Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his comments and question.
That is one of the major problems with this bill. It is a strategy that the Conservatives borrowed from the Republicans in the United States and used during the last election. The Bush administration used this strategy in 2001. The Conservatives looked at this strategy and knew that it would work to call voters to discourage them and tell them that the polling station had moved, when that was not true, and send them in the wrong direction. One in three people who received that type of call did not vote because they thought the polling station was too far away, for instance.
After this scandal, Elections Canada showed that the Chief Electoral Officer did not have the power to investigate or compel witnesses to testify. He did not get the desired co-operation from the government and, as such, Elections Canada could prove only that the Conservatives' database was at the origin of this scandal.