Bill C-31 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and the Public Service Employment Act

This enactment amends the Canada Elections Act to improve the integrity of the electoral process by reducing the opportunity for electoral fraud or error. It requires that electors, before voting, provide one piece of government-issued photo identification showing their name and address or two pieces of identification authorized by the Chief Electoral Officer showing their name and address, or take an oath and be vouched for by another elector.
It also amends the Canada Elections Act to, among other things, make operational changes to improve the accuracy of the National Register of Electors, facilitate voting and enhance communications with the electorate.
It amends the Public Service Employment Act to permit the Public Service Commission to make regulations to extend the maximum term of employment of casual workers.

Canada Elections Act

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to enter into the debate on Bill C-31. I would like to bring the perspective of the good people of Winnipeg Centre into this debate and I will try to accurately portray the views that I am getting from the area that I represent.

Let me say at the outset that we believe this new election law will be bad for voters and bad for the voters in the riding that I represent in a disproportionate way perhaps because it is, and I say this with no sense of pride, the poorest riding in Canada.

Low income people will be disproportionately disadvantaged by the provisions of this law, mark my words. I will make this point today, but I think we will be hearing a lot more about it in subsequent charter challenges. I say that without any hesitation or fear of contradiction. This will be challenged as a Charter of Rights and Freedoms issue.

Let me remind members of Parliament here today that section 3 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms says:

Every citizen of Canada has the right to vote in an election of members of the House of Commons or of a legislative assembly and to be qualified for membership therein.

This is a fundamental basic right and freedom that we established in this country. Persons wiser than I have said that the highest duty bestowed on anyone is that of a citizen in a democracy, and key and integral to that is the right and duty to participate fully in that democracy. That means exercising one's franchise to vote.

My colleague, the hon. member for Ottawa Centre, in his remarks in the House of Commons dealing with Bill C-31, quoted Alfred E. Smith, a former governor of New York, a famous populist and champion of child labour issues, et cetera. His famous quote was, “All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy”. There is no such thing as too much democracy.

Some of us are concerned that perhaps democracy was just a moment in history and in time. There are those of us who believe democracy is the highest achievement of civilization, but it is constantly at risk and under threat. If we are not vigilant and absolutely determined that we will embrace, enhance, protect, develop, promote, and strengthen democracy with everything we do, then it starts to slide. It cannot remain static. It is either improving or deteriorating. I argue without exaggeration that I believe the moves taken within Bill C-31 are detrimental and deleterious to the state of democracy in this country.

Speakers before me have made the point that requiring voter ID, the stringent new rules contemplated by Bill C-31, will have the predictable consequence and effect of less people voting. I would argue that if there is any one single problem with our election system today, poor voter turnout is the biggest problem we have. It is the failure to participate.

Roughly 60% of registered voters went to the polls in the last federal election. That is bad enough. But only about 50% of all eligible voters cast a ballot in the last federal election. If we treasure and value democracy above all else, we should find those figures very troubling.

The new changes contemplated by Bill C-31 will result in fewer people voting and ironically, or perhaps not ironically, and cruelly, the very people who need representation the most will be the most affected by these new rules. They will be disenfranchised and will not be exercising their right to vote.

I heard my colleague, the hon. member for Vancouver East, make some very passionate remarks in the House. I think I can safely argue that no one that I know in the House of Commons or anywhere else in this country makes a greater effort to encourage low income people to exercise their right to vote than the member for Vancouver East. Registration tables were set up in the Vancouver lower east side, some of the most devastated neighbourhoods and postal codes in the country. There was an effort to reach out and encourage people who were otherwise marginalized to participate and vote.

The member sounded the alarm that this bill will have a disastrous effect on the work that she does and will result in fewer people voting.

That is only one part of the bill that we are critical of today, the idea of the much more stringent rules about voter ID. That in itself would be enough to say that the NDP would not support this bill, but there is a second element to it that I find equally troubling.

I am our party's critic for ethics, privacy and access to information and serve as the vice-chair of the committee of the same name. From a privacy point of view in this era of identity theft and increased heightened concerns about the protection of the privacy of one's personal information, how could the government even consider putting the date of birth on the permanent voters list? It boggles the mind. It runs so contrary to everything we are doing, hearing and studying at the privacy committee. It is almost as if the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing in the government. It is sounding the alarm at committee that Canadians have never been so vulnerable to having their personal identity and privacy compromised and used in ways that the information was never intended to be used.

One's date of birth could be considered as one's individual pin number. That is the identifier. When we phone some place to get information about our accounts, the person at the other end will check by saying, “What is your date of birth so I can confirm you are who you say you are”. That is the identifier we use. It is the identifier crooks use too. If they have someone's name, address, phone number and date of birth, it is a recipe for identity theft. They have themselves a credit card under that person's name probably without much difficulty.

We cannot keep that information secure if it is put on a permanent voters list. I think I had 350 volunteers working on my election campaign. During an election campaign we cannot control everyone who does some volunteer phoning or some door knocking. It is not unusual to tear off a sheet of the voters list and tell someone, “Contact these 50 people and ask them to vote for our party”. This stuff will be circulated widely. It will not be controlled.

Our PIPEDA legislation mandates that anyone holding personal information must go through stringent security and privacy measures. Then on the other hand, again it is the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, the government in a cavalier way will spread all over the countryside one's name, address, phone number and date of birth on one convenient database. It is a recipe for disaster in terms of breaching one's privacy and allowing identity theft to take place. It is appalling.

In committee we are currently studying PIPEDA. Ironically, in this chamber the government is giving away the personal privacy protection of ordinary Canadians and in another room in the same building the privacy committee is seized of the issue of PIPEDA trying to enforce ever more stringent rules on the private sector so it will not divulge that information to anyone for our protection. Within the same building under the same roof we have these two competing dynamics going on: one striving to protect Canadians' privacy; the other cavalierly tossing it around the country. This ain't no beach party. This is not funny. It is not a joke.

I cannot believe we are even having this debate. I cannot believe the Liberals and the Bloc are in favour of this. We know where the idea came from, this date of birth business. Bloc members and PQ members in Quebec like to send birthday cards to voters. That is just crazy. If we are going to compromise the privacy and the personal information of every Canadian just so MPs can send birthday cards to try to endear themselves to their voters, we are really being flippant with the interests of Canadians. We are not putting the best interest of Canadians first and foremost, if that is the rationale. I do not know how they got away with it.

I do not know what the vote was like at the committee but I assume only one party voted against this idea at the committee. I think it was the NDP. I may be corrected; perhaps in the questions and comments period someone might want to correct me.

Then we heard from the Liberal Party. A university professor who teaches constitutional law, the member of Parliament for Vancouver Quadra, made a very good speech full of good facts and figures of all the things to be careful about. He raised the caution of the voter ID situation. He raised the caution about the date of birth. Then his party is going to vote in favour of it. I do not understand it. I do not accept that more thorough and comprehensive enumeration will protect the interests of either one of those issues.

I will say there is important work that needs to be done in the Canada Elections Act. I wish we were having a serious debate about cleaning up some of the atrocities that I have witnessed in election campaigns.

One of the favourite tricks of the Liberal Party of Canada is to clear out senior citizens homes, especially in Chinatown in the area I represent, and then at the polling station, as each individual senior gets off the bus, the seniors are handed a piece of paper with the name of the Liberal candidate and a big X beside it. That is illegal. The Liberals think illegal is a sick bird. They do not really have any concept of right and wrong. I have maintained this before. However, if investigations were to take place on the Canada Elections Act, I would love to see that addressed, because where I come from it is illegal.

As far as actual voter fraud goes, we were kind of led to believe that this act is necessary because of the preponderance of voter fraud. In fact, all we can go by is the actual experience. In the 2006 election campaign, one person was charged and convicted of voter fraud. It was a person who voted even though he was not yet a Canadian citizen. He voted for all three parties or something and got 30 days' community service. In the previous election in 2004, there were no cases; not a single person was charged or convicted of voter fraud. In the 2000 election, there were three individuals convicted of voter fraud.

Where is the experience? Where is the empirical evidence that voter fraud is so rampant that we have to take these heavy-handed measures and risk disenfranchising many--I will not say thousands and I will not say millions--possibly disenfranchising a lot of low income people who do not have the economic stability to provide the right kind of ID?

Where do we get off jeopardizing the personal privacy rights of every voter in the country by putting their DOB on the voters list based on that kind of flimsy evidence? If we could have pointed to a thousand cases, I still would have argued that would not warrant the heavy-handed measures of Bill C-31, but the Conservatives can only point to four cases in the last three federal elections.

We know there is funny business going on, but it is not voter fraud. It is not the permanent voters list. It is not people misrepresenting themselves.

The Conservative members have said that it is going on like crazy, that it is going on all over the place, but we just never catch the people. That is not good enough. That kind of reasoning is not justification for changing the legislation. We need hard facts, and the hard facts are that there were four cases in the last three elections out of 24 million votes cast. Mercy. Statistically insignificant would be the way scientists would phrase that percentage. I cannot even figure out how many decimal points of 1% that would be.

I do not agree with Bill C-31. I fundamentally disagree with it.

The one thing I wanted the government to do was clean up the loans issue, if we are to deal with elections at all. Somehow the government left a loophole we could drive a Brinks truck through, or maybe a Mazda, in terms of loans as opposed to donations.

In Bill C-2, the federal accountability act, we severely limited the amount of money that individuals can donate to an election campaign, and we completely banned any union and corporate donations, which was the right thing to do. Get big money out of politics. Nobody should be able to buy an election in this country. However, we left a big loophole where we can lend a candidate any amount of money or we can lend ourselves any amount of money and never pay it back. How is that different from big money buying influence in Canadian politics? Frankly it is a bit of a no-brainer, because if the loan is not paid back, Elections Canada deems it to be a donation in 18 months.

What they did in one famous case on the Liberal side is that 24 hours before that 18 months was up, they took out another loan and paid off the first loan with the second loan, so now another 18 months would go by. Who is ever going to police whether those guys ever pay off their leadership loans in conjunction with the rules? I believe it will be lost in the sands of time and we will have been made fools of, because we will have knowingly and willingly watched those people violate the spirit and the letter of the election financing laws.

If we were going to address any shortcoming or inconsistency in our Canada Elections Act, election financing should have been addressed, especially if we are going into a federal election. Every well-off MP, or any MP that has a big financial backer or corporate sponsor now knows that Elections Canada is completely feckless, completely unable to police, to stop or to do anything about these massive loans.

When is a loan not a loan? If one never pays it back, it is a donation, right? That is the only conclusion I can come to. There are guys lending themselves a quarter of a million dollars. No one person is allowed to donate a quarter of a million dollars to any election campaign, even their own, but they are allowed to lend it to themselves. I cannot do that. Ordinary Canadians cannot do that. The whole idea was to level the playing field so that nobody had a disproportionate competitive advantage because of who they knew or what corporate backer they had or if their daddy was rich. That was the whole idea. Well, that is out the window now. It is making a mockery of the election financing laws.

Our time in the House of Commons would have been better spent trying to get that fixed before the next federal election campaign, because it is going to snowball now. Every Tom, Dick and Harry who has no conscience is going to take advantage of that loophole. Those of us who have morals and ethics I would hope might have a contributing factor in stopping people from doing that, but others who have a paucity of ethics and morality will take advantage of that loophole, and it is perfectly legal, apparently. Elections Canada cannot do anything about it.

The new requirements for voter ID will add further barriers to voting for marginalized people, for low income people, and will seriously undermine the right to vote. I think we are going to see a charter challenge.

I want to acknowledge the work that my colleague from Ottawa Centre has done on both of these issues, the voter ID issue and the amendments that he sought to put in place on Bill C-31, which we debated last week. The amendments made it to the floor of the House of Commons and then they were summarily dispatched to the trash heap of history, but it was a noble effort and he tried his best, given the limited cards he was dealt to do the honourable thing and the right thing with this.

I want to acknowledge my colleague from Western Arctic too, who has been a champion on this issue, because in the northern regions and in first nations communities, the idea of addresses and photo ID is a big problem. There are no street addresses on a lot of first nations reserves and people do not have photo IDs.

I know that this is a matter that my colleague from Ottawa Centre has brought to the Privacy Commissioner. I hope the Privacy Commissioner sees things the way we do. I hope that we can look forward to a favourable ruling from the Privacy Commissioner that will say that the government is wrong, that it is putting the right to privacy and the personal information of Canadians at risk when it has a permanent voters list with names, addresses, dates of birth and phone numbers on it. It is just folly.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Mr. Speaker, as the member for Western Arctic, I will preface my remarks for my colleague by saying yes, in Western Arctic this issue has been debated in the newspapers, and it has been debated in our legislative assembly. People know this is an issue that drives to the heart of the sense Canadians have of their own place in their country and their own identity.

As for the idea that now we are going to drag out a photo ID licensed by the government in order for us to vote, in a small community, where everybody in the community knows each other, people do not carry identification with them on many occasions. In my own home community, I do not carry identification around with me. I do not find it necessary. I do not find it useful. I leave it at home where it is safe. When I do need it, I can get it.

There will be a lot of people right across this country in large cities and in small places who will not have their ID when they go in to vote at the voters' booth. This will disenfranchise them. They will be turned off voting. We are going to create more of a problem.

The real problem we have with voting in this country is that we do not get everybody out to vote. Forty per cent of voters do not show up to vote. That is a much greater and a much more serious problem than the four people who were charged with fraud in three elections. We have a staggering problem if 40% of our electorate does not go out to vote.

In my riding, it is probably closer to 50%. I do not want to put impediments to voting in their way. I want them to vote because by voting they join the democratic process and they validate what we in the House of Commons are doing.

I would like to ask my honourable colleague a question. In his riding, does everyone have voter ID and does everyone carry voter ID on election day? When they finish work, head to the voters' booth and find they do not have ID, are they going to be satisfied with going home across the city and coming back to vote?

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague from Western Arctic for his passionate commitment to this issue and for his very relevant comments on how this affects the people in his riding of Western Arctic.

His question specifically to me was about what the effect would be in an inner city riding like Winnipeg Centre. I know that the voter ID issue is a huge problem, because I have seen the lineups, even under the current rules. People come to the voting station and have to stand in a separate line for an hour, and sometimes an hour and a half, to get registered.

Now the test will be even higher. It used to be that one could bring an envelope, a hydro bill or some printed material with one's ID on it, as well as a driver's licence, for instance. Once people have made the commitment to come and vote and stand in line for that long, if they were turned away and told to go home to get something else or something they did not have at all, that would be it, they would never come back. It is tough enough to get low income people convinced that it is relevant to vote.

If I may, I will suggest some things we could do that would have been relevant. If we made sure the voters' cards were sent in envelopes instead of just in the mail, I think that would add an element of security. This is one of the things that my colleague from Ottawa Centre proposed. I have been in apartment buildings where I have seen the cards loose around a bank of mailboxes.

There is also universal enumeration. There is no substitute for door to door enumeration. The permanent voters list is a flawed document. An army used to be dispatched, sometimes of retired people, sometimes of people from the local legion, to knock on every door to clean up that voters list before an election. That practice should never have been stopped, in my view, especially in transient areas with high turnover, such as the inner cities we represent.

Also, my colleague from Ottawa Centre made the point for allowing people who are not on the voters list the ability to swear in with a statutory declaration, with the voters having to swear in at the polling station verifying who they are. This is reasonable. This has been used in the past. We do not believe it was subject to wanton abuse, as was implied by the Conservative Party members I have heard speaking. We think this is a reasonable consideration.

If the goal is to have more people voting, we should be putting in place measures that will facilitate it. If one is satisfied with the status quo or even can live with fewer people voting, then Bill C-31 is the answer.

It seems to me that we are coming at this the wrong way. The biggest problem we have, like my colleague from Western Arctic says, is the poor voter turnout, not this notion that there is widespread electoral fraud, because there is no evidence to back that up.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Winnipeg Centre has given us a precise and poignant response to this bill and the problems therein.

To be clear about this, he made mention of what happened in committee about the birthdate information. The birthdate information in the bill was originally put in to be used for voter verification, notwithstanding that we would also have a number assigned to every voter. Birthdate information would be included for purposes of verification for Elections Canada. It was the Bloc that moved an amendment to have this information shared with political parties. That was supported by the Liberals.

To be clear on this, at the time, the Conservatives in committee voted against that amendment. Then, when I brought this forward at report stage to have that amendment taken out, they fell silent, so this so-called champion of privacy and libertarian ideals is gone from the Conservative Party and has been replaced with big brother.

I just wanted to be clear about this. The Conservatives did not support the big brother amendment of the Bloc that was supported by our friends in the Liberal Party; I guess they can raise money now because they have been cut off from their corporate welfare so they have to figure out how to actually widen their donor base. So now they will do what they have always done and rely on something else instead of going out and rolling up their sleeves and getting to work. They will rely on the database provided by the Bloc.

However, now the Conservatives are supporting that, so we have a government-sanctioned identity theft kit out there, and for what? It is for the political parties. Every time I ask why the political parties need this, they never answer the question, not the Conservatives, not the Liberals and definitely not the Bloc, but they do mention that they would like to get the birthday cards out soon, I understand.

That was to set the record straight. The Conservatives, in committee, were against sharing birthdate information. Now they are in favour of it. I think that is important to note.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Ottawa Centre raises another very valuable point. Again I thank him for the dedication he has shown in trying to bring an element of reason to this debate.

There is one other thing that we should be addressing today in terms of election law: the rules that allow people to launder money through their children's bank accounts in order to circumvent the donation limits of the Elections Act. That would be time well spent if we could have some of that cleaned up before we go into the next election campaign, because it made most Canadians feel a little bit ill when they saw eleven year olds donating $5,400 each to a leadership race in the last Liberal leadership campaign.

However, when we tried to change that law in Bill C-2, the Conservatives, the Liberals and the Bloc voted against the NDP's efforts to try to make it illegal to shake down kids for their lunch money to run an election campaign. I thought that was appalling. I thought that this would have been an opportunity, because once the Elections Act is opened, every clause can be reviewed, but we have seen fit to allow another election to go by where the donation limits can be circumvented by laundering money through our children, grandmother, neighbour and God knows who.

I think these loans are criminal, but legal, which may be a contradiction. They are certainly criminal to anyone with the sensibilities of most Canadians. As for this idea that we can launder money by funnelling it through our children's bank accounts to circumvent the rules, it should be illegal.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it has been interesting to listen to the debate on Bill C-31 today. This is a bill that we have described as insufficient. It has not dealt with the real issue of what the failure of electoral system is. It does not deal with electoral reform. We soon will bring that forward for the House. One of my colleagues has a motion on which we will be voting and it will get to the heart of the problem in our system, which is the fact that we do not have a fair voting system.

Alas, though, we do have Bill C-31 in front of us. I think it is important to go back to the origin of the bill, which was a committee report that was cherry-picked by the government. The government decided it would use the opportunity to respond to a committee report by putting forward an agenda that it thought would make it look good in the eyes of the public. We have seen this piecemeal approach to democratic reform from the government before. Those members take a morsel here and a morsel there and try to make it sound like dinner, but it is not. It is just crumbs.

The government has done this before. Recently we heard that the government was going to deal with Senate reform by way of having elections in the provinces. The Prime Minister would bless it and it somehow would be real reform. That is piecemeal. It is pretending to be doing something.

Mr. Broadbent, my predecessor, had an ethics package that included the idea of fixed election dates. The government put that idea forward. No arguments there, but the government has not dealt with the other piece of Mr. Broadbent's ethics package, the fundamental changes he proposed to make our system fairer so that a citizen's vote would actually mean something.

Here we have Bill C-31. I guess the government thought that with this bill it would look credible because it was going to solve the problem of the opportunity for voter fraud. It is very important to state that: the opportunity for voter fraud. Because, as my colleague from Winnipeg Centre quite rightly pointed out, “there is no there there”, as the quote goes, when we talk about voter fraud. It is the opportunity. If we could deal with that, then I guess we could be dealing with many other issues. Climate change is not the opportunity but is what in front of us and the government has finally come on board and recognized it, a little late perhaps, but there it is.

This idea that we are dealing with the opportunity for voter fraud is what the government is responding to with Bill C-31. The government quickly put a bill together and made it look as if it was going to solve the voter fraud problem that was so ubiquitous. Then it would be seen as credible, as cleaning up the system.

I dare say the Conservatives did not do their homework. When the Chief Electoral Officer responded to the whole idea of voter fraud, he was very clear. He said there was rampant integrity in the system and in citizens. He said there was no problem. We heard evidence that there have been four cases over three years.

The government has decided that it knows best. I call this bill the big brother bill. Why? Because it says that the government is going to tell citizens what is best for them. It claims to know better than ordinary citizens. It claims to know better than the witnesses who came forward. The witnesses said the bill would not be good for citizens, but the bill says that is okay because the government knows better.

Witnesses told us that the bill would not increase voter participation. It would put barriers in front of people. As has been mentioned by my colleagues, it is probably a recipe for further disenchantment with the voter system. It will mean that fewer people will actually participate in voting. If that was the intent of the bill and the government, they have succeeded, because that in fact is what will happen.

We have identified clauses 18 and 21 of the bill as major concerns. I put amendments forward. These clauses are really going to disenfranchise people and open up the privacy of everyday citizens to people who will be able to exploit it.

I considered that if this were an opportunity for the government to address the problem of voter fraud, instead opposing the bill, I would bring forward ideas and amendments in committee. As has already been mentioned, one of the concerns is the voter card. Why are these voter cards left in hallways in apartment buildings. Anyone can pick them up and use them for whatever purpose, including voter fraud?

A simple piece of technology called an envelope can be employed. In fact, I brought this idea forward in committee. I suggested this to the Chief Electoral Officer who said that it was a good idea, that it was something his department was looking at. Yet when it was put forward as an amendment, the government said that it was out of the scope of the bill.

The government has failed to accept a simple solution, a common sense idea of putting voter cards in envelopes addressed to the voter. If the voter has moved, it will be returned to sender. It happens all the time with other pieces of mail. Why not do this with something as important as a voter card? Hopefully the government will find a way to bring that idea forward.

Everyone in this place knows the problems with the centralized voters list. We know why we went to that list, which was to save money.

The most important aspect of our democracy is the right to vote, to participate. It seems passing strange that we would not see the wisdom of investing and supporting universal enumeration, that we would not go door to door, as was mentioned by my colleague, the hon. member for Winnipeg Centre. We could employ people, for instance seniors or people at the Legion and others, who had the time and could use some extra income to go door to door. They know their neighbourhoods.

People who are members of civic and community associations could help out. As a kid, I recall the knock on the door. An enumerator would confirm who was on the voters list and ensure that the names were written down. These lists were more accurate than the centralized voters lists we now have on computer. That idea was put forward, but, alas, the government again said that it knew better, big brother, that it would not invest in it. Instead, it would do targeted enumeration.

The problem with targeted enumeration is that it is hit and miss, more often miss than hit. What we end up with is a scattered approach across the country. Voters lists in some areas are accurate and up to date, such as bedroom communities where there is a low turnover rate.

What happens in the areas where there is high turnover? There is massive turnover in my riding of Ottawa Centre. It is always a problem. A very simple solution to that would be to go door to door. That idea has not been embraced by the government. When it was proposed as an amendment to the bill, it was not accepted.

If members were to ask people in Tim Hortons or on Main Street what makes sense to them, to continue with a centralized computerized voters list that does not work or have door to door enumeration that would clean up the list, they would probably say that it would make sense to go door to door, employ people who need extra income and have an accurate voters list. It is the most important tool we have to allow people to vote. Their names are on the voters list.

If we were to go through the history of our country, people would be shouting from their graves and asking what we were doing. They fought for the right to vote and we are undermining that.

Those are two ideas. The first is to put the voter's card in an envelope, address it to the voter and if the person has moved on, the card is be returned to sender, prompting a cleanup of the list. The second is door to door enumeration. It makes sense and is a worthy investment.

Look at the money that is spent in government, yet it will not consider investing in enumeration. My constituents shake their heads and ask me what we are doing in this place, if we cannot even come up with something as fundamental as funding for enumeration. The voter's list is the bedrock, the foundation of our democracy. That suggestion has been rejected by the government.

The one that troubles me the most, and I have spoke about it in this place many times, is the idea that Canadians' privacy will be at risk because of the bill. As I mentioned before, the have the following in the bill. We have a requirement for photo ID to be presented when people vote. If they do not have photo ID, they are to present two pieces of ID that have been sanctioned by the government. If they are unable to produce that, someone has to vouch for them and that person has to be on the voter's list. That is the sequencing.

Each voter now, according to this bill, will be given an identification number, I guess analogous to an ID number such as a SIN. That is fine, we did not argue with that. In fact, we did not argue with having photo ID or the other two pieces of ID. We argued about what happened when people did not have that.

However, the piece that puzzles me to this day is the fact that the government saw fit to add birthdate information on the voter's list. I fought that in committee. I did not think it was necessary because we would have photo ID and a voter identifier. Because of this terrible problem of opportunity for voter fraud, which as we have already mentioned that there have been four cases in three elections, we will now have the birthdate information of Canadians on the voter's lists. This is absurd.

Not only will Elections Canada have information, every political party will have this.

[An hon. member]

The Rhino Party?

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

We are hearing variations of who will have this information. I can get to that in a minute. Maybe there is something we do not know about the government's entrepreneurial ideas. Why will they have this information? Because the Bloc Québécois put forward an amendment that would allow birthdate information to be shared with all political parties.

The Liberals supported it in committee. The Conservatives at the time were pretty level-headed about it and they voted against the amendment. However, the amendment went forward and was brought forward to the House.

The sad thing is, and to this day I cannot figure it out, the people who we would normally associate with civil liberties and the idea of wanting to ensure that the privacy of one's identity would be safe, the Conservative Party, decided it would support the Bloc amendment as did the Liberals supported the amendment. Something does not pass the smell test. Now we have the Conservative Party and the Liberals supporting the Bloc amendment to have birthdate information given to all political parties.

Let us go over some of the political parties with which this will be shared. It will be shared with all parties represented here, the Green Party, the Marijuana Party, the Rhinoceros Party, the Communist Party, the Marxist-Leninist Party, the Christian Heritage Party, the whole gamut. I cannot fathom why the government would want all these people, including the New Democratic Party, to have the birthdate information of Canadians. It puzzles me.

My friend from Winnipeg Centre has an analogy that would be fitting.We have government-sanctioned identity theft kits here. What we are saying is, “Here you go”.

[An hon. member]

I thought they were tough on crime.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Yes, they are tough on crime, but they are going to hand over the facilities for crime. They are going to give them the kit for their use.

We have just seen some incredible breaches of privacy with credit cards and bank cards. Concerns have been raised about privacy of information being one of the key issues.

As my friend from Winnipeg Centre said, one committee is trying to figure out how to protect citizens' privacy and then the House presents a bill that will hand over a person's identity to whomever.

Every single political party now will have that information and will be able to use it for whatever purpose. I have heard members on the other side say that no, people will not use it for nefarious reasons. How would they know that? All of us know that electoral lists are used by political parties and the information gets out to many people. Lists are handed over to people so they can canvass. That information is shared with many different groups.

The key thing is that today, members in the House are saying, not only through the amendment, but through the sanctioning of this bill, that they support the undermining of the privacy of Canadians' personal information. That is what is being done here.

I brought forward amendments to take out the Bloc amendment that would allow the sharing of birthdate information with all political parties. No one, including the Conservatives, voted with my party. They thought it was fine for the birthdate to stay.

Let us be clear about what we are doing with the bill. We are taking away the opportunity for some people to vote. We are handing over the private information of Canadians to Elections Canada and to political parties.

Why are we doing this? It was mentioned at the beginning of this debate that this was apparently a problem because of the opportunity for voter fraud. It was not based on evidence of thousands of cases of voter fraud, but only the potential that there could be voter fraud.

I think that when most Canadians find out that barriers have been put in the way of their access to their franchise they will be very upset. They will want to know why members did not stand up and speak against this provision. They will find out that the government, the Liberals and the Bloc got together and said it was fine, that there was no problem and that they were looking out for the better interests of Canadians.

Canadians will ask why their birthdate information is included. In my constituency this is an issue for many seniors. Seniors do not appreciate having their birthdate information broadcast to all the employees of Elections Canada, let alone all the political parties.

Many people I know, particularly seniors, are very proud of who they are, but they are also very private people. They will not appreciate that their birthdate information will be known by organizers and people in the back rooms. They will be targeted by fundraisers. Organizations salivate over this type of information.

That is what probably happened in the Conservative Party. Originally in committee the Conservatives were against this amendment. I think what happened is that this went to headquarters and a light bulb went on and the organizers were salivating about the potential for targeting their message to voters.

There is also the wider potential for fundraising. We know that members of the Liberal Party have been cut off from their sugar daddy. They do not have access to funds like they used to. They are flailing around. It was a no-brainer for them. The Liberals said that they would support the Bloc amendment because they would now have an opportunity to raise funds from people and niche their message based on people's age.

That is what all of this is about. This is about political parties deciding that they can use this information for their own purposes. When I asked the Conservatives, the Liberals and the Bloc as to why political parties needed the birthdate information of electors, they dodged the question. They have not answered the question. They refer to the need for verification. There is verification. An identity number is assigned to each voter. There is the presentation of photo ID. This is similar to the old Soviet Union where people had to present their papers as they travelled around.

[An hon. member]

Next we will have retina scans.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Yes, we will have retina scans, but we should not suggest that because they will probably adopt it. We must decide whether or not the privacy and liberties of Canadians are important.

As we have this creeping big brother kind of approach coming into people's lives, we need to stop and take a look at why we are doing this and what the purpose is.

The last comment I will make is that Canadians--

[The Acting Speaker, Royal Galipeau]

Order, please. Questions and comments, the hon. member for Winnipeg Centre.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Ottawa Centre for the commitment he has shown in taking this struggle on and in the face of formidable adversity and even hostility on that committee.

I am surprised at the reaction this seems to have stirred in some people. It is probably because the member has implied that they are a bunch of fascists. I noticed from the tone that we could almost hear the jackboots slapping together as they approached.

I thought this kind of big brother intrusion into one's privacy was the kind of thing the Conservatives actually bristled about. I thought their reputation was to get government out of our lives, that less government was better and less intrusion into our privacy. Not wanting to share our information used to be, I thought, one of the hallmarks of the Conservative ideology. However, now that they have the grasp of power, it seems that trampling all over an individual's rights to privacy and so on is no longer offensive to their sensibilities.

I would like my colleague's views on how he came to the opinion that this will probably result in a charter challenge under section 3 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

As well, he made reference to the socio-economic implications in considerations of this. I would be interested to know if he agrees with me on this point. It seems that the big players in politics today have assessed that since the bottom 20% socio-economic quintile do not vote, we should not waste any attention on them. The top 20 percentile all vote but we know how they will vote. Everything else seems to be geared toward that middleman, that 60% which is at play. That is the prize.

Therefore, measures like this completely disregard the bottom 20 percentile who do not vote anyway and, therefore, who needs them, why waste our energy on them and when they vote they probably do not vote Conservative.

Does the member think there was a selfish consideration of, “To hell with the bottom 20% because they probably will not vote anyway and, if they do, they will not vote for us at any rate so who cares if they are marginalized and disenfranchised one step further”?

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I think the hon. member for Winnipeg Centre is onto something here.

First, I will speak to the charter challenge. This was not something we made up and theorized about. This was brought forward while the bill was in committee. People said that if this becomes a barrier to people voting, then, as my colleague from Winnipeg Centre said, it will be challenged because access to the right to vote is absolutely fundamental in the charter.

People who work on behalf of the rights of those who are disenfranchised, civil libertarians, have said that this will be something that will need to be challenged. When we put barriers to exercise franchise, then it is the responsibility of any citizen who can to challenge this. Notwithstanding the gutting of the court challenges program, people will do it in any event.

It is a real challenge in terms of where this is going. We will end up spending millions of dollars in court for something that need not happen. As I mentioned, an envelope would have sufficed, as well as universal enumeration.

On the socio-economic question that my colleague from Winnipeg Centre asked, I think of Stanley Knowles who used to represent a riding in Winnipeg and what he would think of this bill. Stanley Knowles was a champion of the disenfranchised. He prided himself on ensuring that those who did not have a voice were heard. I think Mr. Knowles would see this bill as an attempt to thwart the voice of the disenfranchised.

How can we see it any other way when we are taking away the ability of those who are the most vulnerable to vote? That is very clear in this bill. The bill puts up more barriers to people who do not have access to the kind of identification that we would have in our wallets because of the advantage that we have, which primarily has to do with socio-economics.

I think my colleague from Winnipeg Centre is on to something here. Why? Is this done with intent? Is this done to take out certain people from the democracy that we all cherish so much? I would hate to see that happen and hopefully one day people will see the error of their ways and change it.