House of Commons Hansard #67 of the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament's site.) The word of the day was commissioner.

Topics

Presence in GalleryOral Questions

3:10 p.m.

Conservative

The Speaker Conservative Andrew Scheer

That concludes question period for today.

I would like to draw the attention of hon. members to the presence in the gallery of two finalists for the 2014 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing: Charles Montgomery and Paul Wells.

Presence in GalleryOral Questions

3:10 p.m.

Some hon. members

Hear, hear!

Business of the HouseOral Questions

3:10 p.m.

Liberal

John McKay Liberal Scarborough—Guildwood, ON

Mr. Speaker, as you know, Bill C-474 is the only vote that is up for tonight. It does seem like a misallocation of resources to call the members in for one vote. Therefore, as there has been discussions among the parties, I wonder if you would seek consent to the following motion. I move:

That the deferred recorded division at the second reading stage of Bill C-474, An Act respecting the promotion of financial transparency, improved accountability and long-term economic sustainability through the public reporting of payments made by mining, oil and gas corporations to foreign governments later today be further deferred to Wednesday, April 9, 2014, immediately before the time provided for Private Members' Business.

Business of the HouseOral Questions

3:10 p.m.

Conservative

The Speaker Conservative Andrew Scheer

Does the hon. member have the unanimous consent of the House to propose this motion?

Business of the HouseOral Questions

3:10 p.m.

Some hon. members

Agreed.

Business of the HouseOral Questions

3:10 p.m.

Conservative

The Speaker Conservative Andrew Scheer

The House has heard the terms of the motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?

Business of the HouseOral Questions

3:10 p.m.

Some hon. members

Agreed.

Business of the HouseOral Questions

3:10 p.m.

Conservative

The Speaker Conservative Andrew Scheer

(Motion agreed to)

Scarborough—AgincourtVacancyOral Questions

3:10 p.m.

Conservative

The Speaker Conservative Andrew Scheer

It is my duty to inform the House that a vacancy has occurred in the representation, namely Mr. Karygiannis, member for the electoral district of Scarborough—Agincourt, by resignation effective Tuesday, April 1, 2014.

Pursuant to paragraph 25(1)(b) of the Parliament of Canada Act, I have addressed my warrant to the Chief Electoral Officer for the issue of a writ for the election of a member to fill this vacancy.

The hon. member for Cape Breton—Canso is rising on a point of order.

Scarborough—AgincourtVacancyOral Questions

3:10 p.m.

Liberal

Rodger Cuzner Liberal Cape Breton—Canso, NS

Mr. Speaker, if we are looking at saving resources here, I would suggest, if I could find unanimous consent, that the ministers who rely totally on their talking points and get up and read them into the record could table—

Scarborough—AgincourtVacancyOral Questions

3:10 p.m.

Conservative

The Speaker Conservative Andrew Scheer

Order.

Canadian Human Rights TribunalRoutine Proceedings

3:10 p.m.

Conservative

The Speaker Conservative Andrew Scheer

I have the honour to lay upon the table, pursuant to subsection 61(4) of the Canadian Human Rights Act, the 2013 Canadian Human Rights Tribunal annual report.

Interparliamentary DelegationsRoutine Proceedings

April 2nd, 2014 / 3:10 p.m.

Liberal

Mauril Bélanger Liberal Ottawa—Vanier, ON

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 34(1), I have the honour to present to the House, in both official languages, the report of the Canadian Parliamentary delegation of the Canada-Africa Parliamentary Association respecting its bilateral mission to Morocco and Republic of Côte d'Ivoire from September 29 to October 5, 2013.

Interparliamentary DelegationsRoutine Proceedings

3:10 p.m.

Conservative

Mike Wallace Conservative Burlington, ON

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 34(1), I have the honour to present to the House, in both official languages, the report of the delegation of the Canada-Japan Inter-parliamentary Group respecting its participation in the co-chairs' annual visit held in Tokyo, Japan, from February 19 to 24, 2011.

Scrutiny of RegulationsCommittees of the HouseRoutine Proceedings

3:15 p.m.

NDP

Chris Charlton NDP Hamilton Mountain, ON

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the third report of the Standing Joint Committee on Scrutiny of Regulations, in relation to the review of statutory instruments.

Public Safety and National SecurityCommittees of the HouseRoutine Proceedings

3:15 p.m.

Conservative

Daryl Kramp Conservative Prince Edward—Hastings, ON

Mr. Speaker, today I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the third report of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, in relation to Bill C-483, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act (escorted temporary absence), from the member for Oxford.

The committee has studied this bill and has decided to report the bill back to the House with amendments.

Public AccountsCommittees of the HouseRoutine Proceedings

3:15 p.m.

NDP

David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, three reports of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts. The first report is on the Public Accounts of Canada, 2013; the second is on chapter 5, “Preventing Illegal Entry into Canada”, of the fall 2013 report of the Auditor General of Canada; and the third is on the main estimates 2014-15, vote 1, under Auditor General.

Pursuant to Standing Order 109 of the House of Commons, the committee requests the government table a comprehensive response to the second report only.

Instruction to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs Regarding Bill C-23Routine Proceedings

3:15 p.m.

NDP

Craig Scott NDP Toronto—Danforth, ON

moved:

That it be an instruction to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs that, during its consideration of Bill C-23, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to other Acts, the Committee be granted the power to expand the scope of the Bill in order to strengthen the role of the Commissioner of Canada Elections by allowing the Commissioner to seek relief through the courts to compel testimony.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by mentioning that I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Louis-Saint-Laurent, who seconded the motion.

The reason for the motion today, just to give some background, is that our attempt to have Bill C-23—the so-called fair elections act, but what New Democrats are calling the unfair elections act—channelled to the committee after first reading, at which time the bill could be more open to amendment, failed. Our attempt in the House did not receive unanimous consent.

There is concern that some areas of the bill that should be subject to amendment may not be because the admissibility rules in the House with respect to committee amendments are a little arcane, to put it mildly. They are complex. The clerks do their best to enforce the rules, but I am not completely certain I am going to get a ruling on admissibility on this point, that the Commissioner of Canada Elections be able to go to court to seek relief to compel testimony of witnesses. Therefore, out of some kind of excess of caution, we are seeking a motion of instruction from the House to permit such an amendment.

All this motion would do is permit the amendment. It does not say the amendment would occur. It would simply allow the committee to consider this kind of matter, and in committee, if the majority declines to adopt the amendment, that will determine it. However, what we do not want to have happen, after all the witnesses who appeared suggesting that the power to compel testimony through a judicial order be included in the bill, is for that to be ruled out of court from the beginning as beyond the scope of the bill. That is the reason I am standing in my place at the moment.

I also want to provide a bit of context.

Last night one of several witnesses, the current Commissioner of Canada Elections, Mr. Côté, appeared, and in no uncertain terms gave support to the Chief Electoral Officer, Mr. Mayrand, and other witnesses, who have said it is absolutely, as he put it last night, “essential to give the Commissioner the ability to seek a court order to compel testimony”. This is something that was in both the commissioner's 2012-13 report and the report entitled “Preventing Deceptive Communications with Electors” by the Chief Electoral Officer, and it comes from painful experience.

The commissioner and the Chief Electoral Officer are all too aware of how difficult it has been to have witnesses, who are themselves not suspect but are members of a political party, actually talk to investigators. The context of the Commissioner of Canada Elections' report is at page 13. Although he is talking in general terms, nobody in the House is under any illusion that he is talking about anything but the investigation into the fraudulent calls that occurred in 2011. He stated:

When investigating matters where the stakes are perceived as significant...investigators often face reluctant witnesses. Frequently, key individuals will simply refuse to be interviewed or they will initially accept, only to later decline. In some cases, they will participate in interviews but will provide only partial information and incomplete answers, often citing a faulty recollection of events or the inability to retrieve key documents. In other cases, a potential witness will profess a complete willingness to cooperate, but the process will take time – resulting in information being provided slowly and in an incomplete fashion.

He goes on to explain why the model in the Competition Act, which is a model very similar to over half of the provincial elections acts, should be adopted by the Canada Elections Act. Basically, it allows for the chief investigative officer within the Canada Elections Act system, the commissioner, to go to court to show that there is a need for witnesses to be forthcoming and to receive a judicial order for witnesses to indeed testify to investigators, with important safeguards.

Three of them were listed in the testimony last night by Mr. Côté, as follows: one, a prior judicial authorization, based on affidavit evidence showing that the person likely has information relevant to an investigation of an offence under the Canada Elections Act; two, the right to be assisted by counsel and to have counsel present at the interview; and three, the right not to have the evidence used against the person—this is obviously very important—who is required to testify. These are basically safeguards taken from the Competition Act.

The commissioner said, “These safeguards would present, in my view, a balanced approach to ensuring more effective enforcement.”

Here is probably the most important and most forceful statement by the Commissioner of Canada Elections last night about the need. He said, “I want to be absolutely clear: if this amendment is not made, investigations will continue to take time, and in some cases a lot of time. And, importantly, some will simply abort due to our inability to get at the facts.”

I grant to the minister that the new voter registry that would be overseen by the CRTC would be beneficial and get us somewhere within the legitimate telecom system, but what has become very clear is that however much that is true, there are all kinds of reasons to know that those who are technologically sophisticated know how to get around the system, effectively setting up proxy servers in their basements or in other countries and not ever having to use the legitimate system.

If that is the case, it is all the more necessary that the investigative powers of the Commissioner of Canada Elections be bolstered in exactly the way that he and the Chief Electoral Officer have requested for the last two or three years in light of their experience of all the recalcitrance and all the resistance they have received investigating the fraudulent calling scheme that undermined the 2011 election.

We only discovered with clarity yesterday, when we were asking questions of witnesses from the CRTC in committee, how important this could be in terms of the internal limits of the voter contact registry. It turns out that although calls are defined as including live voice calls, there is an exclusion for live voice calls from any group or person as long as that group or person is using internal services.

Let us forget about the minister's image of the grandmother at the local level calling with regard to lawn signs. The concern is the national party with its capacity to have internal services for live voice calls. What are live voice calls normally used for? They are usually used for not just getting out the vote and that kind of stuff. They have to be used for fundraising.

There is another exception in the bill. This one would allow for fundraising calls to anybody who has given $20 or more in the last five years to be exempted from the expense ceiling, which basically means that a whole operation has to be set up at the national level to make those phone calls. We have been concerned from the beginning that those calls could be a cloak for all other kinds of pitches to be made under the guise of fundraising requests. What we have found is that such live calls at the national level, using a national phone bank that is part of the internal services of a party, are not part of the CRTC's regime. The CRTC testified that this is an exclusion. Live voice calls coming from external telecom providers would be, but not those from the national party.

We have no problem with making sure there is no red tape for grandmothers helping out at the local level by calling for lawn signs. Our concern is at the national level, with the phone bank problem of live calls using that exemption for fundraising as a Trojan Horse that will be completely unmonitorable because it is not part of the CRTC regime and because the Chief Electoral Officer has already testified that he cannot monitor it.

One of the reasons it is so important to have the power to compel testimony through a judicial order is that the voter contact registry is only going to go so far. It is only going to provide prevention and detection for a certain kind of person who unwittingly uses the system, not the sophisticated rogue who now knows that legitimate telecom operators cannot be used to call perhaps hundreds of thousands of numbers and who would use available technology to skirt that system. The system is not useless, but it would do almost nothing for the knowledgeable, technologically sophisticated rogue, especially using offshore resources, to call into elections.

Therefore the back-end investigation is all the more important, and therefore the power to compel testimony of witnesses through a judicial order is an absolute must as an amendment to Bill C-23. Out of an excess of caution, I am asking the House through this motion for instruction to allow PROC to amend the bill in this respect to give us that authority if the committee agrees in its discussions that it is a valid amendment.

Instruction to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs Regarding Bill C-23Routine Proceedings

3:25 p.m.

NDP

Alexandrine Latendresse NDP Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech and for moving this motion today, because this is now an extremely difficult situation.

This government has introduced a bill to amend the Canada Elections Act without consulting anyone. It introduced this bill without talking to Elections Canada, the commissioner or anyone, other than Conservative colleagues. All the experts agree that this bill will simply help the Conservatives take in more votes in 2015.

As for the commissioner's power to compel, I was there yesterday with my colleague when the current and former commissioners explained how they think this change is a step in the wrong direction.

I would like to hear more from my colleague about how our colleagues reacted to this claim that the commissioner himself made yesterday. He said that this was a very bad idea and that it will undermine his independence. The Conservatives simply keep saying that, on the contrary, it will make him more independent, as we heard the minister claim again today.

I would like to try to understand how we are living in a kind of Orwellian world, in which someone says something and the Conservatives seem to completely ignore the comments and do the exact opposite.

Instruction to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs Regarding Bill C-23Routine Proceedings

3:25 p.m.

NDP

Craig Scott NDP Toronto—Danforth, ON

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for the question.

Indeed, that is exactly the case. Yesterday evening, my committee colleagues did not care that expert witnesses were stating very clearly that the Office of the Commissioner must absolutely be kept within Elections Canada.

I do not know exactly how to say this, except that it was as though the witnesses were completely worthless. So why bother? That is what I am wondering.

Instruction to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs Regarding Bill C-23Routine Proceedings

3:30 p.m.

Liberal

Kevin Lamoureux Liberal Winnipeg North, MB

Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the member, more in regard to the process.

We are of the opinion that we are in fact able to move amendments in regard to the compelling of a witness. Whether it is me or the Liberal Party critic dealing with the legislation we have before the committee now, we are preparing and developing amendments.

The motion is good, if the member is trying to seek clarification, but let there be no doubt that from the Liberal Party's perspective we believe it is absolutely critical and essential and that this bill would be fundamentally flawed if it were not amended to allow the commissioner to compel witnesses. It is that simple.

It is a fundamentally flawed piece of the legislation if the commissioner is not able to compel witnesses. Is it the NDP's opinion that an amendment of that nature would be beyond the scope of the legislation? We do not necessarily share that concern.

Our concern is that, when the critic is afforded the opportunity to bring forward the amendments, we have an adequate amount of time. We are concerned about more time. I think all Canadians share that concern with us.

Would the member want to pick up on that point? We do not agree with—

Instruction to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs Regarding Bill C-23Routine Proceedings

3:30 p.m.

Conservative

The Acting Speaker Conservative Barry Devolin

The hon. member for Toronto—Danforth.

Instruction to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs Regarding Bill C-23Routine Proceedings

3:30 p.m.

NDP

Craig Scott NDP Toronto—Danforth, ON

Mr. Speaker, I understand I have very limited time.

I do want to assuage my colleague's concerns. I started by saying that this is being moved as an excess of caution because of the complexity of the rules. Quite often we end up being almost bushwhacked in committee by amendments that are not permitted.

We have the same view as the member for Winnipeg North, that an amendment allowing the power to compel would be admissible, would be within the scope of the bill. I personally have no doubt about that, but I worry from past experience about rulings on admissibility that nobody could expect.

This amendment is so important, and I think we agree on this. We want to make it absolutely clear.

If our colleagues across the way actually vote down this motion of instruction, it will have no effect in law. The admissibility clerk will still tell us one way or the other whether it is included, but our colleagues across the way can help ensure, for the sake of a better democratic process, that we are not going to get into admissibility discussions in the committee, that there will be no doubt whatsoever.

Instruction to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs Regarding Bill C-23Routine Proceedings

3:30 p.m.

Conservative

The Acting Speaker Conservative Barry Devolin

Resuming debate, the hon. member for Louis-Saint-Laurent.

Instruction to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs Regarding Bill C-23Routine Proceedings

3:30 p.m.

Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre Saskatchewan

Conservative

Tom Lukiwski ConservativeParliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I saw quite clearly, when you asked for resuming debate, that the member for Etobicoke—Lakeshore, was standing before the member opposite. Therefore, I move:

That, the Honourable Member for Etobicoke—Lakeshore be now heard.