification, 39 different types of identification. Vouching comes from an age when there was no such photo identification, when there were no such measures. Is it not time we recognize that those inherent error rates, whether fraudulent or not, are not appropriate in a democracy?

[Craig Scott, NDP, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Mr. Speaker, with great respect to my colleague, the question really goes to the substance of Bill C-23.

My colleague cited a statistic that is part of the tapestry of the lack of evidence. The idea is that one-sixth of voter identification cards are in error. It took us ages to figure out exactly what the minister had been referring to when he used that figure. Apparently, 84%, according to Elections Canada reports, are up to date and accurate in the sense that when those cards are sent out, they reach 84% of the people they are intended to reach.

However, what is the significance of the other 16%? It is that people who would have been alerted to the fact that there is an election do not receive them. That is a problem in the sense that it might mean there is much less of a chance that they are going to vote. However, it has no relationship to the potential for fraud, no relationship whatsoever, because the person receiving it has just moved into the house or apartment and does not know was living there before until maybe seeing this. What is he or she going to do with it? Is he or she going to somehow turn into a citizen fraudster because Elections Canada sent the wrong card and the person is going to forge a second piece of ID to use that with? No. That is why the one-sixth figure coming from the minister is itself inaccurate. It is a figure, but it is deliberately not helping people understand the reality. I will not use another word.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, what has been very disturbing today is the position taken by the Conservative Party that the NDP has somehow broken the old boys system that we all torque or embellish things—nudge-nudge, wink-wink—that this is what we are conditioned to do. However, we are talking about lying in the House of Commons. I do not believe that should be considered a common thing.

There is a very high threshold for contempt and one of the key elements for finding contempt is an attempt to mislead the House. Here I would like to ask my hon. colleague a question, given his background in constitutional law. When a member walks into the House when the legislation being discussed actually impedes the rights of Canadians to vote, and then that member claims to have witnessed a crime that never occurred, does my hon. colleague believe this is something we should consider an everyday occurrence, that if we just make up crimes we say we witnessed but did not see, it is an ordinary action in the House? Or does that meet the threshold for misleading the House and interfering with the work of legislators in creating the laws of this country?

[Craig Scott, NDP, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is important to go back to my opening comments about how this is serious in terms of its content and who was potentially misled, and that includes all Canadians.

Anyone listening to the debate and hearing this being associated with conditioning or a common political acculturated condition is not going to feel much better about their political classes. The question is bang on in the sense that I would ask that we please not be included in this characterization, that people please not include me, and I am assuming my colleague, with the idea that we have been acculturated and conditioned to somehow or other saying these sorts of things. Canadians would be shocked if that were the case.

We have enough problems with the nature of our political discourse, how incredibly oversimplified, dumbed-down, and sometimes nasty and distorted it can be, without the idea that we are conditioned to engage in making misleading statements.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

Mr. Speaker, my understanding is that the hon. member for Mississauga—Streetsville apologized to the House and voluntarily corrected the record. This is not the first time a member has had to correct the record and apologize to the House.

I am very concerned about our creating an environment in the House of punishing members. I am concerned about punishing a member of Parliament on any side of the House if that person comes forward and corrects the record and apologizes for making a mistake. Is that the environment of co-operation that the NDP has been talking about for many years?

[Craig Scott, NDP, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is very important that my colleague know the exact retractions made by our colleague on February 24:

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order with respect to debate that took place on February 6 in this House regarding the fair elections act.

I made a statement in the House during the debate that is not accurate. I just want to reflect the fact that I have not personally witnessed individuals retrieving voter notification cards from the garbage cans or from the mailbox areas of apartment buildings. I have not personally witnessed that activity and want the record to properly show that.

That was not an apology. We must keep in mind that our colleague said it twice. If this had been phrased as an apology, we might be in a different universe. We might not have had a question of privilege. It was simply a matter of, “I want to correct the record”.

Saying “I want to correct the record” is not an apology.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is a great honour, as always, to rise in the House and represent the people of Timmins—James Bay.

I have to say that this is not a happy night because it represents yet another lowering level within the House under the Conservative government in its abuse of the Westminster system that we certainly hold dear.

When I say that it is an honour and a privilege to rise and represent the people of Timmins—James Bay, it is because they choose to have me here and they will choose some day if I am not to be here. I respect that. I understand that I have certain obligations to fulfill while I am here.

There are certain words we use. We use the word “privilege”. It is an interesting word. We have privileges as members of Parliament. For example, we have privileges that protect us from libel so that in certain instances, when a question or comment is heated, within the House we are able to debate that. Sometimes, questions have to be asked that may later turn out to be unfounded, but our role as parliamentarians is to question and to find out whether the people of Canada are being represented. We have to have certain privileges to keep us able to do that job.

However, with privilege comes a clear responsibility. My hon. colleagues on the other side may not realize it, but we are legislators. Our job is to create the laws of Canada. We are part of a larger legislative system, the Westminster tradition. What is decided here, in terms of precedent, is looked at in other parliamentary democracies.

One of our key responsibilities as members of Parliament is to speak truthfully in the House, meaning not to lie. That does not mean to use embellishment, to exaggerate, to zigzag, or to avoid. That all happens within the House, but the obligation to not lie is a fundamental principle because to lie is to mislead the work of parliamentarians.

We have to look at this situation and put it in context. The threshold for finding someone in a prima facie case of contempt is very rare. People apologize in the House for saying all manner of things, all the time. After they make their apology, that is considered the end of it.

I think back to 2006 and Jim Prentice, who was also from Timmins. I think I used colourful language about certain human behaviour in a washroom when I thought of his response. I later said that it was not appropriate and I apologized. That was colourful, but that is different from attempting to mislead the work of Parliament and attempting to undermine it.

If we look up the word “contempt” in the dictionary, parliamentary contempt is interference with the work of Parliament.

The three criteria found against the member for Mississauga—Streetsville are as follows. First, he made a statement that was false. In fact, he did not say it once; he said it twice. Second, he knew that it was misleading. Third, he did it in an attempt to mislead the House.

Let us look at what he did. We are dealing with a bill, this voter suppression act, which is a very disturbing piece of legislation because what the government has decided to do does not deal with the issues that came out of the 2011 election, of widespread issues of voter suppression and voter fraud through robocalls. It was judged in the Canadian court system and it was found that there were numerous cases of interference in the right to vote, traced back to the Conservative database. Elections Canada was not able to identify the actual perpetrators because the Conservative Party interfered by not putting up any witnesses and interfered with Elections Canada's attempt to find witnesses. All we know from that court finding was that across Canada, in key ridings, attempts were made to deny Canadians their right to vote, and the Conservative database was used.

One would think that clearing up the Elections Act would be to ensure that Elections Canada has the power to subpoena witnesses and to go in and examine who had access to the database where actual fraud occurred.

However, the bill does not deal with that at all. What it does is to flip the issue. We are not talking in the House any longer about known cases of voter suppression and voter fraud by unknown Conservative operatives. Now the onus is on average Canadians. The government is telling us is that it is average Canadians who are defrauding the system. There has not been one case brought forward that the Conservatives could point to. That is a problem, because we have numerous instances, and I could name the ridings, where we know that voter fraud happened through robocalls. However, they cannot give one instance of a Canadian citizen interfering, undermining, or voting fraudulently.

This gets to the issue of motivation. The member for Mississauga—Streetsville stood up in the House and claimed to have witnessed a crime. That is an extraordinary thing. My colleagues on the other side are telling us that this is perfectly okay. They say we all torque or embellish, and that is how they are conditioned. I do not know how it is seen as perfectly okay to walk into a legislature, where laws are being decided, and claim to have witnessed a crime that never occurred. That is what the member for Mississauga—Streetsville said. He said that he witnessed people picking up voter cards, going to the campaign office of whatever candidate they supported and handing out the voter cards to other individuals, who then walked into voting stations with no ID and with friends who vouched for them. He said that he personally witnessed this crime.

He then said later that he would relate something that he had actually seen. He claimed to have witnessed a crime. He said he had seen campaign workers pick up a dozen of these cards and walk out. What were they doing? When one stands up and attempts to mislead the House by claiming to have evidence when no evidence exists, claims to have witnessed crimes that never occurred, one has shown absolute contempt for the work of this Parliament and for the people who elect them.

Our Conservative colleagues are saying that we are all conditioned to do that. I do not believe we are all conditioned to do that. They say that we all torque and embellish. I do not believe that we are here to lie to Canadians. I do not believe that lying has any place in the House of Commons, and it certainly does not. This is what the parliamentary tradition tells us. However, the Conservatives are telling us that this is the way things are done and that New Democrats are being mean for having pointed it out.

This is not the first time that they have made up these kinds of claims. The present Minister of Heritage, on May 3, 2012, claimed to have witnessed a crime because she was under the gun for allegations that robofraud had happened in her own riding against the other parties. She claimed, “...Hey, I got a live call and was told to go to another polling station”. That is serious. If she knew voter fraud was occurring it would be incumbent upon her to call the authorities. When she was pressed about where that voter fraud from other parties happened in her riding then she retracted and said she was sorry, that maybe she had misspoken. This is serious. We are talking about whether or not crimes have occurred.

This is about a larger issue of abuse of our parliamentary system. It is about undermining the work of committees, which has gone on since the government received its majority mandate. It is about creating reports based on evidence when there is no evidence. We saw recently, with the conflict of interest study, where the government completely gutted the basic principles of the accountability act and put recommendations into the report that were never heard. Witness after witness said we needed to strengthen the Conflict of Interest Act, and the Conservative government members came to the committee and made up recommendations out of thin air and then passed them at committee. That is what is happening in terms of undermining.

Why is this serious? It is because in the Westminster tradition we do not have all the checks and balances that they have in the U.S. legislative system. There is an understanding that people will act with a certain degree of honour and that it is within committees where we are supposed to work together.

We see now Bill C-520, with which the member for York Centre would bring in power so that Conservatives who were under investigation could demand investigations of the Auditor General and Conservatives who were under investigation for abusing the Lobbying Act could demand investigations of the Lobbying Commissioner.

There is not a Parliament anywhere in the western world where those under investigation get to write laws to allow them to open investigations into the people whose job is to hold parliamentarians and lobbyists to account. However, in this topsy-turvy Conservative world, Conservatives believe that this bill is imperative.

I asked the member for York Centre the other day if he had one example to back up this bill and claims about agents of Parliament such as on the Auditor General, who was investigating his friends in the Senate, or the Ethics Commissioner, who has investigated his friends on the Conservative front bench, or Elections Canada, which is under attack from the Conservative government with the false claim that it is wearing a team jersey. I asked the member if he could give me one example, but he could not.

This is about creating a pattern of governing without evidence. That is a serious breach, because if we do not base the rule of law on evidence, then there is no proper rule of law.

I ask you, Mr. Speaker, to consider what happened to the party over there that promised accountability. I think of the minority response from the Canadian Alliance to the case of contempt found against the Liberals. This is what the Canadian Alliance said at the time said. I am holding up a moral mirror for those members to look into, but I do not think any of them want to look up.

This contempt cannot be dismissed as mere forgetfulness that might occur in the heat of questioning. It is instead a deliberate attempt to mislead....

Parliament cannot exercise that vigilance when it is misled or lied to. To mislead Parliament shows contempt for Parliament. It must not be tolerated at any time....

This is what we are talking about today. We are talking about a member who came into the House, not once but twice, and lied about witnessing crimes that never occurred. He then waited 19 days to correct the record. He never apologized. The honourable thing to do when one makes a mistake is to apologize, but he never apologized.

If a member stands in the House and claims to have witnessed crimes and does not follow through, then that member is certainly culpable. I still call my hon. colleague “honourable”, even though what he has done is very dishonourable. If the hon. member for Mississauga—Streetsville claimed to have witnessed a crime and was emphatic that he saw fraud being committed, then he had a legal responsibility to report it. However, he did not, because he was making it up. He put himself in a very difficult position as a spokesperson for the Conservative government on a bill that would take away basic rights from Canadians to vote, because he did so on the premise that he witnessed crimes that had never occurred.

According to the Westminster tradition, the decision that will be made by the committee will have to look beyond the narrow interests of the Conservative war machine. I am very disturbed about their willingness to do this, because we have seen time and time again that the Conservatives put their narrow interests ahead of the larger obligation that we all have as parliamentarians. We saw it with Bev Oda, a disgraced minister who was found in contempt of Parliament for lying. Were there any consequences? No, there were not.

We found that the Conservative government prorogued Parliament, shut it down, to stop an inquiry into abuse of Afghan detainees. That report has never really been dealt with, and it still remains a black mark on Canada because it was not dealt with. The Conservatives actually shut down the work of Parliament rather than get to the bottom of whether or not this happened.

We remember the other prorogation, when the Conservatives shut down the work of Parliament in order to avoid a non-confidence vote. It is a larger contempt for democratic privileges that we are seeing here.

If we see the Conservative government attempt to shut down debate in this House about whether or not it is okay to come in and lie while a proposed law is being debated, it will set a precedent that will show other countries in the parliamentary system that Canada holds the parliamentary tradition very cheap. I think members would agree with me that we need a higher standard.

I have heard all manner of prevarications from the Conservatives tonight about how we are all supposed to get together and show respect for one another. I would love to believe that, but it is like being invited to a picnic with alligators. I just do not believe it.

I have seen in committee work that every good amendment brought forward is routinely rejected. The basic work of Parliament is always in camera so that the Conservatives can abuse their majority. Conservative members do not show any interest in working with the other parties.

To Conservatives, colourful is the same as lying. It is not. Passion is not the same as misrepresenting the truth. They say that everyone embellishes and everyone torques. That is simply not true.

[Gerald Keddy, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margaret's, NS]

A lie is a lie, Charlie. It does not matter how you say it. A lie is a lie. What are you talking about? If you lie because you have the protection of the House, it is still a lie.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Stand up. Tell me I am a liar.