Procedure and House Affairs committee  From here it's good afternoon. Good morning to you.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thanks everyone. I will be making my presentation in English, but I am certainly prepared to answer any questions in French. I'd like to thank you all for inviting me. I'm very pleased to have the opportunity to address this committee, and I'm very pleased that the government has decided to move forward in this area.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The definition of exceptional circumstances is not a simple one, and I would have liked to see some attempt in the drafting of the law. My ideal would be something like the German system, where in a majority system you'd still need a vote of non-confidence. This would mean the government would have to engineer a vote of non-confidence from its own members, which would take really extraordinary circumstances for it to act.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I'll defer to Professor Heard.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I don't agree, because an election is not simply a way in which political leaders can use Parliament to impose their will. An election belongs to the people. An understanding should be built into the law to say that as long as the government maintains the confidence of the majority of the members of Parliament, it cannot bring about a premature election.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Well, as I said--and I won't try to repeat myself--I assumed that this would be in the bill, and when it wasn't there, I found myself in a quandary, because it's not the sort of thing.... I'm not experienced at drawing up laws. Something that would say that elections in Canada take place under the following conditions unless a government loses the confidence of the House, at which time the Governor General, on advice, will call an election at another date struck me as a natural way to set up the law.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Can I answer that?

Procedure and House Affairs committee  There is no evidence of the kind you ask, mainly because we have very few examples of recent changes of the kind you describe. Since most countries use fixed elections, to isolate fixed versus unfixed and look at the different voting turnouts would not work statistically. There are two points I'd like to make on this.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  No, I can't imagine. For example, the United States has fixed election dates and their voting turnout records are fairly low, but there are a whole bunch of reasons for that. Frankly, I think if they didn't have fixed election dates in the U.S., they'd have at least as low, if not lower, turnout.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think that to some extent this is an unreal question. I don't see why we have to be so precise that every possible situation is somehow made explicit. If we say that no election will be called unless the government loses the confidence of the House, if we find the appropriate parliamentary language for saying that, then I think that would be sufficient.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  No, not on that particular matter.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Let me try to answer with a very concrete example about which we now have more information. This begins with something that began in the United States, was taken up in Canada, and I've now heard they do this in Sweden as well. That is, they run mock elections in the schools at the time of the regular elections and they use it to inform young people about the elections.