Bill C-23 (Historical)

Fair Elections Act

An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to certain Acts

This enactment amends the Canada Elections Act (“the Act”) to require the Chief Electoral Officer to issue interpretation notes and guidelines on the application of that Act to registered parties, registered associations, nomination contestants, candidates and leadership contestants. It also requires the Chief Electoral Officer, on request, to issue a written opinion on the application of provisions of the Act to an activity or practice that a registered party, registered association, nomination contestant, candidate or leadership contestant proposes to engage in.
The enactment also modifies the Chief Electoral Officer’s power under section 17 of the Act so that the power may only be exercised to allow electors to exercise their right to vote or to allow votes to be counted. It also limits the Chief Electoral Officer’s power to transmit advertising messages to electors and requires the Chief Electoral Officer to ensure that any information so transmitted is accessible to electors with disabilities.
The enactment further amends the Act to permit the Chief Electoral Officer to seek approval from parliamentary committees to test an alternative voting process (but where such a pilot project is to test a form of electronic voting, the Chief Electoral Officer must first obtain the approval of the Senate and House of Commons). The enactment also eliminates the mandatory retirement of the Chief Electoral Officer at age 65 and replaces it with a 10-year non-renewable term. It provides for the establishment of an Advisory Committee of Political Parties to provide advice to the Chief Electoral Officer on matters relating to elections and political financing. The enactment also amends the Act to provide for the appointment of field liaison officers, based on merit, to provide support to returning officers and provide a link between returning officers and the Office of the Chief Electoral Officer. It also enables the Chief Electoral Officer to temporarily suspend a returning officer during an election period and provides for the appointment of additional election officers at polling stations. Finally, it empowers registered parties and registered associations, in addition to candidates, to provide names of individuals for election officer positions and changes the deadline for providing those names from the 17th day before polling day to the 24th day before polling day.
The enactment also adds to the Act Part 16.1, which deals with voter contact calling services. Among other things, that Part requires that calling service providers and other interested parties file registration notices with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, provide identifying information to the Commission and keep copies of scripts and recordings used to make calls. That Part also requires that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission establish and maintain a registry, to be known as the Voter Contact Registry, in which the documents it receives in relation to voter contact calling services are to be kept.
The enactment also replaces Part 18 of the Act with a new, comprehensive set of rules on political financing that corrects a number of deficiencies in the Act. Notably, the enactment
(a) increases the annual contribution limits for contributions to registered parties, registered associations, candidates and nomination and leadership contestants to $1,500 per year and by $25 per year after the first year;
(b) increases the amount that candidates and leadership contestants may contribute to their own campaigns to $5,000 and $25,000, respectively;
(c) permits registered parties and registered associations to make transfers to candidates before their nomination is confirmed by the returning officer;
(d) requires a registered party’s auditor to complete a compliance audit in relation to its election expenses return indicating that the party has complied with the political financing rules;
(e) requires registered parties, registered associations and candidates to disclose details of expenses for voter contact calling services in their returns;
(f) reforms the rules governing unpaid claims, making it an offence for claims to remain unpaid after three years and strengthening the reporting of unpaid claims;
(g) reforms the reporting requirements of leadership contestants;
(h) permits higher spending limits for registered parties and candidates if an election period is longer than the 37-day minimum;
(i) includes new rules on political loans; and
(j) defines “capital asset” for the purposes of reporting the distribution cost of advertising or promotional material transmitted to the public using a capital asset, so that the expense is reported as the corresponding rental value for the period in which it was used, and for the purpose of the disposal of the campaign surplus.
With respect to voter identification, the enactment amends the Act to require the same voter identification for voting at the office of the returning officer in an elector’s own riding as it requires for voting at ordinary polls. It also prohibits the use of the voter information card as proof of identity, eliminates the ability of an elector to prove their identity through vouching, allows an elector to swear a written oath of their residence provided that their residence is attested to on oath by another elector, and requires an elector whose name was crossed off the electors’ list in error to take a written oath before receiving a ballot.
The enactment also amends the Act to provide an extra day of advance polling on the eighth day before polling day, creating a block of four consecutive advance polling days between the tenth and seventh days before polling day. It requires a separate ballot box for each day of advance polling and details procedures for the opening and closing of ballot boxes during an advance poll. Finally, it gives returning officers the authority to recover ballot boxes on the Chief Electoral Officer’s direction if the integrity of the vote is at risk.
The enactment also amends the Act to, among other things, establish a process to communicate polling station locations to electors, candidates and political parties, to provide that only an elector’s year of birth is to be displayed on the lists of electors used at the polls, instead of the full date of birth, to permit candidates’ representatives to move to any polling station in the electoral district after being sworn in at any polling station in the district and to establish a procedure for judicial recounts.
The enactment further amends the Act to change how the Commissioner of Canada Elections is appointed. It establishes that the Commissioner is to be appointed by the Director of Public Prosecutions for a seven-year term, subject to removal for cause, that the Commissioner is to be housed within the Director’s office but is to conduct investigations independently from the Director, and that the Commissioner is to be a deputy head for the purposes of hiring staff for his or her office and for managing human resources.
The enactment also amends the Act to add the offence of impersonating or causing another person to impersonate a candidate, a candidate’s representative, a representative of a registered party or registered association, the Chief Electoral Officer, a member of the Chief Electoral Officer’s staff, an election officer or a person authorized to act on the Chief Electoral Officer’s or an election officer’s behalf. It also adds the offences of providing false information in the course of an investigation and obstructing a person conducting an investigation. In addition, it creates offences in relation to registration on the lists of electors, registration on polling day, registration at an advance polling station and obligations to keep scripts and recordings used in the provision of voter contact calling services.
The enactment further amends the Act to provide for increases in the amount of penalties. For the more serious offences, it raises the maximum fine from $2,000 to $20,000 on summary conviction and from $5,000 to $50,000 on conviction on indictment. For most strict liability offences, it raises the maximum fine from $1,000 to $2,000. For registered parties, it raises the maximum fine from $25,000 to $50,000 on summary conviction for strict liability political financing offences and from $25,000 to $100,000 on summary conviction for political financing offences that are committed intentionally. For third parties that are groups or corporations that fail to register as third parties, it raises the maximum fine to $50,000 for strict liability offences and to $100,000 for offences that are committed intentionally and for offences applying primarily to broadcasters, it raises the maximum fine from $25,000 to $50,000.
The enactment amends the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act to authorize the Chief Electoral Officer to provide administrative support to electoral boundary commissions. It amends the Telecommunications Act to create new offences relating to voter contact calling services and to allow the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to use the inspection and investigation regime in that Act to administer and enforce part of the voter contact calling services regime in the Canada Elections Act. It amends the Conflict of Interest Act to have that Act apply to the Chief Electoral Officer. It also amends the Director of Public Prosecutions Act to provide that the Director of Public Prosecutions reports on the activities of the Commissioner of Canada Elections.
Finally, the enactment includes transitional provisions that, among other things, provide for the transfer of staff and appropriations from the Office of the Chief Electoral Officer to the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions to support the Commissioner of Canada Elections.

Awarding of Contract to Boeing

[James Bezan, Conservative, Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I will just continue addressing the question of privilege that was raised on Friday by the member for Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot.

I had gotten to the point in my dissertation as to the ruling that Speaker Milliken made in 2002 about the minister of national defence at that time. He is quoted as saying that misleading a minister or a member has been considered a form of obstruction and, thus, a prima facie breach of privilege. The Speaker accepted the minister's assertion that he had no intention to mislead the House and made the following statement: “Nevertheless this remains a very difficult situation.”

The Speaker went on to say:

On the basis of the arguments presented by hon. members and in view of the gravity of the matter, I have concluded that the situation before us where the House is left with two versions of events is one that merits further consideration by an appropriate committee, if only to clear the air. I therefore invite the hon. member for Portage--Lisgar to move his motion.

On November 4, 2003, the member at the time for Scarborough—Rouge River presented to the House the ninth report of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates, which documented how the former privacy commissioner had deliberately misled the committee and provided false and misleading information to it. The member for Scarborough—Rouge River rose later in the sitting on a question of privilege to charge the former commissioner with contempt of Parliament based on the contents of the report. On November 6, the Speaker delivered his ruling and found the matter to be a prima facie question of privilege.

On April 10, 2008, the member for Charlottetown at the time raised a question of privilege alleging that the RCMP deputy commissioner provided false and misleading testimony to the Standing Committee on Public Accounts at a meeting on February 21, 2007. The Standing Committee on Public Accounts reported the matter to the House. and the Speaker found that a prima facie case of contempt had been established.

On February 17, 2011, the member for Scarborough—Guildwood and other members argued that a minister had made statements in a committee that were different from those made in the House or provided to the House in written form. These members argued that the material available showed that contradictory information had been provided. As a result, they argued that this demonstrated that the minister deliberately misled the House and that, as such, a prima facie case of privilege existed.

In a ruling of March 9, the Speaker said:

The crux of the matter, it seems to me, is this: as the committee has reported, when asked who inserted the word “not” in the assessment of the KAIROS funding application, in testimony the minister twice replied that she did not know. In a February 14 statement to the House, while she did not indicate that she knew who inserted the word “not”, the minister addressed this matter by stating that the “not” was inserted at her direction. At the very least, it can be said that this has caused confusion. The minister has acknowledged this, and has characterized her own handling of the matter as “unfortunate”. Yet as is evident from hearing the various interventions that have been made since then, the confusion persists. As the member for Scarborough—Rouge River told the House, this “has confused me. It has confused Parliament. It has confused us in our exercise of holding the government to account, whether it is the Privy Council, whether it is the minister, whether it is public officials; we cannot do our job when there is that type of confusion”.

On February 25, 2014, the then House leader of the official opposition raised a question of privilege regarding statements made in the House by the member for Mississauga—Streetsville. He claimed that:

...the hon. member for Mississauga—Streetsville had deliberately misled the House on February 6, 2014, during debate on Bill C-23, the fair elections act, when he stated that he had witnessed evidence of voter fraud firsthand. He further argued that the matter was not resolved by the statements made by the member for Mississauga—Streetsville on February 24 and 25, where he admitted that, contrary to his original claim, he had not actually witnessed what he had originally claimed to have witnessed. In his view, this was not a simple case of someone misspeaking; he argued rather that it was a case where the member deliberately chose to take something he knew not to be true and present it as eyewitness evidence—something so egregious, it constituted contempt.

In delivering his ruling, on March 3, the speaker at the time cited that:

Speaker Milliken was faced with [this] in February 2002 when the then Minister of National Defence, Art Eggleton, provided contradictory information to the House. In ruling on a question of privilege raised about the contradiction, Speaker Milliken stated on February 1, at page 8581 of Debates:

I am prepared, as I must be, to accept the minister’s assertion that he had no intention to mislead the House.

The same Speaker went on to conclude:

In keeping with that precedent, I am prepared to accord the same courtesy to the member for Mississauga—Streetsville.

At the same time, the fact remains that the House continues to be seized of completely contradictory statements. This is a difficult position in which to leave members, who must be able to depend on the integrity of the information with which they are provided to perform their parliamentary duties.

Accordingly, in keeping with the precedent cited earlier in which Speaker Milliken indicated that the matter merited “...further consideration by an appropriate committee, if only to clear the air”, I am prepared in this case for the same reason to allow the matter to be put to the House.

On November 3, 1978, the member for Northumberland—Durham raised a question of privilege and charged that he had been deliberately misled by a former solicitor general. The member had written in 1973 to the solicitor general, who assured him that, as a matter of policy, the RCMP did not intercept the private mail of Canadians. On November 1, 1978, during testimony before the McDonald commission, the former commissioner of the RCMP stated that they did intercept mail on a very restricted basis and that the practice was not one that had been concealed from ministers. The Speaker ruled on December 6 that there was indeed a prima facie case of contempt.

I will go back to the original question raised by the member for Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot. He said on November 4 that he had been told by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Defence that a decision had not yet been made in answer to a question that he had here on November 21 about the replacement of our CP-140 Aurora aircraft.

The parliamentary secretary stated:

Mr. Speaker, I agree with the hon. member. We need to replace the CP-140 Aurora patrol aircraft. However, we need to replace them with something that will serve the operational capability of the armed forces. No decision has been made yet.

The parliamentary secretary's second answer was even more specific. She said, “Mr. Speaker, I want to be very clear today. No decision has been made.”

A few days later, on November 28, in an answer to questions from the member, the Minister of Public Services and Procurement said:

Mr. Speaker, I thank our colleague for acknowledging the expertise of aerospace workers not only in Quebec, but also in Canada. That is why the decision we will soon be making is an important one....

We know that the next day, November 29, there were multiple media reports that the government was going to be buying the Boeing Poseidon P-8A patrol aircraft.

Global News stated, “sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, said that last week”, which was November 23, “cabinet green-lit the purchase of 16 P-8A Poseidon surveillance aircraft to replace the half-century-old CP-140 Auroras.”

It went on to say:

Two of the sources, including a senior government official, said the Treasury Board held a special meeting Tuesday night [November 28] and approved the contract, which a U.S. agency has listed at US$5.9 billion (C$8 billion).

Therefore, the announcement did finally get made officially on November 30 to sole-source the P-8 from Boeing.

This question of privilege does not call into question the replacement of the CP-140 Aurora patrol aircraft or the process of awarding that contract to Boeing. To be clear, Conservatives want to procure equipment for the Royal Canadian Air Force and the Canadian Armed Forces; we just want to do it faster, and we want to make sure we are procuring the kit and equipment our armed forces are asking for.

This question of privilege is with respect to whether the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Defence and the Minister of Public Services and Procurement intentionally misled the House.

Based on the timing of events I just laid out, I support the member for Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot's question of privilege. The answers from both the Minister of Procurement and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Defence were misleading to the House and the defence industry, and I would suggest that this constitutes a prima facie breach of privilege.

Alleged Misleading Comments by the Prime Minister

[Candice Bergen, Conservative, Portage—Lisgar, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today on a question of privilege to address misleading comments made in the House by the Prime Minister.

At the heart of the issue is the Prime Minister's denial that he was aware, in 2018, that the allegations of sexual misconduct against General Vance were a matter of a #MeToo me complaint. I have evidence that will demonstrate that this is a false statement. Further, the facts clearly indicate that the Prime Minister had to have known of the situation, and therefore deliberately misled the House. Bosc and Gagnon, at page 82, states that it is a contempt of the House for a member “deliberately attempting to mislead the House or a committee (by way of statement, evidence, or petition.”

During question period yesterday, the Prime Minister said:

Mr. Speaker, as I have been saying for some time now, yes, there was a complaint against General Vance. Nobody in my office or in the Minister of National Defence's office knew the nature of the complaint.

Then he went on to say:

Mr. Speaker, what the Leader of the Opposition is putting forward is simply untrue. While there was awareness that there was a complaint against General Vance, there was no awareness that it was in fact a #MeToo complaint of a sexual nature.

I have emails on this matter, internal to the Privy Council Office, from Janine Sherman, deputy secretary to the cabinet for appointments, to various political staff in the minister of defence's office and the Prime Minister's office that I would be happy to hand over to you, Mr. Speaker.

I will refer to a few of these emails, beginning with one from Janine Sherman in which she proposed transmittal language from the minister to the ombudsman, dated March 2, 2018. This is what she wrote:

“Dear Mr. Walbourne, I am further writing to our discussion concerning allegations of sexual harassment that were brought to your attention. As the allegations relate to a Governor in Council appointee, I would ask you to please transmit the information to Ms. Janine Sherman, Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet for the Senior Personnel Secretariat, Privy Council Office, and provide her with your full cooperation.”

In a March 5, 2018, email from Ms. Sherman to Mr. Walbourne, the first paragraph is blacked out, but I will quote, “I understand that you have information concerning the conduct of a GIC appointee that the Minister has asked that you share with me.” Here there is another redaction. To continue, “...but given the sensitivity of this matter if it is at all possible to speak today or at your earliest convenience, I will make myself available.”

There is also an email from Ms. Sherman dated March 2, 2018, although the recipient is blacked out. It states, “On behalf of the Minister, I am writing further to your discussion concerning allegations of sexual harassment that had been brought to your attention.”

Ms. Sherman confirmed that these email exchanges were with political staff in her testimony to the committee on national defence, dated March 26. Ms. Sherman is recorded in the committee's evidence as saying:

Those redactions are done on the basis of the statutory requirements in the Privacy Act and the Access to Information Act, so public servants' names are not redacted. For non-public servants, that does constitute personal information and that is the reason it is redacted.

In the interests of being helpful, I could indicate in a generic way that those interactions were between myself and people in the Prime Minister's Office.

The Prime Minister's statements in the House, which predate Ms. Sherman's testimony of March 26, confirm her version of the events as stated above. The Prime Minister stated during question period on March 10:

Mr. Speaker, my office was aware of the minister's direction to the ombudsman to follow up with appropriate authorities, but my office and I learned of the details of the allegations over the past months only.

Then, on March 24, the Prime Minister said:

Mr. Speaker, allegations of sexual misconduct or inappropriate behaviour need to be followed up by the appropriate authorities, and that is exactly what happened in this case.

That was the Prime Minister speaking on March 24. I am going to repeat that. He even said, “allegations of sexual misconduct”. Now I am going to go on to what he continued to say:

The ombudsperson was directed toward the right people in terms of following up on an investigation. The ombudsperson was not able to share further information with the investigators and, therefore, the investigation did not move forward.

We will continue to take very seriously any allegations that come forward, as we always have.

Ms. Sherman confirmed she had these discussions specifically with staff in the Prime Minister's Office later in her testimony before committee.

She stated:

As a matter of course, Madam Chair, in my responsibilities, I would not make a decision alone in that respect. I did meet with Mr. Walbourne myself. After that discussion, I would have briefed up to the people who had been involved in the discussion to pursue and try to get more information about the generality of the complaint.

I would have done a follow-up in terms of, certainly, the Clerk.

Later, in response to a question from the member for Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman on whether the information was shared with the Clerk of the Privy Council and the Prime Minister's chief of staff, Katie Telford, she said:

I have shared information to say it was within the Prime Minister's Office.

The emails from Ms. Sherman outline the substance of the information that she was discussing with staff in the Prime Minister's Office addressing the Prime Minister's assertion that no one in the defence minister's office was aware of the nature of the complaint.

Gary Walbourne's testimony to the Standing Committee on National Defence from March 3 states the following:

The investigation process inexplicably moved at a snail's pace until March 2018, which just so happened to be the time when I personally met with [the Minister of Defence] to address an allegation of inappropriate sexual behaviour within the senior ranks of the Canadian Armed Forces, specifically, against the chief of the defence staff, and to discuss my concerns about this allegation.

He further stated:

To...conclude my statement, I will say that, yes, I did meet with [him] on March 1, 2018, and, yes, I did directly tell him about an allegation of inappropriate sexual behaviour made against the chief of the defence staff.

Finally, there is Michael Wernick's testimony at the Standing Committee on National Defence on April 6, replying to another question from the member for Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman regarding the allegations being of a sexual misconduct nature.

Mr. Wernick stated:

I don't have the language of the emails in front of me. I think the language was “potential sexual harassment”. There is a back-and-forth of emails between Zita, Janine and Elder. I certainly would say that it was in the realm of sexual misconduct or sexual harassment, but I couldn't speak to the exact language.

Also, as to whether the Prime Minister's statements about his office should extend to the PCO, Wernick had this to offer, which appropriately places the PCO as responsible to the Prime Minister.

He stated:

The Privy Council Office is the Prime Minister's department. It's part of the executive branch of government. It is the Prime Minister's department, and the Prime Minister is the minister, just like any other department, and the Clerk is the deputy minister, just like any other department.

It's not independent in the sense of the courts, but it is separate from [the Minister of Defence]. I guess that's the argument he was making. It was somebody from outside.

Mr. Wernick later responded to a question from the member for Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke as to why Elder Marques had gone to the Clerk instead of to the NSA.

Mr. Wernick stated:

That would be because I'm the boss of the Prime Minister's department. That would have been going right to the top and saying, “We have this very serious issue. The minister wants it looked into. What's the best way to proceed?

On February 1, 2002, the Speaker then ruled on a matter regarding the former minister of national defence. The hon. former member for Portage—Lisgar, now the current Premier of Manitoba, alleged that the then minister of national defence deliberately misled the House as to when he knew that prisoners taken by Canadian JTF2 troops in Afghanistan had been handed over to the Americans. In support of that allegation, he cited the minister's responses in Question Period on two successive days.

The Speaker considered the matter and found there was a prima facie question of privilege.

He stated:

The authorities are consistent about the need for clarity in our proceedings and about the need to ensure the integrity of the information provided by the government to the House.

The authorities to which Speaker Milliken referred to include, but are not limited to, House of Commons Procedure and Practice, second edition, which states on page 115:

Misleading a Minister or a Member has also been considered a form of obstruction and thus a prima facie breach of privilege.

On February 25, 2014, the House leader of the official opposition raised a question of privilege regarding statements made in the House by the member for Mississauga—Streetsville.

The hon. member for Mississauga—Streetsville had deliberately misled the House during debate on Bill C-23, the Fair Elections Act, when he stated that he had witnessed evidence of voter fraud first hand. He further argued that the matter was not resolved by the statements made by the member for Mississauga—Streetsville later on February 24 and 25, when he admitted that contrary to his original claim, he had not actually witnessed what he had originally claimed to have witnessed.

In the Speaker's view, this was not a simple case of someone misspeaking. He argued, rather, that it was a case where the member deliberately chose to take something he knew not to be true and present it as eyewitness evidence, something so egregious it constituted contempt. On March 3, the Speaker delivered his ruling and found the matter to be a prima facie question of privilege.

On November 3, 1978, the member for Northumberland—Durham raised a question of privilege and charged that he had been deliberately misled by a former solicitor general. The member had written a letter in 1973 to the solicitor general, who assured him that, as a matter of policy, the RCMP did not intercept the private mail of Canadians.

On November 1, 1978, during testimony before the McDonald Commission, the former commissioner of the RCMP stated that they did indeed intercept mail on a very restricted basis and that the practice was not one that had been concealed from ministers.

The Speaker ruled on December 6, 1978, that this was indeed a prima facie of contempt.

On the final analysis, does this meet the test for a prima facie question of period? The evidence above does clearly establish that the Prime Minister provided information that was misleading, and there is no doubt about that. Therefore, the first test is met.

On the second test, did the Prime Minister know that the information he provided was false?

On March 10, in questions from the official opposition, the Prime Minister specifically had to address the awareness of members of his office, Elder Marques and his department, Michael Wernick and Janine Sherman, and the defence minister. The Prime Minister's answer included the following, “The ombudsman came forward with allegations, the minister said that he needed to take those to independent authorities able to follow up on this investigation, and that is something my office was aware of.”:

Gary Walbourne's statement of March 3 to the Standing Committee on National Defence details specifically that the allegations brought forth were sexual in nature. The testimony predates the statement by the Prime Minister by a full week.

This was followed on March 11, in response to a question in the House, the Prime Minister named members of the Prime Minister's staff, as I said, Elder Marques and his department, Michael Wernick and Janie Sherman, and the defence minister, as having personal knowledge of the nature of the complaints. In that exchange, the defence minister speaks directly to his knowledge of the substance of the allegations and the actions he took with regard to it.

There is a strong case that the second test is met.

On the third test, was the Prime Minister intending to mislead the House?

The Prime Minister's answers on this matter have repeatedly changed, not only in the press but in the House. They have gone from “not being aware of allegations” to “not being aware of specific allegations” to “his office being aware.”

However, the public statement issued to the media by the Prime Minister's Office on February 23, and published in its entirety by Mercedes Stephenson, states the following, “The Prime Minister confirmed on March 10, in the House of Commons, that his office was aware of the concern raised by the defence ombudsman in 2018.”

That means the Prime Minister has issued a public statement prior to his statement in the House that his office was aware, as the defence minister has stated, that he raised concerns of a sexual nature regarding the chief of the defence staff.

In the face of a public statement by the Prime Minister, which contradicts the statement made yesterday in the House of Commons, there is an argument that the third test has been met.

In conclusion, it is just not believable that the Prime Minister was unaware that these allegations were of a #MeToo sexual complaint nature.

Let us remember, this was in 2018 at the height of the #MeToo movement, the very height of it. It was also during this period that allegations surfaced that the Prime Minister had inappropriately groped a young newspaper reporter. In addition, sitting on the Prime Minister's desk for three years was a report from former Supreme Court Justice Marie Deschamps that categorized the culture in the military as “sexualized”.

The second edition of Maingot's Parliamentary Privilege in Canada, at page 227, states:

In the final analysis, in areas of doubt, the Speaker asks simply:

Does the act complained of appear at first sight to be a breach of privilege...or to put it shortly, has the Member an arguable point? If the Speaker feels any doubt on the question, he should...leave it to the House.

In the House, the Prime Minister is being accused of something very serious, something that should not be treated lightly or dismissed as a matter of experiencing something differently.

Let us not forget who we are dealing with here. We are dealing with a Prime Minister who has frequently breached our ethics laws. I am, of course, referring to the SNC-Lavalin scandal, his family vacation on billionaire island and the investigation about his family ties to WE Charity.

All things considered, I believe I have more than an arguable point. If you rule this matter to be a prima facie question of privilege, Mr. Speaker, I am prepared to move the appropriate motion.

Response by the Prime Minister

[Andrew Scheer, Conservative, Leader of the Opposition]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today on a question of privilege regarding an incident that occurred in committee of the whole on July 8. I know you are aware of this, because I made this case to you a couple of weeks ago and you came back to the House and identified the unique circumstances. I thought that now that the House is sitting, I would expand on the remarks I made that day.

Mr. Speaker, I would first like to present to you my argument that in this special case it is within your authority and duty as Speaker to rule on the matter raised in committee of the whole. As you yourself noted on July 8:

...the situation is somewhat particular in that the question of privilege was raised in the committee of the whole and the procedure for dealing with it is quite different than it is in the House.

What complicates this matter even further is that the work of the committee of the whole today and the work scheduled this summer are strictly governed by an order of the House that limits these proceedings and dictates that the committee must now rise.

The situation is more than particularly complicated. The House order adopted on May 26 would appear to run counter to some of the more important tenets of our parliamentary democracy, such as Parliament's authority to defend members' privileges or take action to keep the executive accountable. Although the Liberals, with the support of the NDP, provided us with these occasions to talk in committee of the whole, they effectively prevented members from taking any action.

Mr. Speaker, that is the point of my submission to you today and why I believe you should intervene on this question of privilege that arose in committee of the whole on July 8.

Page 156 of the third edition of House of Commons Procedure and Practice explains the procedure when a member rises on a question of privilege in committee of the whole:

...the Chair will hear the question of privilege. As in a standing, special, or legislative committee, the role of the Chair is to decide whether the matter raised does in fact relate to privilege. If the matter raised by the Member touches on privilege and relates to events in the Committee of the Whole, the Chair will entertain a motion that the events be reported to the House.

The terms of the May 26 order do not provide for a motion to be moved. Therefore, the matter of my question of privilege cannot be reported to the House.

Pages 152 and 153 of the third edition of House of Commons Procedure and Practice note:

Speakers have consistently ruled that, except in the most extreme situations, they will hear questions of privilege arising from committee proceedings only upon presentation of a report from the committee which deals directly with the matter and not as a question of privilege raised by an individual Member.

The extreme situation noted in that passage was from 1992, when Speaker Fraser found a prima facie case of privilege with respect to threats made to a witness who had appeared before a subcommittee, without waiting for a report. The ruling, found at page 14631 of the Debates, from December 4, 1992, points out that there are occasions on which it is not appropriate to wait for a report from the committee before dealing with a serious breach of privilege. In that case, Mr. Speaker Fraser was faced with the fact that it might well be a period of several months before the subcommittee could meet to deal with the matter.

In this case, the problem is more substantive than just a simple matter of delay. It would appear that the committee of the whole established by the government is unable to take any action except to rise, as you explained to us on July 8, Mr. Speaker.

With respect to the content of my question of privilege, Mr. Speaker, I would like to bring your attention to a matter that was raised on November 3, 1978, by the member for Northumberland—Durham. The member charged that he had been deliberately misled by a former solicitor general. The member had written a letter in 1973 to the solicitor general, who assured him that as a matter of policy the RCMP did not intercept the private mail of Canadians. On November 1, 1978, during testimony before the McDonald Commission, the former commissioner of the RCMP stated that the RCMP did indeed intercept mail on a very restricted basis. The Speaker ruled on December 6, 1978, and found that this did constitute a prima facie case of privilege.

The issue I raised on July 8 is similar in that a senior officer of the House, the Ethics Commissioner, presented evidence that directly contradicts the evidence the Prime Minister gave the committee in response to my question about the co-operation that his office will or will not be providing to the Ethics Commissioner. The Prime Minister said, in reference to the SNC-Lavalin scandal, that he took unprecedented steps so that the Ethics Commissioner could, “fully investigate the matter at hand.”

On July 8, I referenced three points that the Ethics Commissioner made in the “Trudeau II Report”. They directly contradicted the Prime Minister.

First, the commissioner said:

Because of my inability to access all Cabinet confidences related to the matter I must, however, report that I was unable to fully discharge the investigatory duties conferred upon me by the Act.

Second, he noted:

Because of the decisions to deny our Office further access to Cabinet confidences, witnesses were constrained in their ability to provide all evidence. I was, therefore, prevented from looking over the entire body of evidence to determine its relevance to my examination. Decisions that affect my jurisdiction under the Act, by setting parameters on my ability to receive evidence, should be made transparently and democratically by Parliament, not by the very same public office holders who are subject to the regime I administer.

Third, he said:

During this examination, nine witnesses informed our Office that they had information they believed to be relevant, but that could not be disclosed because, according to them, this information would reveal a confidence of the Queen's Privy Council and would fall outside the scope of Order in Council 2019-0105.

This is very important, because as we are currently witnessing, the Prime Minister is in a very similar situation. He is assuring members of the House and Canadians that he will co-operate fully, as he said he did in the previous investigation, which we now know to be false.

On February 1, 2002, the Speaker Milliken ruled on a matter regarding the former minister of national defence. At the time, the previous member for Portage—Lisgar alleged that the former minister of national defence deliberately misled the House as to when he knew that prisoners taken by Canadian JTF 2 troops in Afghanistan had been handed over to the Americans. In support of that allegation, he cited the minister's responses in question period on two successive days. The Speaker considered the matter and found that there was a prima facie question of privilege. He said, “The authorities are consistent about the need for clarity in our proceedings and about the need to ensure the integrity of the information provided by the government to the House.” The authorities to which Speaker Milliken was referring include, but are not limited to, House of Commons Procedure and Practice, second edition, which states on page 115, “Misleading a Minister or a Member has also been considered a form of obstruction and thus a prima facie breach of privilege.”

The Speaker in 2002 accepted the minister's assertion that he had no intention to mislead the House and made the following statement: “Nevertheless this remains a very difficult situation.” The Speaker went on to say:

On the basis of the arguments presented by hon. members and in view of the gravity of the matter, I have concluded that the situation before us where the House is left with two versions of events is one that merits further consideration by an appropriate committee, if only to clear the air. I therefore invite the hon. member for Portage—Lisgar to move his motion.

Of course, the House is presented with two versions of events. We have the Prime Minister's version, where he claims he fully co-operated, and we have the report from the Ethics Commissioner, which directly contradicts that claim.

On February 25, 2014, the former House leader of the official opposition raised a question of privilege regarding statements made in the House by the former member for Mississauga—Streetsville. He said the hon. member for Mississauga—Streetsville had deliberately misled the House during debate on Bill C-23, the Fair Elections Act, when the member stated that he had witnessed evidence of voter fraud first-hand. The former House leader further argued that the matter was not resolved by the statements made by the member for Mississauga—Streetsville on February 24 and 25, when he admitted that, contrary to his original claim, he had not actually witnessed what he had originally claimed to have witnessed. In his view, this was not a simple case of someone misspeaking. He argued, rather, that in this case the member deliberately chose to take something he knew not to be true and present it as eyewitness evidence, something so egregious that it constituted contempt.

On March 3, 2014, the Speaker delivered his ruling, citing what Speaker Milliken was faced with in February 2002, when the then minister of national defence, Art Eggleton, provided contradictory information to the House. In a ruling on a question of privilege raised about the contradiction, Speaker Milliken stated on February 1, 2002, at page 8581 of the Debates, “I am prepared, as I must be, to accept the minister's assertion that he had no intention to mislead the House.”

The Speaker went on to conclude:

In keeping with that precedent, I am prepared to accord the same courtesy to the member for Mississauga—Streetsville.

At the same time, the fact remains that the House continues to be seized of completely contradictory statements. This is a difficult position in which to leave members, who must be able to depend on the integrity of the information with which they are provided to perform their parliamentary duties.

Accordingly, in keeping with the precedent cited earlier in which Speaker Milliken indicated that the matter merited “...further consideration by an appropriate committee, if only to clear the air”, I am prepared in this case for the same reason to allow the matter to be put to the House.

As you know, Mr. Speaker, in deciding these matters, Speakers take into consideration three principles. The first is that the statement was misleading.

This was clearly the case. The Prime Minister gave us a version of events that was obviously not true.

Second, the member knew at the time of the statement that it was incorrect. There is no doubt that the Prime Minister must have known that it was incorrect. The title of the report was the Trudeau II Report, because it was the second time he was found guilty of ethics violations. He also knows it to be false, because in the previous Parliament, I questioned him regularly on his obstruction of that investigation.

Third, the member making the statement intended to mislead the House.

I believe this matter has met all three of these principles, Mr. Speaker.

Getting back to your comment in committee on July 8 about this matter being complicated, I refer you to Joseph Maingot's second edition of Parliamentary Procedures in Canada, page 227:

In the final analysis, in areas of doubt, the Speaker asks simply: Does the act complained of appear at first sight to be a breach of privilege...or, to put it shortly, has the Member an arguable point? If the Speaker feels any doubt on the question, he should...leave it to the House.

In a ruling of October 24, 1966, at page 9005 of the Debates, the Speaker said:

In considering this matter I ask myself: What is the duty of the Speaker in cases of doubt? If we take into consideration that at the moment the Speaker is not asked to render a decision as to whether or not the article of complaint constitutes a breach of privilege...considering also that the Speaker is the guardian of the rules, rights and privileges of the House and of its members and that he cannot deprive them of such privileges when there is uncertainty in his mind.... I think at this preliminary stage of the proceedings, the doubt which I have in my mind should be interpreted to the benefit of the member.

Mr. Speaker, you have clearly indicated that this is uncharted territory. There are likely very few scenarios that could guide you specifically as to the proper course of action, because this has not happened before in our parliamentary system. I believe, therefore, you should leave it to the House to decide, and if you do find that there is a prima facie question of privilege, I am prepared to move the appropriate motion.

Procedure for Votes in the Chamber

[Candice Bergen, Conservative, Portage—Lisgar, MB]

Madam Speaker, I rise regarding the question of privilege that the whip brought forward yesterday, as well as the recent comments and explanation that was given by the member for Vimy. I want to take a couple of moments to comment, and I appreciate the opportunity to do so, and then we can continue with the debate on the bill.

I want to begin by thanking the member for Vimy for her explanation today. We all understand what it is like being a new member of Parliament and not always being sure of what it actually means to be in the chamber when the question is being read. I want to let the member know not to feel bad about that and that we all understand. We are glad that she now understands where she needs to be when the question is being read.

There are a couple of items I want to point to regarding two issues I know the Speaker indicated he would be looking at and making some decisions on. The first is on the issue of misleading the House. There is some precedent which I think is important we have the opportunity to hear and consider as the Speaker makes his decision.

On February 25, 2014, the House leader of the official opposition raised a question of privilege regarding statements made in the House by the member for Mississauga—Streetsville. The hon. member for Mississauga—Streetsville had deliberately misled the House during debate on Bill C-23, the Fair Elections Act, when he stated that he had witnessed evidence of voter fraud first-hand.

He further argued that the matter was not resolved by the statements made by the member for Mississauga—Streetsville on February 24 and February 25, where he admitted that, contrary to his original claim, he had not actually witnessed what he had originally claimed to have witnessed and he apologized to the House.

On March 3, the Speaker delivered his ruling, citing what Speaker Milliken was faced with in February 2002 when the then minister of national defence, Art Eggleton, provided contrary information to the House. In that case as well, the minister indicated that he did not intentionally mislead the House and he too apologized.

Speaker Milliken went on to conclude, “In keeping with that precedent, I am prepared to accord the same courtesy to the member for Mississauga—Streetsville.”

We have two precedents where prima facie cases of privilege were found despite members indicating that they did not intend to mislead the House and apologized. There is precedent where when this House and the Speaker are misled, there still is a case of prima facie privilege and that there is a consequence that needs to be found for that action.

With respect to my whip's motion to send this matter to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, I refer the Speaker to the second edition of Maingot's Parliamentary Privilege in Canada, page 227, which states:

In the final analysis, in areas of doubt, the Speaker asks simply:

Does the act complained of appear at first sight to be a breach of privilege...or to put it shortly, has the Member an arguable point? If the Speaker feels any doubt on the question, he [or she] should...leave it to the House.

I am asking the Speaker to leave this matter to the House to decide, and if the House decides to send this issue to committee, then the committee can look at, in addition to the misleading statement, the issue my whip raised as to establishing a mechanism for the Speaker to deal with disputed votes, which is particularly important in a minority Parliament.

We need to deal with the issue of deliberately or not deliberately misleading the House and there is precedent for that. As well, we need to deal with the matter of the importance of votes. In a minority Parliament, we still have the question of how we would have dealt with it if it had been a matter of confidence and the government had lost that vote, which we all know is of grave importance.

I wanted to make sure that was presented as the Speaker continues his deliberations.

Elections Modernization Act

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise in debate at this point on Bill C-76. I want to take the occasion to start with a bit of a broad historical sweep, albeit going back just to 2014. It is important for Canadians to know what is being accomplished with this legislation and what remains to be done. It is not perfect. I want to stress that, but I will be voting for it. I am also gratified that at least some of my amendments were accepted in the committee that studied the bill.

I want to go back to 2014, when the current hon. member for Carleton was the minister of democratic institutions. He brought forward a bill in that Parliament, Bill C-23, that was given the unlikely title, given its content, of the Fair Elections Act. I was a member of the opposition at the time, as leader of the Green Party, but I struggled with other members of the opposition, the New Democrats and Liberals, to try to stop that piece of legislation because it clearly had less to do with fairness than with trying to create favourable conditions for the governing party, the Conservatives at that time, going into the 2015 election.

Therefore, it is with a great deal of irony that I have heard a number of times Conservative members say that the Liberals are just trying to change the terms to make them better for their party.

We cannot forget the circumstances in 2014 when the member for Carleton introduced his bill. I hope that this will now be fixed by the changes to Bill C-76.

Going back to what the so-called Fair Elections Act did, it was consumed, as some members of this place still are, with a fiction—and I want to underscore the word “fiction”.

It is completely untrue. I want to stress that Canada does not have a problem with election fraud.

We do not have a problem of people disguising themselves, taking voter cards or any number of things that have been hinted at in the chamber in the last debate on Bill C-76. We do not have a problem of Canadians voting more than once under assumed identities. We have a problem of Canadians voting less than once. That is a serious problem, and that is why we needed the things that the so-called Fair Elections Act got rid of. These were things like being able to vouch for someone and being able to provide one's voter card as a piece of ID when going to the polls.

None of this would have been necessary if it were not for changes that the former Harper Conservatives made back at the very beginning of their first mandate. For the first time, they made it a requirement that Canadians produce a piece of government issued photo ID in order to vote. That, again, hinted darkly at the idea that people were voting more than once because we did not have enough checks on this problem. It was a non-existent problem then and does not exist now. It never existed. That is the evidence of several chief electoral officers, including Marc Mayrand and Jean-Pierre Kingsley, who both testified to the PROC committee that it was a non-problem.

Bill C-23 did a few other things. It took away some of the abilities of our Chief Electoral Officer to speak to us as voters when we needed information. One of those critical moments was, for instance, the election in 2011. The Chief Electoral Officer sent out a press release and got on the phone and radio. Robocalls were going on. Canadians were being misdirected, being told that their polling stations had changed. None of that was true. We had an investigation. I do not think it was ever adequately investigated. We know it took place, but we do not know who did it. That is a mystery that remains unsolved, but I think we know there was a gun lying on the floor, it was smoking, and several people standing around appeared to have used it. We have no conclusion, but we know for sure that voters who did not intend to vote Conservative were being told to go to polling stations that did not exist.

The Chief Electoral Officer then had the power to get on the radio and say “If you get a message on the phone that tells you it's Elections Canada on the line and your polling station has changed, ignore it. We have not changed any polling stations”. That was important.

What Bill C-23 did in 2014 was to take away the ability of the Chief Electoral Officer to do exactly that. It took away the ability of the Chief Electoral Officer to reassure Canadians that their polling stations had not changed.

There were a number of other things that the so-called Fair Elections Act did. One was to say that if there were a particularly long writ period, more spending would be permitted. That meant that the really big parties, like the Conservatives or the Liberals, and this was certainly to the advantage of the Conservatives in that election, could spend more money if the writ period were longer. They spent a lot of money. In that election, they spent just shy of $42 million. The people of Canada gave them half back, because of the way the so-called Fair Elections Act operated to their benefit.

Moving quickly, we had two pieces of legislation tabled in this 42nd Parliament to deal primarily with fixing all of the things that had gone wrong or were perverse under Bill C-23 in the 41st Parliament. In December 2016, we got Bill C-33. I was thrilled to see it, but it never got to second reading. Everything in Bill C-33 was added to Bill C-76, which emerged this year.

Let me just go through the great things that were in the original Bill C-33 and are now before us in Bill C-76. It gave the Chief Electoral Officer back the powers to warn people, to talk to Canadians, and to educate people in a non-partisan fashion. It got rid of the extended period in which parties could get more money out of the whole system. That is now in Bill C-76. It actually shortened up the period and restricted how much money big parties could spend, which means that the taxpayers will reimburse them less at the end, which is great.

The first part of Bill C-33, which has now come forward within Bill C-76, brought back the basics, namely that people are allowed to bring someone with them to the polls to say, “I know Joe. He's my brother-in-law. We live in the same neighbourhood. He's missing a driver's licence because his driver's licence has been taken away from him. I am here to vouch for him.” Students voting at university have a very difficult time proving where they live and thus that they have the right to vote.

Far too many people were denied their constitutionally enshrined right to vote in 2015. The Conservatives said that voter turnout went up. Sure it did. Voters were desperate to get rid of Stephen Harper, and they showed up in large droves. However, the reality is that hundreds of thousands of Canadians were denied the right to vote because of the changes to the Elections Act that we are now getting rid of.

What is also really good and entirely new is the concept that the Chief Electoral Officer, that is, Elections Canada, can go into schools and try to encourage 14-year olds to register to vote for when they turn 18. They can start, right away, knowing that they are registered so that they can begin to think about their civic duty to vote.

The lack of voter turnout among our youngest citizens is a real problem. I would love to see us reduce the voting age to 16. That is not in this bill, but a good first step is allowing Elections Canada to go into the schools to talk to the young people when they are in high school. Their civics education will feel far more real when they are personally registering to vote. It is not that they have the right to vote, but they are pre-registered for when they turn 18 and do have the right to vote.

Bill C-76 does a number of other things. I do not think we will ever do enough to deal with the threats to social media, things like Cambridge Analytica, the way that Facebook information can be mined, the way that Facebook ads can be targeted, and the use of fake news. Bill C-76 attempts to deal with this. I think we are going to have to come back to it and do more. I certainly support what they have done in this bill.

I certainly support having pre-writ election spending limits. This was a big vacuum in our laws. I think it is because the last time we looked at the Elections Act, no political party was spending money pre-writ. They kept their money and started spending it after the writ fell. It was not until Stephen Harper's attacks on Stéphane Dion in January 2007 that we started having attack ads outside of a writ period with no spending controls at all. Now we have spending controls.

What is missing? Here is the big gap. This was our opportunity to put political parties under our privacy laws. This legislation says that political parties must develop privacy policies and table them, but that is a far cry from having them under our privacy laws. It is a voluntary scheme. We need to put political parties under our privacy laws.

Back when Bill C-23 was going through the House in 2014, during clause-by-clause consideration of the bill, I did try to get an amendment passed that would make political parties subject to the Privacy Act. No party supported that then. I really want to thank the New Democratic Party for supporting my amendment, which did not succeed, to set out that parties must adhere to the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, PIPEDA. We did not succeed, but I thank the NDP for being with me on that.

We need to keep working for fair elections in Canada. Bill C-76 gets us a long way toward them.

[Celina Caesar-Chavannes, Liberal, Whitby, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I have been listening to this debate for quite some time and hearing the opposition talk about time allocation and the issue with having the Chief Electoral Officer in place at a particular time.

I am hoping that my colleague from Oakville could speak to this and remind hon. members and all Canadians that we used 87% of the recommendations of the Chief Electoral Officer. We heard witnesses' testimony that amounted to over 100 hours of study of this legislation, where Bill C-23, the unfair elections act, only had less than 50 hours.

I am wondering if my colleague could speak to the dedication that we have put into this piece of legislation.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

Mr. Speaker, I do not know how I am going to follow that. It was quite blistering, intelligent and if I do say so myself, something I must surpass. I will try. I do not know if I will have any success, nevertheless we know the Lower Mainland of British Columbia is well represented.

I want to thank my colleagues for bringing forward their thoughts on this. We are into third reading on Bill C-76. We are just about to hand it over the Senate. I hope it gets the acceptance.

For me, this is a journey that has taken place for quite some time. It started for me with Bill C-23 in the last Parliament. At the time, it was called the Fair Elections Act. There was much to-do about the title, of course, and a lot of people made fun of the title. A lot of us felt that it was not fair in many respects. Some changes were made that were certainly acceptable, but for the most part, it was a bill that was troubled in the law. In my humble opinion, here we are now winding back some of the mistakes made in Bill C-23.

There are four main themes in Bill C-76. We are talking about amendments to third party spending, which is very important because third party spending has come up quite a bit in politics throughout the world. The United States grapples with this issue every year, not just every four years. Throughout Europe it is the same sort of situation, where one has to track the third party spending looking at how they plan to affect elections. This bill would substantially address that issue, far more substantially than what has been done in the past.

One of the things being encapsulated in this legislation is the fact that the activities around politics and the things we can spend on are being described. Right now, there are all sorts of ways of communicating with the people. With the onset of polling years ago, now we have push polls, pull polls and all that sort of thing, as well as the fact that we also have social media to contend with. In the past, advertising was held to newspapers, radio and television. Through social media, now there are all types of advertising, and ways to track advertising spending have become much more difficult as well. Therefore, encapsulating all of that in this legislation would go a long way.

For example, in the past we always talked about the advertising issue. Right now, there are three elements in this legislation we must address: election advertising, as I have mentioned; political activities, election activities such as rallies and those sorts of things that must be addressed; plus surveys, finding out the information and bringing it back to the candidate and the campaign, and the expenditures surrounding those.

The second part of Bill C-76 is reducing barriers to participation and increasing accessibility. To me, the accessibility measures in this legislation are essential. I will get to those in a moment. However, part of this bill would be reducing the barriers to participate, in particular the voter information card, which is something that has come up quite a bit. I will also address that a little later. In terms of modernizing voting services, I mentioned the advent of technology. We are using technology a lot more in all facets of life, not just when it comes to election campaigns. Another element is amendments related to privacy and protecting personal information.

When it comes to third parties, what we would be doing here is broadening the scope of third party activities. A third party would have to register with a CEO, which we feel is necessary. If they spend more than $500, then they would have go forward, be registered and would have to be tracked in light of that. We are also talking about spending on advertising, as I mentioned, partisan activities and election surveys.

Now, we would be defining two periods to measure this. There would be a pre-election period and the election period, when the writ is dropped until election day. It is very important to capture what would be happening in the pre-election period in this legislation, because we want to track how it affects the election itself. Third party spending is a big part of that. Foreign prohibition also came up. I have been here 14 years, and this issue comes up substantially when talking about foreign participation in our elections. Now, it is not prolific to the point where it is a major problem, but it could be. The language in this legislation would curtail a lot of that activity.

To be precise, it would be people who do not reside in Canada. It would include corporations that do not carry on business in Canada or are not formed in Canada and groups where the responsible person does not reside in Canada. It defines the entity by which third party spending is done.

I want to move on to another subject that is also encapsulated in the bill that is a step ahead. It is called the register of future electors. There are many jurisdictions around the world, and even within Canada, that look at voters younger than the voting age of 18. They go through the process of registering them so that when they turn 18 it becomes a simpler measure. However, what it really does is incorporate younger people to get involved in the election itself. It is not like when one takes part in an election in school. What they are doing is enumerating themselves to be registered so that when the election arrives they will be far more ready and far more aware of the situation of how one registers to become involved. Let us face it, it is a right to vote. We have a right within our charter, and therefore, to exercise their right these people get to the point where they work up to the age of 18.

There are jurisdictions in Canada that do this right now. They are: Nova Scotia, P.E.I., Ontario and Yukon. Around the world, U.K., New Zealand, Australia and Argentina all partake in registering of younger voters before the age they are eligible to vote.

That is only fair. Within the major political parties in the House one can vote for a leader at 14 years of age. Therefore, if the parties recognize they are incorporating people at this age to vote, then certainly it is incumbent upon Elections Canada, which they agree with and seem to be as excited about this as much as I am. They too are now involved in the process. That is also something in the bill that was overdue. Now we are embarking upon that.

On accessible voting, amendments to make it easier for those needing assistance to vote need to be improved. We are looking at assistance by friends or relatives to make the process of marking a ballot easier. Vouching in seniors residences would also become easier. The right to vote and the access to vote is an inalienable for Canadians and must be enshrined in legislation. The access to vote must be improved through the Canada Elections Act.

The other part of the disability involves when it comes to spending and how we do this. Money spent on those with disabilities can be included for election expenses but is not part of the cap. Therefore, we can be reimbursed for expenses for those with disabilities, but it does not go toward the overall spending cap. This is the type of legislation that could go a long way. It may seem like a small measure to many of us, but it is not if one is campaigning for someone with a disability.

Clause 5 restores the broad-based authority of the CEO to educate and inform the public. This was an egregious error in Bill C-23, the former Fair Elections Act, when they took that power away from Elections Canada. The problem with it was that Elections Canada was not able to inform the public about voting, the process and the democracy of it. It was basically pigeonholed to one particular part, which was only to youth. There is nothing wrong with that, that will continue, but now Elections Canada would have the ability to go beyond this and bring to the public information about democracy and voting. It would help promote to Canadian citizens above the age of 18 who have not taken part in democracy, and therefore is essential.

The other part is on the voter information card. How many times would I go around and see people with the voter information card on their refrigerator or on the door, waiting for election day? They would take it down to the voting booth as part of their ID and be turned away because it is not ID. To me, that was just wrong. Therefore, I am glad to see we are restoring the voter information card as valid ID. In the past, with Bill C-23, the problem with that legislation in many respects was it was a solution to a problem that did not exist. The problems around the voter information card were so minuscule that they felt it was unnecessary to use. To me, that was an egregious error so I am glad to see that back in all its facets.

Finally, I would like to say I am glad to see that the commissioner of Canada elections has returned to Elections Canada and has been taken out of the public prosecution office.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Madam Speaker, I welcome this debate because the Liberals have finally got on with it and introduced a bill to fix the work done by the previous government, and here I use the term “work” loosely, because that work made it more difficult for a whole series of Canadians to vote.

As the parliamentary secretary was saying earlier, this bill, in their terms, is a “generational overhaul”. Even in the name of the bill itself, that it is a modernization act, conveys that. It gives Canadians the clear sense that we do not do this very often. We do not renew the election rules by which we all participate in our democracy, the ways in which the parties and third parties participate and the ways that voters experience the election, very often.

There was a longstanding principle in Canada, that we would never change those rules in this place unilaterally, that doing so was bad practice and bad faith for one party alone, the government, to force through changes to our rules unilaterally. Canadians would then be left with the very distinct impression that maybe the ruling party of the time was putting in rules that would help that party in the next election.

That is a fair assumption to make. People do not even have to be quite so cynical as some folks in the Prime Minister's Office are to make that assumption.

The practice in this place, for generations, was that when we changed election rules, we did it together collaboratively. The previous government, unfortunately, broke with that tradition over a fight about vouching. It felt there were problems with the vouching system. The New Democrats fundamentally disagreed and the evidence supported them, because there was no massive fraud taking place in our elections and those changes were more about disenfranchisement than ensuring proper enfranchisement of our voting rights.

How we got here with the current government is an important part of this conversation. The Liberals said that the bar was quite low, that their aim was to fix Stephen Harper's unfair elections act. It was not going to be hard to do; it just had to undo a bunch of the damage that the Conservatives had done in Bill C-23 in the last Parliament.

The government introduced the bill. It took a year, but okay, it was a new government. Then for two years, it did not move the bill. The bill just sat there on the Order Paper. I can remember getting up in this place to ask the democratic institutions minister, “Hey, where is your bill? What else are you working on?”

At the time, we had been going through the whole electoral reform process, some of my colleagues will remember well. The committee was called ERRE. It was a special committee. We had participation from all parties, including a representative of the Bloc and the Greens. We toured around the country. We visited every nook and cranny. I see that the Chair is smiling in fond recollection of all of those days we spent on the road together. It was an incredible privilege, not just because we got to hear from experts in Canada about our democracy and how it could perform better, about voting and how to count votes in different ways, but also heard about how much of Europe and most of the world, in fact, had changed over time.

Also, and more importantly, we got to hear from average, ordinary Canadians. We had an online survey. Some 33,000, I think, people participated. We went around and held town halls, and heard from witnesses from each of the provinces, but we also just had an open mic where people could come up for a few minutes and tell us what they thought was needed.

As a parliamentarian, this is the very lifeblood, the very motivation of why we should be here, to have that open access to Canadians. They poured their hearts out to us, talking about voting reforms they wanted to see. They overwhelmingly supported proportional voting systems. That was the evidence that we heard, both from the experts and from the public who came before us.

Then, unfortunately, at the 11th hour, in a most awkward and quite cynical move, the Liberals kind of pulled the plug and, for months, they would not talk about what they wanted to do, what kind of voting systems they were interested in. The Prime Minister had hinted at one out of Australia that he liked, a ranked ballot. However, very early on in the committee process, we heard from experts who said that ranked ballots would not work well in Canada, that it would be a first-past-the-post system but on steroids. It worked very well for a traditionally centrist party, a party that borrowed a bit from all sides at all times. Good gosh, who could that possibly help out? Right, it was the Liberals. That idea was shot down out of the gate.

Then the disinterest of the Liberals in moving anything forward became obvious, to the final point where the then-democratic reform minister got up in this place and slammed the committee itself for failing to do its job. She then became the former democratic institutions minister, because that did not go over well.

Moving forward, we then saw the government taking so much time that it actually blew past the Elections Canada deadline, which was last spring. Indeed, Elections Canada came before our committee and said that if we were going to make any changes to the way elections are run, it needed legislation passed by the House and the Senate last spring. The Liberals said, “right”, saw the deadline and introduced the bill the day after the deadline had passed.

The committee began to work, the Conservatives started a little filibuster, and that took all spring and into the fall, and then the government blinked and they worked out a deal together. It is so nice to see parliamentarians getting together and working things out. The Conservatives and Liberals worked out that there would be more pre-election spending money, thus putting more money into politics. The Liberals were okay with that. Now they are upset again at the Conservatives and so things are returning back to normal, I guess.

We were just outside the House of Commons talking about the debates commission, which this very same committee had studied as well for quite a while and made clear recommendations, which I have here. The second and most important one is on the leaders' debate, which is an important part of our democratic process. A lot of Canadians watch these debates in French and English and make up their minds as to whom they want to support. However, it got a little tricky in the last election, with leaders not showing up and kind of screwing up the process a bit. Therefore, a debates commission was promised three years ago. However, for months and months, the new Liberal minister of democratic reform told us not to worry, that they were not really consulting with us because they were just going to use the report by the procedure and House affairs committee, PROC. We said, okay, if they followed what PROC studied and recommended, then we should be fine.

The second recommendation states that the leaders debate commissioner must be selected unanimously by all parties in the House. That seems like a good idea. We do not want the person who sets the rules over that important debate to favour one party or another, or to be chosen only by one party and not anyone else, because Canadians would then ask if it were not a partisan appointment, which is not right. It should not be a partisan appointment, especially by just one party, because then we would just watch the democratic reform minister step out in front of the cameras and say that the government has appointed a commissioner, that the government has decided alone and set the terms for who can participate in the debate and that the commissioner it has appointed will set the topics and all of the rules to follow. The Liberals say unilaterally, “Trust us”.

On democratic issues, the government seems to have some kind of fundamental twitch that comes up again and again, in that when it comes to the decision between collaboration and working with others versus unilaterally having all the power in its hands, the governing Liberals choose the latter again and again. I do not know why. It is actually quite stupid strategically, because when they make recommendations that are only supported by themselves, they are open to proper accusations of bias, of trying to rig the rules. For heaven's sake, I just do not know why. It is not just for the sake of the spirit of collaboration that we try to work together to try to strengthen our democracy, but if that is not motivation enough, then doing so just for the sake of political strategy is sufficient reason. However, the Liberals do not understand that when they work with other parties and have them support their recommendation, there is just much less controversy out the other end and that Canadians will trust the results more. Yet, time and time again, the Liberals choose to go it alone and then it blows up in their face again and again, and then they want to blame someone.

Here we are with Bill C-76, which is pretty flawed. I mean, 338 recommendations and amendments, a whole bunch of them, came from the governing party itself. They wrote the bill and then had to correct the bill, and then just last night, we voted on more corrections to the corrections of the bill. It is not great that it took them three years to get here, and there were so many fundamental problems in it, and a bunch of things remain uncorrected. I will give one example, and I think it is a good one.

Canadians would worry about someone trying to cheat or steal votes in an election and spending money illegally. Well, how would Elections Canada be able to investigate that? It needs to compel testimony, which the bill includes. However, what the bill does not include, which Elections Canada wanted, is the power to require receipts, cheque stubs, from all of the political parties, as it does for us as candidates. As candidates, if we claim to spend money, we have to demonstrate how the money was spent. Political parties do not.

Well, that is strange. How can Elections Canada do an investigation and find out if something went wrong or if someone may be cheating if it cannot get the evidence? It would be like passing criminal laws in this place where we would strengthen the laws to protect Canadians, but deny the police the ability to gather evidence. We cannot bring a person to trial if we do not have evidence.

However, the Liberals actually had a provision in the bill to require receipts and invoices, but took it out. We tried to put it back in and the Liberals said no. The Chief Electoral Officer said that he needed that ability to catch the bad guys. If someone working in some party office started to cheat and spend money in a bad way, Elections Canada is not going to know, because it will not have the evidence. In order to have an investigation, we need evidence.

Let us talk about getting more women into Parliament. We all remember Daughters of the Vote. It is an excellent program. The government just decided to fund it a little more. Under that program, young women, particularly from each of the ridings across the country, come and occupy these seats, 338 of them. They sit in these seats. Last year they got to question the Prime Minister. They were good. They were tough and fair, but mostly tough.

When we look at our parliamentary situation and whether Parliament reflects what the country looks like, if we were to stand out on the front steps, the first thing one would notice is that there are not a lot of women. They represent 26% of members in this Parliament. In the last Parliament, they were 25%. It went up by one percentage point. At the current pace, we will have gender equity in Parliament in 83 years. The Daughters of the Vote said, “That is not a sufficient timeline, Mr. Feminist Prime Minister. When are you going to get on with this?”

One of the ways we can all get on with this is to encourage more women and more people of diverse backgrounds to run. That is a good way of doing things. However, like many things in life, we have to follow the money. Therefore, one of the changes we proposed was included in the bill by our former colleague Kennedy Stewart. The Liberals said they liked that bill, but then voted against it. How typical. What it proposed was that when we reimburse parties for spending, which the public very generously does, we should reimburse to 100% those parties that try to present candidates that reflect the country, those parties that have candidates close to parity. The parties that just want to present 100% pale, male and stale candidates would get less money back from the public. It is a form of encouragement to not just mouth the words but go out and try to recruit diversity so that we can have diverse views here. How radical is that? The Liberals voted against that. Instead, they said they were going to allow women to claim child care expenses for 30 days as part of their election spending. They could fundraise on that and get child care for 30 days, as if that were the barrier holding women back from running for office, those 30 days in the 35 days of the actual writ period.

Come on. For an allegedly feminist prime minister—and I say “allegedly” because I do not have a lot of evidence to show that he is—one would think that if he had a proposal in hand that would result in more women over time getting into office, that would be good, unless he is happy with 26%. That seems to be the case, because he recently decided to protect all of his incumbents from nomination races. He just said, “They're all protected”, which is essentially saying that he would like to have the status quo. I know this because I think there is a Liberal riding association that does not want to have its current incumbent MP represent them again, and the Liberal Party recently told it to step in line or walk out the door. That is love of the grassroots if I ever saw it.

Privacy was a huge part of the conversation that we had with Canadians. New Democrats believe in people's right to have their personal data private. As we move deeper into the social media world, the Internet based economy, privacy and the protection of privacy become incredibly important in commerce but also in politics. Here is what the rules in Canada say right now with regard to how the parties manage huge databases of information about the Canadian voter. They say nothing. Canadian law says nothing. Therefore, if this is a modernization bill, a once in a generation attempt to make our elections free and fair and to protect our sacred democracy here in Canada, one would think that because it is 2018, we would have something in here about that data and protecting Canadians' rights.

Here is the threat that we have seen exposed. It is not an imagined threat. Has anyone heard of Cambridge Analytica? People from Cambridge Analytica approached a number of MPs in the last Parliament, me included, and said that we should hire them because they could help us harvest data from our social media sites, from Twitter and Facebook. They said they would find out their associated email addresses, something one cannot normally do. If someone likes us on Facebook, then they like us on Facebook. That is no big deal, However, we cannot find out their email address. They said they would get us those people's friends as well, that they would be able to micro-target folks who might be associated with them and of interest to us.

For political parties, that is red meat. That is interesting. That opens up whole new worlds. What we can do now with social media is to hyper-target people. The old days of putting out political ads with a sort of scattered approach in appealing to voters are gone. Micro-targeting is where it is at.

The Liberals up until last year prided themselves on being able to micro-target. They said that is how they won the last election. In fact, they hired Cambridge Analytica. They gave a $100,000 government contract to do what? Has anyone seen the contract? No, because the Liberals will not put it out. They hired the guys who were caught up in a thing called Brexit.

Folks will remember Brexit. Britain certainly remembers Brexit because it is going through it right now. Voters in England were hyper-targeted. Databases had been harvested. Facebook likes and share groups had been manipulated and were only being sent a whole bunch of myths and disinformation about what Brexit meant. The British Parliament has been trying to unravel this thing ever since Brexit happened as to how that referendum vote happened.

I want people, particularly from Quebec, to imagine if in the last Quebec referendum we found out after the fact that the referendum had been tampered with by outside groups and agencies, that a foreign government had gone into the data profiles of Quebeckers and targeted them one by one and spread misinformation about the effects of their referendum vote, and we found out after the fact. What would the reaction of Quebeckers be in what was ultimately an incredibly close vote as to whether Quebec would seek to leave Canada? Would anyone cast aspersions on the results of the vote whether they won or lost, that whoever had lost would say that the vote was not done fairly? That is what is being said in England.

The U.S. justice department has said that the last U.S. election was tampered with and the current U.S. mid-terms are being tampered with right now through Russian and Chinese online hackers. The threat is real and the threat is now. When we look at this modernization bill and say what protections are we—

[Bernadette Jordan, Liberal, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Madam Speaker, let me remind members of this House that in a democracy, voting is a fundamental right. Unlike the Conservatives, we believe our democracy is stronger when more Canadians, not fewer, vote.

I now want to touch on the amendments that official opposition members put forward at report stage. Simply put, their amendments would have removed accessibility measures, removed the Chief Electoral Officer's mandate to communicate with Canadians about voting, removed the ability for one voter to vouch for another, and taken away the right from over one million Canadians to vote. It is clear that the official opposition is opposed to more Canadians voting. Sadly, this does not surprise me.

The Conservatives will stand in this place and claim to be champions of Canadian democracy, but I wonder how they genuinely can say that when they have delayed and filibustered throughout the study of this legislation. Let us be honest. The Conservative members attempted to block this legislation purely for partisan purposes. Rather than strengthening our democracy in Canada, the Conservative members of the procedure and House affairs committee wanted unlimited spending ability for political parties in the pre-writ period.

We are levelling the political playing field with Bill C-76 to ensure that our elections are more fair, transparent and secure as a result of this amended legislation. However, the Conservatives insisted on delaying the important work of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs and preventing good legislation, which will help more Canadians vote, from proceeding through this House.

Earlier this fall, the committee invited the Minister of Democratic Institutions to appear at the start of the clause-by-clause consideration, but rather than agreeing to set a time and date to begin clause-by-clause, the Conservatives filibustered throughout the minister's appearance during which she waited for, but never received, a single question. To be completely frank, I still cannot see what their reasoning was for these delays, apart from wasting the minister's time, delaying the important work of the committee and preventing good legislation which will help more Canadians vote from proceeding through this House. I just cannot imagine how Canadians could support these games and tactics.

Many Canadians choose to study or work abroad at various points in their lives. With the advancement in technology, Canadians are more mobile than ever before. As it has been said many times before in this House, a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian, and regardless if an individual was born in this country or took the oath of citizenship recently, by virtue of being a citizen of this country, that individual is entitled and has the right to have his or her voice heard in our elections. It is puzzling that Conservative members in this House would attempt to prevent over one million Canadians from voting in our elections simply because they are living abroad. In spite of attempts from members opposite, Bill C-76, if passed, will ensure that Canadian citizenship entitles people to vote in federal elections regardless of where they currently reside. It is as simple as that.

During the consideration of this legislation at the procedure and House affairs committee, the Conservatives put forward amendments that would require parental consent for young people to participate in Elections Canada's register for future electors; lower the administrative monetary penalties for those who break election laws; restrict the capabilities and independence of the commissioner of Canada elections in performing his or her duties; and restrict the use of the voter information card to provide one's address. Those are just to name a few.

I will return to an amendment submitted by a Conservative member on the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. It had to do with the requirement of parental consent for young people to participate in Elections Canada's register of future electors. Members of this House who are parents will know that parental consent is required for many memberships and to access various online platforms, and certainly for good reason, but to conflate a young person's interest in the democracy of our country and our electoral system with something nefarious is just another attempt by the Conservatives to create barriers to voting in the hopes to suppress the vote.

Members on this side of the House are not surprised by this. The Harper Conservatives attempted to build a case of fear and distrust in our elections through Bill C-23 with the removal of the use of the voter information card to prove address as they felt it was being used by voters to vote multiple times, which as we know, is simply not true. We now see the same fear and divisive tactics by members of the former Conservative government now being used by the opposition with its proposed amendments.

It should also come as no surprise that the Conservatives did attempt to amend Bill C-76 to restrict the independence of the commissioner of Canada elections. After all, it was the Harper Conservatives who restricted the commissioner's power to investigate in the first place.

Members of the House will remember that through Bill C-76 we are reinstating the commissioner's independence and empowering him or her with the ability to better investigate possible violations of elections law. We are giving the commissioner the power to seek a warrant to compel testimony and the power to lay charges. We are doing this following the recommendation after the 2015 election where the Chief Electoral Officer stated, “The inability to compel testimony has been one of the most significant obstacles to effective enforcement of the act.” Following the Chief Electoral Officer's compelling argument, I find it deeply concerning that all members of the House would not support this measure in Bill C-76.

What is stranger yet is that Conservative members on the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs did not support the amendments submitted by the hon. member for Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, which would add additional punishment for third parties using foreign funding for regulated activities. Under this amendment, third parties who are found guilty of offences related to the use of foreign funds could be subjected to a punishment equal to five times the amount of foreign funds that were used.

The reason I find it surprising that they did not support this amendment is that it can also be found in Bill S-239, which was introduced by one of their Conservative caucus colleagues, Senator Frum. Given that the proposed amendment is the same punishment as set out in Bill S-239, I have to wonder if the amendment was purely not supported because it came from a member on this side of the House, or if it was not supported because it actually would strengthen the legislation. Either reason is completely unacceptable.

This fall the new Conservative critic for democratic institutions, the member for Calgary Midnapore, brought a new collaborative tone to our work and I want to thank her for that. Collaboration from all three parties at the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs has made this a stronger bill. Members will not always agree on everything in this chamber; in fact, it is disagreement and debate which can produce better policies for all Canadians.

That is why I want to highlight some of the amendments brought forward by opposition members that the committee was able to come together and agree on. These include more protection for information contained in the register of future voters; creating a better definition for third party activities in Canada; and expanding vouching so that any voter on the list in the same polling station can vouch for another voter.

This builds on other important amendments brought forward by the Liberal members on the committee. I would like to highlight just a few of the amendments presented by my colleagues on this side of the House that further strengthen this legislation. These include a complete ban on foreign money spent at any time, not just during the writ or pre-writ periods, for third parties; a new obligation on social media platforms to create a registry of all digital advertising published and paid for by third parties, political parties and nominated and prospective candidates during the pre-writ and writ period; and, as previously mentioned, allowing employees of long-term care facilities to vouch for residents.

During debate on the bill at report stage, we heard concerns from the member for Thornhill with regard to foreign funds in our elections. He said:

Bill C-76 would double the total maximum third party spending amount allowed during the writ period, and it would still allow unlimited contributions from individual donors and others, unlimited spending by third parties and unlimited foreign donations outside the pre-writ and writ periods....

In wrapping up, while there are, admittedly, some modest improvements made to Bill C-76, it remains a deeply deficient attempt to restore fairness to the Canadian election process.

Simply put, this bill, as amended at committee, would prohibit the use of foreign funding in all third party partisan activities and advertising regardless of whether they take place during the pre-election or election period. As a result, I am proud that this bill would ban all foreign money all of the time to further protect our elections from foreign influence. I must also note for the member's reference that this amendment was supported by all members of the committee, including the member's own caucus colleagues.

On the subject of pre-writ spending by virtue of the creation of these timelines during an election year, Bill C-76 has created a maximum writ period of 50 days. I have heard from constituents in my riding of South Shore—St. Margarets that while levelling the political playing field is important to keep our electoral system fair, they also think that the fixed election date rules cannot be abused again. The previous government rigged the system to its own advantage and many Canadians were frustrated to be in such a gravely extended campaign period.

Before I wrap up, I want to go into detail on one other aspect of Bill C-76, which is Canadian Armed Forces voting. The women and men of the armed forces make tremendous sacrifices on behalf of our country and to protect our free and fair Canadian elections, yet they vote at a lower rate than the general population. This is likely in part because the Canadian Armed Forces' voting system is terribly outdated. Canadian Armed Forces members are required to vote on a base ahead of election day. Often they are required to vote in a different manner than their families. This system made sense when it was established, but it is no longer practical.

That is why we worked closely with the armed forces and the Department of National Defence to modernize forces voting. Under Bill C-76, Canadian Armed Forces members would be able to choose to use the civilian voting program. Those who wear the uniform face some of the most dire consequences of government policy. We have an obligation to ensure that their voices are heard during elections.

I will close by reiterating that this is important legislation. Bill C-76, as amended at committee, would make voting easier and more accessible to Canadians. It would make it easier for Canadians to run for office. It would make it easier for our women and men in uniform to vote. Bill C-76, as amended, would ensure that Canadians enjoy a democratic system that is more accessible, more transparent and more modern than ever before.

I encourage all members to support this important legislation, which would modernize our elections for future generations to come.

[Bernadette Jordan, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Democratic Institutions]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House today to speak to Bill C-76, the elections modernization act. This legislation represents a generational overhaul of the Canada Elections Act and will allow it to better address the realities facing our democratic system in the 21st century. As many in this House will know, this legislation is making our electoral processes more transparent and more accessible to all Canadians.

Let us be clear. Voting is a right. As parliamentarians, it is our responsibility to make voting accessible to all Canadians. Members of this House will know from previous debates on this bill that Bill C-76 makes a number of important changes to federal elections in Canada.

This bill will make voting more accessible for members of the Canadian Armed Forces, those who lack certain types of ID, and Canadians with disabilities. It will make participation in our democracy easier for those who have children or are responsible for sick or disabled family members. It gives the Chief Electoral Officer the flexibility to make elections more efficient. It extends the right to vote to over a million Canadians abroad, and it repeals the element of the Harper Conservatives' so-called Fair Elections Act that made it harder for Canadians to vote, which is why of course so many people refer to Bill C-23 as the unfair elections act.

I am currently the only female member of Parliament elected from Nova Scotia. In fact, I am only the ninth ever elected to represent my beautiful province since Confederation. We clearly have work to do, which is why I want to focus for a moment on the provisions of Bill C-76 that make it easier for women to participate in our democracy.

Historically, women have been disproportionately responsible for caring for young, sick or disabled family members. Bill C-76 will do two things to help people in this situation. First, the legislation will increase the reimbursement rate for candidate expenses related to caring for a family member to 90%, and second, it will exempt those expenses from the campaign spending limit. No longer will candidates be punished for taking care of their young or vulnerable family members.

I would like to remind this House that this legislation is also repealing measures enacted by the previous Harper Conservatives, which made it harder for Canadians to vote.

Certainly, some of the more egregious aspects of this so-called Fair Elections Act included the elimination of vouching and the voter information cards, also known as the VIC, as a form of proof of address. As a result of those changes, many Canadians across the country saw increased barriers to voting. In fact, a 2016 Stats Canada survey found that approximately 170,000 Canadians did not participate in the last election because they lacked the required ID to vote. This is completely unacceptable.

The Conservatives will tell us that it is not hard for Canadians to obtain an ID to vote. They will make false comparisons between voting and boarding an airplane or buying a six-pack of beer. Let me assure members, many senior citizens who are living with relatives, who may not have a valid driver's licence or do not have bills addressed in their name would be greatly helped by the use of the voter information card in order to provide a proof of address. Other examples include Canadians who have their mail sent to a PO box, or students who are often in precarious living situations while studying.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Madam Speaker, I am happy to rise here today to speak to Bill C-76, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act. I am somewhat happily surprised to get this speaking opportunity, as we are debating this under time allocation.

The irony is, if it was not so serious, it is a bit delicious debating a bill that would change the rules around our elections, the foundation of our democracy, under time allocation after only a couple of hours of debate on the committee report. It is doubly ironic because the Liberals used closure to limit debate on second reading as well back in the spring. I remember that. Maybe it is a triple irony, because in the previous Parliament, the Liberals used one of their opposition days to debate a motion that time allocation must never be used to cut off debate on any bill that touches on our electoral system, and they have already done it twice here.

The history of this bill, as the previous member touched on, goes back to the time of Conservative Bill C-23, the so-called “Fair Elections Act” of 2014. If there was ever an Orwellian name for a bill, that was it. Among other things, that act made it more difficult for many Canadians to vote and ordered Elections Canada not to educate Canadians about the electoral process.

Both the Liberals and the NDP ran in the 2015 election on a promise to repeal Bill C-23 and get rid of the first-past-the-post electoral system once and for all. What have the Liberals done with regard to the Fair Elections Act? In late 2016, they tabled Bill C-33, and then sat on it for 18 months and did nothing. Then they tabled this bill, Bill C-76, on April 30 of this year, which included the measures of Bill C-33. That is a little late, because the Chief Electoral Officer had given the government a deadline of April 30 to pass any legislation around election changes because they had to be ready for the 2019 election. The government was a bit late with its homework there.

Here we are almost two years after the government tabled C-33, its first attempt at electoral reform, two years after it broke its promise that the 2015 election was going to be the last election run under the first-past-the-post system, and five months past the Chief Electoral Officer's deadline for legislation to be passed in time for the 2019 federal election.

What is in this bill that we have been waiting for all these months and years? To be fair to the government, I will start with some of the good measures we are happy to see on this side of the aisle. In fact, many of them are changes the NDP has been calling on the government to do for some time. It would limit the writ period of any election to 50 days, thus eliminating the chance for another marathon election like the 70-day campaign we had in 2015. That is great news for all Canadians, not just for candidates. I would like to thank my NDP colleague, the member for Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, for suggesting this to the government in the form of his private member's bill.

I am happy to see two parts of this bill that would encourage young people to get informed and involved in the electoral process. Like many MPs, I go to a lot of schools to talk about government and the electoral process. During the Thanksgiving break I spent a whole day at Grand Forks Secondary giving classes on civics, and a couple of classes on biology as well, because I was a biologist in my former life, but that is outside the scope of this topic.

The questions I get asked at school talks are often much more informed than those I get at open town halls. Unfortunately, the turnout for young voters at elections is usually well below that of older voters, so I am happy Bill C-76 would allow the registration of future electors between the ages of 14 years and 17 years. This simple act has been shown in other jurisdictions to increase the proportion of young people who vote after they turn 18.

Unfortunately, the Liberals voted down an NDP amendment to this bill that asked the government to study the possibility of lowering the voting age to 17. We allow young Canadians to join the military at age 17, but for some reason we do not want to give them the right to vote in our elections, to give them a voice for their future in this country.

Second, this bill would remove the ban on public education programs conducted by the Chief Electoral Officer through Elections Canada. Why this ban was put in place in the so-called Fair Elections Act is beyond me. However, I welcome the opportunity for Elections Canada to inform and educate Canadians about the electoral process.

Bill C-76 would also bring back the process of vouching to allow electors without proper ID to vote, as well as allowing the use of the voter ID card for the same purpose. These were disallowed under the Fair Elections Act in an effort that seemed to want to solve a non-existent problem, that of voter fraud, for which there are vanishingly few if any examples of, by creating a much more serious problem that inhibited Canadians, particularly disadvantaged citizens, from voting at all. We should be encouraging Canadians to vote and this will be a step in the right direction at last.

Unfortunately, the government missed an opportunity to increase gender equality in Canadian elections, to increase the number of women running as candidates. The Liberal government talks glowingly about its commitment to gender equality, but does next to nothing in the bill to advance that.

Canada is far behind other countries in gender equity in political representation. My former colleague, Kennedy Stewart, now the mayor of Vancouver, put forward a private member's bill that would have strongly encouraged parties to increase the proportion of female candidates in future elections. Unfortunately, the government voted that bill down and failed to include its provisions in this bill.

There is no ban on foreign third party spending or activity. We have seen evidence of how foreign activity has affected elections in the United States and the UK. We need to ban that from Canadian elections. We hear almost daily stories of election tampering in those areas and others.

Canadians are deeply concerned about privacy issues during election campaigns. Political parties amass huge amounts of personal information on voters, yet there is nothing in the bill that covers this.

The present Chief Electoral Officer, Stéphane Perrault, said in committee, “If there is one area where the bill failed, it is privacy. The parties are not subjected to any kind of privacy regime.”

The Privacy Commissioner, Daniel Therrien, said that the bill had “nothing of substance in regards to privacy.”

No one at committee spoke against more stringent privacy requirements. Everyone was concerned that we did not go far enough.

I will close by bringing up the big thing missing from the bill and that of course is real electoral reform.

The Liberals, the NDP and the Green Party all campaigned on a promise that 2015 would be the last election under first past the post. Over 60% of Canadian voters supported that idea. For many Canadians, that was the most important promise of the election.

Canadians were tired of elections that gave parties with less than 40% of the vote a 100% of the power in a majority government. The Harper government was an example and the present Liberal government is another. Unfortunately, once the Liberals were in power, they forgot about that promise.

The Liberals say they want to increase the participation of Canadians in the electoral process. They say that Bill C-76 is their answer to this. However, the incredible cynicism on their lack of action on real electoral reform has already had a negative effect on how Canadians feel about their elected representatives and whether it is even worth voting in the next election.

I support many of the reforms contained in Bill C-76, but it falls short in so many ways. Like so many bills we see in this place, it is a tentative step in the right direction, but we need to go further.

Let us get rid of big money in elections. Let us ban foreign interference in elections. Let us protect the privacy of Canadians. Let us get back on track to getting rid of first past the post, so every vote will count.

[Celina Caesar-Chavannes, Liberal, Whitby, ON]

Madam Speaker, I listened to my hon. colleague's speech. He spent some time talking about the fact we have introduced time allocation on this legislation. We know that time allocation is necessary to advance legislation and to do the work that Canadians have sent us here to do.

I want to remind the hon. colleague that, through the committee and other work that has been done, over 85% of the recommendations made by the Chief Electoral Officer were included in Bill C-76. We heard 56 hours of witness testimony. There were 24 hours of study at committee and 36 hours of study on the recommendations of the Chief Electoral Officer. In total, over 100 hours of study have gone into what we now see as a very comprehensive piece of legislation.

I wonder why the hon. member thinks we should take any lessons from his party. When the Conservatives introduced Bill C-23, they had less than 50 hours of study of that legislation.

[Randy Boissonnault, Liberal, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Madam Speaker, the amount of work the committee has done on this particular bill is exemplary. We have had great debate here in this House. If we take a look at the amount of time that was spent on Bill C-23, it is a fraction of what we have been able to spend on Bill C-76. It is important to let members of this House know that a voter identification card is information, and that information is important. Only Canadian citizens can vote in a Canadian election and that is the way it should be.

[Randy Boissonnault, Liberal, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Madam Speaker, the Government of Canada has heard what Canadians have to say.

We are very proud that the majority of the all-party amendments to the bill are among the amendments the committee adopted.

When the bill was introduced, the Government of Canada introduced it as an initiative to modernize our electoral process and make it more transparent, accessible and secure for all Canadians. One of the proposed amendments was to require all electors to be Canadian citizens when exercising their right to vote.

Even though that has always been a requirement for eligibility to vote, Bill C-76 revealed an error in the wording of the new Canada Elections Act, which came into force in 2000.

It was possible to interpret the French version of the act as stating that a person who expected to obtain Canadian citizenship prior to voting day could vote in an advance poll before being granted citizenship. Of course, there is no way to know for sure that a person will become a Canadian citizen until that person has taken the oath of citizenship.

The amendments made by the committee to Bill C-76 correct this error and clarify that only Canadians can cast a ballot in a ballot box. This would help ensure the integrity of the entire electoral process.

Former chief electoral officer Marc Mayrand has applauded the Government of Canada's efforts to modernize our electoral system and make it more accessible. However, he also mentioned that additional amendments should be made to facilitate the identification of electors who live in seniors residences or in long-term care centres, because it could be difficult for seniors to prove where they live with an ID. I think this is a great amendment, a great suggestion, because in a riding like Edmonton Centre, with so many towers and so many seniors residences, I have seen that this particular voter ID difficulty for seniors is prevalent.

The committee also adopted amendments to Bill C-76 that would make the electoral system more accessible for our seniors. From now on, seniors centre employees would be allowed to cast ballots for senior citizens living in their place of work, provided they themselves can vote and live close to the seniors centre. I know that the seniors at St. Andrew's will be happy to hear this. They live about a block away from my house, and when it comes time to vote, they will be able to make sure that their voice is counted.

Bill C-76, the elections modernization act, includes measures to ensure that political parties and third parties play by the same rules in exercising their right to participate in political electoral activities.

From now on, third parties that intervene in the electoral process in any way would have to clearly explain their advertising messages. Also, third parties that spend more than $10,000 or that receive more than $10,000 in contributions would be required to submit financial reports to Elections Canada every two weeks, starting on September 15 in a fixed-election year. Elections Canada would publish these financial reports on its website. These transparency measures would help Canadians better understand who is trying to influence their vote and why.

This bill will also protect our democratic institutions from foreign attempts to influence outcomes. Elections Canada representatives and the commissioner of Canada elections appeared before the committee and recommended further enhancing a number of protective measures. The government agreed to several of those recommendations.

Bill C-76 also contains additional tools that would make it easier for Elections Canada and the Canada elections commissioner to prevent or limit the effects of third party influence on Canadian voters. For example, the new third-party funding section of the act would prohibit the use of foreign funds at any time to obtain or broadcast partisan advertising, to fund partisan activities or to conduct polls. New anti-avoidance provisions would also forbid all attempts to sidestep these rules.

Bill C-76 created a new offence to prohibit the fraudulent use of a computer to influence election results. A new offence added during the committee's study will henceforth prohibit all attempts to influence an election and strengthen that prohibition.

We would also make it a criminal offence to publish material made by anyone attempting to impersonate the Chief Electoral Officer or a returning officer.

Finally, on the recommendation of the commissioner of Canada elections, our government would reinforce the ban that applies to all persons and entities that sell advertising space. It would now be forbidden to sell advertising space to foreigners that would allow them to broadcast election advertising.

The results of Canadian elections should only ever be determined by electoral votes made by Canadians. Bill C-76 already contained numerous amendments to the act to amend the Canada Elections Act that were important to Elections Canada's recommendations.

During the committee's study, the Government of Canada listened to independent experts whose only job is to protect our democratic institutions. I am proud of the comments we heard from those experts because they helped strengthen the bill.

Therefore, I invite all colleagues in the House today to voice their support of the third reading of the act to amend the Canada Elections Act and modernize our electoral process and make it more transparent, accessible and secure for all Canadians from coast to coast to coast.

When we take a look at the facts, 56 witnesses were heard in committee on Bill C-76, there were 24 hours of committee time and there were 36 and a half hours of study time of CEO recommendations by committee. For bill C-23, the hours of study for the Fair Elections Act was 49.5.

Bill C-76 would encourage Canadians to participate fully in the electoral process, and that is exactly what we intended.

Bill C-76—Time Allocation Motion

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Burlington, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is ironic to hear that from my colleague across the way, because when his party was in government it used time allocation to move forward a piece of legislation that further limited democracy.

What is also of note is that since this bill was introduced, the official opposition has taken every opportunity possible to obstruct the progress of this piece of legislation. Even yesterday it put forward 177 spurious amendments that would return this piece of legislation to what was in Bill C-23, which, as we heard from experts and Canadians across the country, limited people's ability to participate in democracy.

This piece of legislation is incredibly important. It expands the franchise. It ensures that every Canadian citizen who has the right to vote will be able to vote.

On this side of the House, we firmly believe that our democracy is strongest when all Canadians participate in it. I understand that that is not the case with my colleagues on the opposite side. However, for us, democracy should be available to all Canadians and we are working diligently to ensure that is the case in 2019.

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Minister of Democratic Institutions]

Mr. Speaker, I think Canadians know that it is neither the Liberals nor the New Democrats who are working to impede democracy, considering it was the previous government that introduced Bill C-23. In fact, most of the amendments my hon. colleague and opposition members proposed were to return this bill to Bill C-23, in which, unfortunately, the previous government went out of its way to limit the ability of Canadians to participate in our democracy. Therefore, it is a bit rich, and slightly laughable, to hear from Conservatives on the other side how strongly they value democracy and democratic participation in our country, when they did things to impede that process.

Bill C-76 would do much to repeal all those unfair elements in Bill C-23. It would ensure that the election in 2019 had the integrity Canadians deserve and expect and that the process would be fair and protected.

Motions in amendment

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the minister is right to point out that Bill C-23, the unfair elections act, is much undone by this bill. We are actually moving amendments to allow for vouching to make more sense, not people just within a polling station but more broadly.

I have a question on process, because process matters, of course. It is not just what is in the piece of legislation but how we pass it through this place. Bill C-23, the unfair elections act, was time allocated by the Harper government at the time, and that means that the debate was cut off. Both ourselves and the Liberals joined in the chorus from other parts and from many Canadians who said that when it comes to election laws, we should never do so.

The Liberals, in fact, moved a motion on one of their few opposition days. It was moved, in part, by the now-Prime Minister, saying that time allocation should never apply to electoral bills.

I have just a straight question, and hopefully we will hear a straight answer. Will the Liberals commit to allowing the debate to exist over something so vital as our democracy, and to not employ the same tactics that were used by the Harper government to time allocate, to shut down Parliament's ability to discuss and debate this bill?

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Minister of Democratic Institutions]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure and privilege to rise today in the House to begin second reading debate on Bill C-76, elections modernization act.

I want to begin by thanking the procedure and House affairs committee for its hard work and collaboration in studying this piece of legislation.

I am incredibly proud of this important piece of legislation that will strengthen the integrity of, increase the fairness of, and protect our elections.

Bill C-76 makes it easier and more efficient for all Canadians to take part in our democratic process in the most important exercise of all: casting a ballot on election day. Importantly, it undoes the most unfair aspects of the previous government's Bill C-23. Not many people know this, but the reason I decided to run for office was precisely that legislation because I could not believe that a government of Canada would do things in its power to make it more difficult for Canadians to vote.

In Bill C-76, we are ensuring that every Canadian who has the right to vote will be able to cast that ballot. I am so proud that we are moving forward with this legislation.

We made important commitments to Canadians surrounding the use of vouching and the voter information card. Those are returned in Bill C-76. I travelled across the country and heard from people who were unable to cast their ballot in the last election because of those changes the Conservatives made previously. Statistics Canada estimates that over 170,000 Canadians were unable to cast their ballot in 2015 because of the changes made in the so-called Fair Elections Act.

For example, the CEO of Elections Canada talked about the dignity that is required when vouching is enabled, the dignity for the people who go to the polling station. He talked about the fact that it is senior women often who do not have two pieces of identification to demonstrate both their identity and their address. Using the voter information card, which will enable individuals to establish residency, will empower and ensure that those senior women, among others, will be able to cast their ballot on election day. This is also important for indigenous Canadians, for people who do not have a permanent place of residence, and also for those who are interested in casting that ballot and need that extra bit of help with respect to vouching. This is so important for the dignity of Canadians. I am so proud that this is part of Bill C-76.

I also want to talk about the fact that in section 3 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, all Canadians, by virtue of having citizenship, have the right to vote. In Bill C-76, we are ensuring that all Canadians living abroad will be able to cast their ballot on election day. Having studied abroad and lived abroad for work, I have had the opportunity to vote from abroad in previous federal elections. I know how important it is for Canadians to maintain that connection to the country they are so proud to come from. Therefore, in Bill C-76, Canadians living abroad will be able to cast their ballots too.

Let us talk about dignity and accessibility. In Bill C-76, we are also ensuring that political parties and candidates will be able to have an incentive to ensure greater accessibility to their campaign material or perhaps build a ramp to their campaign office or provide sign language interpretation at an all-candidates meeting. We heard from Canadians across the country that these measures are so important to be included in the electoral process and to ensure that they also feel included and are able to participate fully in our elections.

Let us talk about some of the important measures with respect to transparency that are in Bill C-76.

With regard to the pre-electoral period that will begin on June 30 going until when the writ is dropped, this will create greater transparency for Canadians to understand what third parties and political parties are spending with respect to advertising. There will be a cap on spending for political parties and third parties during this time period, and for third parties it will, during the writ period, also include political activities. This is so important, because we know that Canadians want to know who is spending money during an election and who is trying to influence their choices as they cast their ballot and get ready to make those choices on election day.

When it comes to foreign interference, I want to thank all members of the House because we stand united across partisan lines to ensure that our elections in Canada are free from foreign interference. Of note, I want to mention that members of the Conservative Party and New Democratic Party, as well as my own party, the Liberal Party, on the procedure and House affairs committee put forward really good amendments at committee stage to ensure we are doing everything we can to protect our elections from foreign interference. All members of this House have put partisanship aside, put country first and I applaud them for doing that.

When it comes to online platforms, we know that 2019 will be a different election. It will be one in which social media has a heavy presence and I am very proud to note that in Bill C-76 important measures have been taken to both protect us from foreign interference and also ensure there is a greater transparency in political advertising online.

In Bill C-76, there are two important amendments to the Canada Elections Act. The first is to ensure that social media platforms do not knowingly accept any political advertising from foreign sources and the second is to create a public registry of all political advertisements in the electoral period, something that Canadians will be able to check publicly to see who is targeting them and trying to influence them during an election.

Another extremely important aspect of Bill C-76 is with regard to the integrity of our elections. The robust election laws we have in Canada are, quite frankly, some of the very best in the world and the world looks to Canada for how to run and administer effective, free and fair elections. We are ensuring that those laws are upheld. We listened to the commissioner of Canada elections and have ensured that this office has the ability to both investigate and compel testimony. These are very important because we saw with previous scandals, whether it was robocalls or the in-and-out scandal, in which the integrity of our elections came into question, that Canadians needed to have the confidence to know who was behind these activities. The commissioner made it clear that had he had these tools, he would have been able to get to the bottom of it, and that is extremely important.

I would like to highlight the fact that Bill C-76 takes into consideration 85% of the recommendations that the CEO of Elections Canada made following the 2015 election. This piece of legislation is in direct response to ensure that Canadians have a process they can trust, that there is integrity in the electoral system, that our laws are as robust as possible and that they are as accessible and inclusive as possible.

There is no right more fundamental than being able to cast a ballot on election day, to mark down who one wants to govern and ensure that process has integrity. I am so fundamentally proud of this legislation. It is good for democracy, it is good for Canada and I am absolutely thrilled that we are debating it at report stage in the House of Commons. We can all be proud of this because it is good for Canada.

Elections Modernization Act—Speaker's Ruling

[The Speaker, Geoff Regan]

I am now prepared to rule on a point of order raised on October 23, 2018, by the hon. member for Perth—Wellington regarding Bill C-76, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act and other acts and to make certain consequential amendments.

The hon. member objects to an amendment adopted by the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, sometimes called PROC in this place, on the basis that it amends a section of the parent act not amended by the bill. He argues that the committee went beyond the mandate the House had given it and urges the Chair to strike the amendment from the bill. He notes that Speakers have exercised this power in the past to deal with inadmissible amendments adopted by a committee.

I am grateful to the hon. member for having raised this matter, as it affords me the opportunity to clear up a misconception about what is commonly referred to as the “Parent Act rule”.

As the hon. member no doubt noted, the passage he cited concerning this rule, found at page 771 of House of Commons Procedure and Practice, is contained in a section about relevance.

The Parent Act rule, the idea that an amendment should not amend an act or a section not already amended by a bill, rests on a presumption that such an amendment would not be relevant to the bill. This can be true. Often, such amendments attempt to deal with matters not referenced in the bill, and this is improper.

However, there are also occasions when an amendment is relevant to the subject matter of a bill and in keeping with its scope but can only be accomplished by modifying a section of the parent act not originally touched by the bill or even an entirely different act not originally touched by the bill. This is especially so when the amendments are consequential to other decisions taken by a committee or by the House.

In the present case, an amendment adopted by the committee creates a new section 510.001 of the Canada Elections Act. This section would empower the commissioner of Canada elections to request and obtain certain financial documents from political parties. The hon. member made no suggestion that this amendment was inadmissible. He objects, however, to a related amendment to section 498 of the act that makes it an offence to refuse to comply with the commissioner's request. Section 498, while not originally part of the bill, is the section that spells out offences relating to Part 19 of the act, which is where the new section 510.001 would be found.

I have trouble seeing how this could be considered irrelevant to the bill. Were I to accept the hon. member's argument, we would find ourselves in the strange circumstance of allowing an amendment that creates a new obligation but refusing an amendment that spells out the consequences for failing to comply with that new obligation.

The parent act rule was never intended to be applied blindly as a substitute for proper judgment as to the relevance of an amendment. Clearly, amendments that arise as a direct consequence of other admissible amendments should be considered relevant to the bill, even if they are made to a section of the parent act otherwise unamended.

The hon. member noted that our procedural authorities do not reference any exceptions, leading him to conclude that none are possible. He well knows, however, that practice and precedent are also binding. As is stated at page 274 of House of Commons Procedure and Practice:

Where there are no express rules or orders, the House turns to its own jurisprudence, as interpreted by the Speaker, who examines the Journals and the Debates of the House to determine which rulings of past Speakers and which practices and precedents should be applied.

There are multiple examples of amendments of this nature having been accepted in the past. In 2003, Bill C-250, an act to amend the Criminal Code (hate propaganda), contained a single clause amending section 318 of the Code to change the definition of “identifiable group”. At the beginning of the report stage, on June 6, 2003, the Chair accepted amendments to sections 319 and 320 of the Criminal Code, which also dealt with hate propaganda.

On May 5, 2014, when the Procedure and House Affairs Committee presented its report on Bill C-23, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act and other acts and to make consequential amendments to certain acts, the report contained an amendment to section 345 of the act, which was not originally amended by the bill, but sought to clarify what did not constitute an election expense under section 376, which the bill did amend.

Just last year, in a report tabled on October 5, 2017, the health committee amended Bill C-45, an act respecting cannabis and to amend the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, the Criminal Code and other acts, by modifying section 7 of the Non-smokers' Health Act, originally untouched by the bill. This change arose out of an earlier amendment to the definition of “workplace” in the same act.

These are just a few examples where exceptions were made to the parent act rule because the amendments were clearly relevant to the bill. Given that the present amendment is of a similar nature, I have no difficulty concluding that it too should be found in order.

I thank all hon. members for their attention.

Federal Sustainable Development Act

[Alupa Clarke, Conservative, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Mr. Speaker, here we are in the House, on Wednesday, May 30, at 8:45. I should mention that it is 8:45 p.m., for the many residents of Beauport—Limoilou who I am sure are tuning in. To all my constituents, good evening.

We are debating this evening because the Liberal government tabled very few significant government bills over the winter. Instead, they tabled an astounding number of private members' bills on things like swallows' day and beauty month. Sometimes my colleagues and I can hardly help laughing at this pile of utterly trivial bills. I also think that this process of randomly selecting the members who get to table bills is a bit past its prime. Maybe it should be reviewed. At the same time, I understand that it is up to each member to decide what kind of bill is important to him or her.

The reason we have had to sit until midnight for two days now is that, as my colleague from Perth—Wellington said, the government has been acting like a typical university student over the past three months. That comparison is a bit ridiculous, but it is true. The government is behaving like those students who wait until the last minute to do their assignments and are still working on them at 3 a.m. the day before they are due because they were too busy partying all semester. Members know what I mean, even though that paints a rather stereotypical picture of students; most of them do not do things like that.

In short, we have a government that, at the end of the session, has realized that time is running out and that it only has three weeks left to pass some of its legislative measures, some of which are rather lengthy bills that are key to the government's legislative agenda. One has to wonder about that.

The Liberals believe these bills to be important. However, because of their lack of responsibility over the past three months, we were unable to debate these major bills that will make significant changes to our society. Take for example, Bill C-76, which has to do with the electoral reforms that the Liberals want to make to the voting system, the way we vote, protection of the vote, and identification. There is also Bill C-49 on transportation in Canada, a very lengthy bill that we have not had time to examine properly.

Today we are debating Bill C-57 on sustainable development. This is an important topic, but for the past three years I have been getting sick and tired of seeing the Liberal government act as though it has a monopoly on environmental righteousness. I searched online to get an accurate picture of the record of Mr. Harper's Conservative government from 2006 to 2015, and I came across some fascinating results. I want to share this information very honestly with the House and my Liberal colleagues so that they understand that even though we did not talk incessantly about the environment, we achieved some excellent concrete results.

I want to read a quote from www.mediaterre.org, a perfectly legitimate site:

Stephen Harper's Canadian government released its 2007 budget on March 19. The budget allocated $4.5 billion in new investments to some 20 environmental projects. These measures include a $2,000 rebate for all electronic-vehicle or alternative-fuel purchases, and the creation of a $1.5-billion EcoTrust program to help provinces reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The Liberals often criticize us for talking about the environment, but we did take action. For example, we set targets. We proposed reducing emissions to 30% below 2005 levels by 2030. The Liberals even retained these same targets as part of the Paris agreement.

They said we had targets, but no plan. That is not true. Not only did we have the $1.5-billion ecotrust program, but we also had a plan that involved federal co-operation.

Allow me to quote the premier of Quebec at the time, Jean Charest, who was praising the plan that was going to help Quebec—his province, my province—meet its greenhouse gas emissions targets. Jean Charest and Mr. Harper issued a joint press release.

Mr. Harper said, “Canada's New Government is investing to protect Canadians from the consequences of climate change, air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.” He was already recognizing it in 2007.

Mr. Charest said, “In June 2006, our government adopted its plan to combat climate change. This plan has been hailed as one of the finest in North America. With Ottawa contributing financially to this Quebec initiative, we will be able to achieve our objectives.”

It was Mr. Charest who said that in 2007, at a press conference with the prime minister.

I will continue to read the joint press release from the two governments, “As a result of this federal funding, the Government of Quebec has indicated that it will be able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 13.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide or equivalent below its anticipated 2012 level.”

What is more, the $1.5-billion ecotrust that was supposed to be allocated and was allocated to every province provided $339 million to Quebec alone. That was going to allow Quebec to engage in the following: investments to improve access to new technologies for the trucking sector; a program to develop renewable energy sources in rural regions; a pilot plant for production of cellulosic ethanol; promotion of geothermal heat pumps in the residential sector; support for technological research and innovation for the reduction and sequestration of greenhouse gases. This is probably one of those programs that is helping us make our oil sands increasingly environmentally friendly by allowing us to capture the carbon that comes from converting the sands to oil. There are also measures for the capture of biogas from landfill sites, for waste treatment and energy recovery, and finally for Canada ecotrust.

I invite our Liberal colleagues to listen to what I am going to say. In 2007, Steven Guilbeault of Greenpeace said the following: “We are pleased to see that after negotiating for more than a year, Quebec has finally obtained the money it needs to move towards meeting the Kyoto targets.”

Who made it possible for Quebec to move towards meeting its Kyoto objectives? It was the Harper government, a Conservative government, which established the $1.5-billion ecotrust fund in 2007 with monies from the budget surplus.

Not only did we have a plan to meet the targets we proposed, but this was also a plan that could only be implemented if the provinces agreed to the targets. It was a plan that was funded through the budget surplus, that did not further tax Canadians, and that provided money directly, without any conditions, other than the fundamental requirement that it had to help reduce climate change, which was philosophically important. Any and all measures taken to reach that goal were left entirely to the discretion of the provinces.

Mr. Harper, like a good Conservative who supported decentralization and like a true federalist leader, said that he was giving $400 million to each province so it could move forward with its plan.

By 2015, after 10 years of Conservative government, the country had not only weathered the worst economic crisis, the worst recession in history since the 1930s, but it had also reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 2% and increased the gross domestic product for all Canadians while lopping three points off the GST and lowering income taxes for families with two children by an average of $2,000 per year.

If that is not co-operative federalism, if those are not real results, if that is not a concrete environmental plan, then I do not know what is. Add to that the fact that we achieved royal assent for no less than 25 to 35 bills every session.

In contrast, during this session, in between being forced to grapple with scandals involving the carbon tax, illegal border crossings, and the Trans Mountain project, this government has barely managed to come up with four genuinely important bills.

By contrast, we expanded parks and protected Canada's wetlands. Our environmental record is exceptional.

Furthermore, we allowed debate. For example, we debated Bill C-23 on electoral reform for four days. The Liberals' electoral reform was debated for two hours.

I am sad, but I am happy to debate until midnight because debating is my passion.

Democratic Reform

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Minister of Democratic Institutions]

Mr. Speaker, the other side keeps talking about rigging elections. The other side seems to forget that 400 academics signed a petition asking them to stop Bill C-23 when they were in power. Why was that? It was because they were worried that the Conservatives were going to circumvent democracy.

We are not afraid of Elections Canada. We are not afraid of the commissioner of Elections Canada, but perhaps that side is. Conservatives paid $250,000 in fines for breaking election laws. We will take no lessons from the Conservatives when it comes to democracy in this country.

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Minister of Democratic Institutions]

Mr. Speaker, the party opposite seems to have amnesia about Bill C-23. The Conservatives forget that they were the ones for whom The Globe and Mail ran a five-part series demanding that they not go forward with their elections legislation. Bill C-76 is undoing the damage that they did to our democracy.

In fact, they even went so far as to not consult Elections Canada on elections legislation. That is what we did in drafting this legislation. It was not instructing them, as the Conservatives are so falsely accusing.

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Minister of Democratic Institutions]

Mr. Speaker, I think my colleague opposite remembers the previous government's Bill C-23. With Bill C-76, we are making it easier for Canadians to vote, and we are cracking down on offenders who maliciously interfere with our electoral process. Compare that to the Conservatives, who, when they were in government, made it harder for Canadians to vote and who took part in malicious schemes, like the one involving Dean Del Mastro and his robocalls, to undermine the electoral process. We do not need any lectures on democracy from the Conservatives.

Second reading

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I really do appreciate many of the comments made by the leader of the Green Party.

She was here during the debate on Bill C-23, Harper's Fair Elections Act. We found that there were a great many individuals, academics, Elections Canada itself, and parties within the chamber, excluding the Conservatives, who really opposed the legislation. Today, we have a wide spectrum of support, not only outside this chamber but also inside it, where we have more than one party supporting the legislation.

Would my colleague and friend across the way not recognize that there are some who ultimately do not want to have the elections laws reformed? If this legislation passes, it will strengthen Canada's democracy. I agree there is always room for improvement. However, this will provide additional strength to Canada's democracy. Would the member not agree that at times we do have to look at ways to get legislation through, because there are parties that will put up whatever obstacles they can to prevent its passage?

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is an honour for me to rise to speak to Bill C-76.

I am pleased to rise in debate today, but I regret that it is in the context of time allocation already being applied to the bill. I appreciate that the Liberal side of the House has provided time for my colleague, the hon. member for Montcalm, and for me to speak to the bill, but I regret deeply the use of time allocation. Because I was not able to get in on the debate on time allocation that occurred before the vote, let me suggest some ideas to the hon. minister, the government House leader, and others as to how we might avoid so many time allocations.

It is my belief that the ability, in votes, of all three of the larger parties, particularly the official opposition and the governing party, to put forward as many speakers as possible on any bill is a black box for our House leaders. Getting agreement is something I will leave to them. I can only assume that when we have a lot of time allocations, the coordination is not going well. I do not blame any one party more than the others. I will just say that it is not a good thing for this place when we have time allocation, particularly on a bill that is important.

I would like to suggest that the Speaker has the power, and could be encouraged by those within this place who want the place to work better, to insist on a rule that has fallen into disuse. That rule is that members cannot read speeches. If no one could read a speech, people in the back rooms could not hand a speech to someone and say, “Go give this speech. You are up next.”

They would have to call enough people forward who had read the bill and understood the bill and were prepared to debate it without notes. I am not saying that there are not many of us who are prepared to do that, but the ability of a House leader, on any side, to decide to play games with this place would be significantly minimized if we went back to that rule, which already exists.

I would urge those who think it is a good idea to perhaps speak to their own House leaders. In that case, I would just have a conversation with myself, but the rest of those assembled here should talk to their whips, talk to the House leaders, and talk to the Speaker if they think it would be a good idea to say that we do not want all the members to just read. I am not saying that members do not get up and read speeches they have written themselves. I know that happens, but a lot of times, people read something they have never seen before in their lives. We can tell by the rapt attention with which they deliver something they do not actually know much about or believe in.

Here ends the rant on how to get this place to work better. If people could only get up and speak based on what they know about a bill, we would get more interesting debates and more civilized debates, and we might have an easier time getting agreement on how many speakers there would be on legislation.

It is really tragic that we are seeing time allocation as often as we are seeing it. I do not think it is healthy for democracy, and I know it is going to be an election issue, with everyone saying, “They did it more. They did it too. They are hypocrites.” We should not live in glass houses if we are going to collect stones.

This bill is good legislation. It is very good legislation. It undoes a lot of what happened in the unfair elections act before the last election, but that does not mean that it is perfect legislation, which is why we should not be hearing from the minister that it has already been discussed at PROC. It should be discussed in this place at second reading, where all members who are engaged in the issue and know about it can participate, because not everyone is on PROC. It is a committee.

We know that Bill C-33, which was excellent legislation, languished for a year and a half. It was tabled when I was still serving on the Special Committee on Electoral Reform, which was one of the more tragic experiences of my life. We were still sitting around the table putting forward good ideas, but then saying, “Oh, the minister has new legislation that just came out that has some of our ideas in it.” That was Bill C-33. It came out in December of 2016, and everything from Bill C-33 is now rolled into Bill C-76.

For those who are not familiar with the bill, perhaps who are watching from home, let me say that Bill C-33 did a lot of very good things. I know that the Conservatives will disagree. They like Bill C-23, which they called the Fair Elections Act. What it did was make it harder for Canadians to vote. There is no doubt in my mind about that. I had people come to me who were not allowed to vote.

Bill C-23 was focused on the false notion that Canada suffered from voter fraud. However, it is very clear, on the evidence, that the problem in Canada is not people who try to vote more than once; it is people who vote less than once. We do not have any voter fraud that the elections commissioner has ever really been able to find is a problem. Our problem is low voter turnout.

The Conservatives were quite self-congratulatory when we went from an average national voter turnout of 60% in 2011 to a voter turnout of 68% in 2015. They said that proved that the unfair elections act did not decrease voter turnout. In fact, I think it masked what would have been a much bigger voter turnout. Young people mobilized in 2015. There were a lot of efforts to educate people about vote mobs, advanced poll voting, and getting people who did not usually vote out to vote.

I am enormously proud to represent Saanich—Gulf Islands. In 2011, when the voter turnout nationally was 60%, voter turnout in Saanich—Gulf Islands was just a titch below 75%. In 2015, when I was re-elected, voter turnout was just a bit below 80%. Now, that is nothing compared to my friend who is leader of the Green Party in Prince Edward Island, Peter Bevan-Baker. When he was elected, voter turnout in his riding was 93%.

Let us not be satisfied with 68%. We need to see 90% or 95% of Canadians voting and feeling good about the democratic experience. I think getting back the voter registration card is important. Bringing back vouching is important, and so is bringing back the powers of the Chief Electoral Officer to inform people and educate people. Warn people when voter fraud is happening.

Everything in Bill C-33 that would undo Bill C-23 is to the good and should be passed quickly. As well, I really like the idea that the Elections Canada folks would go into schools and register people who are 16 to 18 years old so that when they get the right to vote, they know what they are doing. They know where to go. They have already registered to vote. That is all in what was former Bill C-33. It is all good stuff. I wish we had already passed it.

Now we are looking at new and additional changes. I wish we had seen more. Clearly, if we are going to protect the privacy of Canadians, it is long past time that political parties were exempted from the Privacy Act. I have never heard a single good reason why we are in a special category, political parties, and Canadians' data is safe with us. Clearly, it is not safe with us. We get hacked. We hire companies and do not have any idea that they will be doing stuff like Cambridge Analytica or some of the ones that mine data and use it for other things. We are not in a position to say that it is good enough to have a voluntary code of privacy practice for every political party that we are required by law to show Elections Canada and have posted publicly.

By the way, I do not think “trust us” works terribly well for political parties. One of the best pieces of legislation from the 41st Parliament, the Reform Act, to bring about reform in this place and reduce the power of political party leaders over their MPs, which came out under the name of the member for Wellington—Halton Hills, required a change in the Parliament of Canada Act. It was executed. Section 49 is new and requires parties, immediately after the election, to have a discussion in caucus and a vote to decide what the powers of the leader will be. For instance, will the power of the leader include throwing someone out of caucus?

I am reliably informed that even though that is the law of the day, two out of three recognized parties in this place skipped that step and did not think it was important to follow the Parliament of Canada Act, section 49. I am deeply dismayed that this took place. All MPs in this place should ask their party leadership if they did that. Did they file the letter with the Speaker? They should ask to see the letter filed with the Speaker to comply with section 49 of the Parliament of Canada Act.

On to the other things in Bill C-76. I hope the government will be open to amendments. As I said, this is good legislation. It does take on things like pre-writ spending. However, why are we allowing any pre-writ spending on televised election ads that bombard Canadians with negative messages and attack ads. It is good to regulate spending before an election. Let us just say that between election day and the next time a writ drops, no one is allowed to spend any money on political ads. There is not an election going on, so no spending. I will be bringing forward things like that as amendments.

Why are we increasing the spending ability of third parties? I would love to see us go in the direction of many countries around the world, including the U.K., which prohibit spending for electronic political ads of any kind at any time. It is very useful legislation.

There are many things I would like to suggest need more work in this legislation. Getting it to committee is important, but not so important that we should have time allocation in this place.

Bill C-76—Time Allocation Motion

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Burlington, ON]

Madam Speaker, that is why I think we need to get this bill to committee as soon as possible. It is to ensure that those questions are asked of witnesses, that those questions are asked of myself, of officials, of Elections Canada, so that we can have the proper scrutiny, so that we can get this done, so that we can ensure that we have restored the transgressions in democracy that were put forward by the previous government in Bill C-23 and ensure that we have integrity in our system in 2019.

That is exactly what we are going to do. I look forward to continuing this conversation and continuing this debate and dialogue with colleagues in this House and at committee. Let us get it there. Let us get it done for Canadians.

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Burlington, ON]

Madam Speaker, I think the member is confused because she is recalling Bill C-23 from the previous government. That is what happened when the Conservatives tried to rig the election in their favour. This bill is precisely trying to fix those abhorrent changes that were put forward with regard to democracy and to specifically ensure that we re-establish its integrity.

In the previous response I mentioned returning power to the commissioner of Elections Canada to compel testimony and lay charges, precisely because there were some members on the other side of the aisle who ended up in jail for their transgressions. Therefore, we are empowering the commissioner of Elections Canada to make sure he has the tools necessary to enforce the law and also to ensure that the law is strengthened so that we can uphold democracy here in this country.

Elections Modernization Act

[Xavier Barsalou-Duval, Bloc, Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague opposite, who is generously sharing his time with me.

It is a great pleasure to speak today to Bill C-76 on behalf of the Bloc Québécois. Many subjects are debated in the House, and when we discuss democracy, and changes in how we operate and how members of the House are elected, I believe that it is a crucially important debate for everyone here. Furthermore, it is even more important that we take the time needed to debate these matters and that everyone have the opportunity to speak as long as necessary, because our democracy is at issue.

My party studied the bill thoroughly, but since we do not have much speaking time today, I will have to focus on just a few main themes.

Before I begin my more in-depth analysis, I would like to touch on the few things we think this bill gets right. First of all, Bill C-76 undoes some of the damage the Conservatives did with Bill C-23, such as preventing the Chief Electoral Officer from educating voters about the voting process and encouraging people to vote.

I think virtually all of us can agree with the basic principle that more voter participation is a good thing. The Chief Electoral Officer's job is to make sure that as many people as possible can vote. Preventing people from voting undermines and delegitimizes our democracy. On that, this bill is a good first step.

In addition, the bill gives the Chief Electoral Officer and the Commissioner of Canada Elections some powers that were also taken away from them under Bill C-23.

Bill C-76 contains positive measures to encourage members of the armed forces, young people and persons with disabilities to participate in the electoral process. We also welcome the government's efforts in this regard. Finally, we are particularly supportive of limiting the duration of the election campaign to 50 days, because that is what the Bloc Québécois asked for during the last federal election in 2015. In fact, the Conservative government used a loophole in the fixed election date bill to greatly extend the duration of the election campaign in order to circumvent the spirit of the legislation put in place. We had not seen such a long election campaign in hundreds of years. It did not make sense. We needed something that made sense. We had to frame that. For this reason, we are pleased to see the 50-day limit, because it is still a reasonable limit. We very much welcome these provisions and congratulate the government on having retained the position and vision of the Bloc Québécois on this issue.

Now, I want to talk about one of the biggest problems with Bill C-76. The problem is not necessarily what is in the bill, but what is missing from it, and some measures in the bill are not particularly interesting.

I want to point out four areas on which we disagree. If I have the time, I will then talk about what we plan to do later on. The first thing that we have a problem with is third-party involvement in the electoral process. The government is proposing greater oversight of third-party involvement in the electoral process. We think it is a good idea to have greater oversight of third parties, except that this oversight would allow for a higher spending limit for third parties, even though there is greater oversight during the pre-election period. There is also greater oversight over the money going to and from these third parties.

The government is over-complicating things. We do not think that third parties should be influencing the election by spending money during the electoral process. We think that is a bad thing. The political parties that spend money to get elected are the ones that should be involved in the electoral process. We are already supposed to be regulating spending and fundraising for political parties, so third parties should not be spending money to get other parties or a specific party elected. It is dangerous to get third parties involved since they could find roundabout ways to use money to support one party and undermine the others.

Interested parties could draw inspiration from what is happening in the United States with super PACs. We do not think that is good for democracy. We need to make much simpler rules that categorically ban third-party intervention in electoral spending. We hope the government and the other parties will be open to that idea.

Voter identification is another issue that is especially important to us. We got a chance to discuss it in 2015, during the last election campaign. Bill C-76 would have been a great opportunity to move the discussion forward, but unfortunately, it will not require Canadians to uncover their faces to vote, which is something the Bloc Québécois has been calling for for a long time. Some parties have supported us in calling for that. Candidates from other parties have even broken ranks to side with us.

In 2007, Michel Guimond introduced Bill C-465, which required every elector to identify himself or herself with his or her face uncovered before voting. When Bill C-23 was being debated in committee, MP André Bellavance, who is now mayor of Victoriaville, also introduced some amendments specifically requiring voters to uncover their faces. Unfortunately, at the time, the NDP, the Conservative Party, and the Liberal Party banded together to veto the Bloc Québécois's proposal that Canadians be required to uncover their faces in order to vote. The end result was that during the 2015 election people showed up to vote dressed any which way. Some dressed up as clowns, Star Wars or Star Trek characters, or monsters, while others put on hockey gear. It was absolutely disgraceful.

The electoral process must be serious, secure, and secular, since our government must be secular. It therefore seems obvious to us that Canadians should vote with their faces uncovered. We are very pleased that the Conservatives seem to have had an awakening in this regard. We hope that they will remain consistent in their views on this.

Another issue that we care about, and I hope I will have time to mention them all, is political party financing. Something must be done because not everyone can afford to pay $1,500 to attend a cocktail party. After the Conservatives did away with the public funding for political parties implemented by Jean Chrétien in response to the sponsorship scandal, the Liberals promised that they would bring it back. However, once they took office, it seems they changed their minds. Perhaps they realized that there were a lot of people who wanted to make donations. Why then would they allow the other parties to compete on a level playing field? It is important to have a level playing field. The parties should receive funding based on votes, not just on the depth of their party supporters' pockets.

Another issue that we care about is government advertising. The government promised to do something about that, but there is nothing in this bill in that regard. We know how this works. We have seen a lot of quasi-partisan or questionable advertising in recent years. The government has a duty to take action on this issue.

There is also no framework for the leadership debate in this bill. It seems pretty clear to us that all parties represented in the House should have the opportunity to participate in the leadership debate. The bill also does nothing to reform the voting system. The government has broken its promise in that regard.

Finally, the Liberals are trying to let foreigners keep the right to vote. It seems obvious to us that the people who should be able to vote are the people who live here, in a riding in Canada, and not people from other countries. We understand the case of members of the armed forces or people who are temporarily out of the country. However, people who have been out of the country for years do not have the interests of people living here at heart. Those people should just vote in their new country, if they so wish.

[Alupa Clarke, Conservative, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Mr. Speaker, thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak today as we get back to the House after a week in our ridings. Last week was very busy, I must say. I also want to take this opportunity to say hello to the many constituents of Beauport—Limoilou who, as always, are watching now on Facebook Live or who will be watching at a later time when the videos are posted on CPAC.

Today we are talking about democratic participation, which I find fascinating. If there is one thing that interests me most in life, it is democratic participation. This was the reason I got involved in politics. I urge Canadians to get involved. Last week I held the first-ever “Alupa à l'écoute!” public consultation in Beauport—Limoilou. I spent more than six hours listening to my constituents and answering their questions. Ultimately, my goal was to hear about the concerns, challenges, and difficulties they face in their day-to-day lives. The next consultation will be in Giffard on September 13, and the third will be in Beauport on November 17. For more information, people can call 418-663-2113. After these three public consultations, I will produce a report in the winter of 2019 and introduce a bill to address an issue that people face in their day-to-day lives. In those six hours last Thursday, I answered every question from around 40 constituents. I was very proud, because this kind of democratic accountability is absolutely essential. That actually ties into this bill.

Let us talk about participatory democracy. Once again, Bill C-76 is not all bad, but we expect that the Conservatives will vote against this bill for specific reasons. I did say “expect”, but that will depend on what happens in committee. My first impression is that this is another attempt by a government that brags about its international and national brilliance. Specifically, the Liberal government thinks it has a monopoly on being virtuous all the time. They want to sell to Canadians on the idea that with this bill they are again improving the accessibility of the electoral system and the eligibility to vote. A number of Liberal colleagues spoke in this place about the integrity of the system. With respect to Bill C-76, we feel that some of the amendments and new rules will directly or indirectly undermine Canada's electoral system.

My Liberal colleague, who as usual was fiery and spouted anti-Conservative rhetoric, said that voting is of course a fundamental right, but that it is also a privilege, as my colleague from Lethbridge stated. It is a privilege that requires a right and individual responsibility first and foremost. The laws that govern Elections Canada at present seek not just to foster participation, but also to ensure that this duty is carried out with integrity and responsibly. It is really a conflict between how to increase the public's participation and how to ensure that the right to vote remains a protected right.

The Liberal member for Willowdale spoke eloquently of the history of our great federation by talking about the changes in voting almost every decade; we went from suffrage on the basis of property ownership to popular ballot. We went from the popular ballot, just for men, to voting for women, thank God. It was Borden's Conservative government that gave women the right to vote. All the parties here, Canada's major governing parties, Liberal and Conservative, are always in favour of making voting more accessible.

We have some technical questions about the bill. That is unfortunate because, as my Liberal colleagues said, accessibility to the vote is a fundamental debate. Why did the Liberals move a time allocation motion a week ago? We were supposed to vote on time allocation today. Surely, the Liberals backed down after finding that they would look undemocratic by allocating only two or three hours of debate on such a fundamental issue.

In comparison, for Conservative Bill C-23, which dealt with Elections Canada and which was introduced during the 41st Parliament, we had four days of debate for a total of 14 hours, in addition to 23 meetings in committee, on this bill that was aimed at improving our electoral system. At this point, we have only had two hours of debate on Bill C-76.

As the NDP did, it is important to recall the concerns raised by the Chief Electoral Officer. He said that the government had previously tabled the amendments to Bill C-76 in Bill C-33, which died on the Order Paper. Actually, it did not exactly die on the Order Paper, because there was no prorogation, but it never got beyond first reading. The Chief Electoral Officer therefore told the government that it needed to get to work right away if it really wanted to make changes in time for the 2019 election. However, the government waited until the last second to make these changes, just days from the deadline set by the Chief Electoral Officer. Clearly, this is just another tactic to keep us from debating Bill C-76 properly.

Certain parts of this bill are fine, but what I find utterly astounding about it is that it proves that Mr. Harper was right back in 2015. The Liberals called us terrible, horrible partisans for announcing the election on July 1. However, the reason we did that was because Mr. Harper had noticed a problem. During the month of June 2015, unions, such as the FTQ in eastern Canada and other big unions in western Canada, which of course are free to protest, had spent tens of millions of dollars on partisan ads attacking the Canadian government in power at the time, which was a Conservative government. Since we could not respond to that situation because we were not in an election period, Mr. Harper, a man of unimpeachable integrity, decided to call an election so that we could respond using election expenses.

Throughout the campaign, the Liberals called us enemies of democracy who only cared about winning votes. In fact, they still say that about us today. However, by creating a pre-election period beginning on June 30 in Bill C-76, they are confirming, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Mr. Harper was right to do the same thing four years ago. That is a tribute to our former prime minister.

What exactly would Bill C-76 do? It would expand voter eligibility. Apparently this bill would prepare future voters by creating a register of young people aged 14 to 17 so that Elections Canada can start communicating with them. That seems kind of strange to me because that is when young people are most likely going to CEGEP or community college and living in apartments with two or three roommates. I do not really know how that communication is supposed to happen considering that young people today use their phones and social networks such as Facebook to communicate.

My Liberal colleague said that Liberals support enfranchisement, but giving kids the right to vote is something else entirely. He said that voting is a basic right, but that there is discrimination inherent in our system because Canadian citizens under the age of 18 do not have the right to vote. Voting is not in fact a privilege and a basic right granted to everyone. There are limits, and we can all agree that those limits are good for democracy and the duty to vote because people under the age of 18 have to go to school and do their homework. I strongly agree with that. If they are not in school, they should at least be working or travelling around the world and around Canada without asking anyone for money. I can say for sure that, up to age 18, people should be preparing to exercise their civic duty. That is why people cannot vote until they turn 18. It is not in fact an absolute right for everyone. There is already some discrimination inherent in the right to vote in Canada.

Then there are three pre-election periods. I have already mentioned the pre-election period, so let us talk about the “pre-pre-election” period. There is already a problem with this one, since there will be no constraints on the financial commitments of domestic and international third parties.

Until June 30, we know very well that all the international environmental groups, who like to see the Prime Minister contemplating the death of the oil sands, will spend millions of dollars to promote the end of natural and energy resources in Canada, which is very bad news. Natural resources represent 40% of the Canadian economy. We are in an energy transition. The systematic blindness on the part of the Marxist left and the centrist left in Canada is astounding. We are always being told that we are not making any effort on the environmental front. Since 1960, the environment has been systematically and continuously improved. Let us also not forget that this 40% of the Canadian economy is used to fund hospitals, education programs and our elections, which still cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

They also want an extended period of advance polling, which is very good. I won because of advance polling, so it is a very good idea. Joking aside, it is a good thing.

With regard to limiting the election campaign to 50 days, we could also ask why 50 days and not 37.

The Liberals want to change the requirement of having identification with an address and photo. It will be terrible. I go door to door every month in my riding—

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Don Valley East.

I am pleased to rise today to speak to Bill C-76, the Elections Modernization Act. I have had the privilege of being a member of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs since I first came to this place. One of the most interesting studies we have conducted so far was the one pertaining to the recommendations of the chief electoral officer.

In the previous Parliament, I was the parliamentary assistant to the critic for democratic reform, namely, the current member for Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame. I was a member of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs during its study of Bill C-23, Fair Elections Act. Under the circumstances, it was an odd name, given that the Conservatives worked harder than any other party to destroy the integrity of our elections.

Under Stephen Harper's leadership, the Conservatives won three consecutive election campaigns, specifically in 2006, 2008, and 2011. The Conservatives were found guilty of electoral fraud in the 2006, 2008, and 2011 elections. Clearly, the Conservative Party of Canada has never won an election without cheating, so when the Conservatives introduced a bill on electoral integrity, they knew exactly where the gaps were.

After letting their parliamentary secretary to the prime minister be led out in handcuffs for bypassing election laws, after pleading guilty to the illegal in and out scandal, and after sacrificing a young 22-year-old scapegoat for election crimes committed by the Conservative Party to try to steal several ridings, as part of the robocall scandal, one of the first targets of the Conservative Party was the elections commissioner. They made sure that he would never have the tools he needed to conduct a real investigation.

Bill C-76 changes all that. The elections commissioner will return to the Office of the Chief Electoral Officer, who is an officer of Parliament, instead of reporting to the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, where there is no officer of Parliament. Once enacted, the act will give the commissioner the power to require testimony or a written return, a power that was eliminated by the Conservatives. Why did Stephen Harper's Conservatives not want the elections commissioner to have that kind of authority, especially since he was responsible for the integrity of our elections?

Integrity is clearly not what the Conservatives were looking for, and given their reaction to this bill, their position has obviously not changed. In the debate on this bill, we keep hearing that the Conservatives have concerns about the creation of a pre-election list of young people, which could be given to political parties. They know that this list is meant for the Chief Electoral Officer and that these names will not be provided to political parties before the individuals turn 18. However, the Conservatives do not want a tool that would help inform young future voters and help them prepare to become citizens and informed voters in our democracy.

The Conservatives are afraid that young people will not vote Conservative. Instead of modernizing their old-school values, or reassessing their attitude towards women, immigrants, minorities, indigenous peoples, the environment, and science, the Conservatives would rather do everything they can to make sure that the younger generation does not have the tools it needs to participate in the democratic process. They refuse to evolve to where society is now.

During the 2011 election campaign, advance polling stations were set up on university campuses. In Guelph, the Conservatives opposed a polling station at the student centre and a young campaign volunteer, who was also a ministerial assistant on Parliament Hill was accused of attempting to steal the ballot box. Those accusations were never proven, but the incident shows how afraid the Conservatives are that young people will get involved.

The Conservatives think that giving young people the opportunity to get involved in elections, as Bill-76 proposes, is an existential threat. For the first time, millennials will outnumber baby boomers.

The Conservatives are not adapting to the new reality. They prefer to shout out “it is not a right” here in the House when we are talking about women making their own decisions about their bodies. That is shameful. Millennials, those of my generation, have had enough of this paternalistic attitude. We find that the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle and his Conservatives have the same attitude.

Again in the 2011 federal election and again in the riding of Guelph, robocalls were made. These calls were bilingual and claimed to be on behalf of Elections Canada. The calls told thousands of voters that the location of their polling station had changed. The goal was to keep people from voting. The federal elections commissioner and his investigators did not have the authority to compel witnesses to testify, so the commissioner had to make agreements with those involved in this subterfuge. As a result, a young man who is unilingual and has no particular technical skills was put in jail for electoral fraud. He was the scapegoat that I mentioned earlier.

Because the investigators lacked authority, the legal process resulted in a completely ridiculous outcome. First of all, they overlooked the campaign's political adviser, who had all the necessary political and technical access and who had created software called “Move My Vote” to determine what to dispute in the 2013 electoral redistribution. This is not to mention the fact that the assistant campaign organizer worked at the store where the burner phone was sold, or the fact that the Conservative Party lawyer was present when the witness statements were taken, rather than the lawyer of the accused or the witness. That is the kind of situation the Fair Elections Act was designed to ensure by undermining the integrity of the investigation process.

However, that was not the only problem the Conservatives wanted to create or even exacerbate. One of Elections Canada's main tasks is to educate voters across Canada on the electoral system and their role in it, and those information campaigns should be entirely impartial to ensure fair elections. The Conservatives, however, had no interest in conducting public information campaigns in schools or newspapers. Voter participation is not in the Conservatives' partisan interest. They did everything they could to undermine it. In the end, voter participation was high, but that was because Canadians were fed up with the lack of integrity.

Because of that, the Conservatives used their integrity bill to change the law and take away Elections Canada's educational role. Going forward, its only role would be to say where, when, and how to vote. That is it. Things were even worse than we thought. On top of taking power away from the Chief Electoral Officer, the Conservatives wanted to muzzle him, just like they muzzled scientists to keep facts from interfering with their agenda.

In addition to dealing with the elections commissioner's workplace and power structure, Bill C-76 will resolve this ridiculous situation created by a government that had no interest at all in protecting democracy. To the Conservatives, electoral integrity meant staying in power.

Going forward, the Chief Electoral Officer will have the right to speak and to perform his rightful educational role. That is why the Conservatives are so afraid of this bill passing and will do everything they can to block it. Much like women's rights, the integrity of our elections is not something the Conservatives care about. Shame on them.

Speaking of shame, let me remind the House that the Conservatives use the Fair Elections Act to take away voters' right to use their voter information card as a piece of ID. That had an immediate and significant impact. An estimated 170,000 people lost the right to vote in 2015 because of that anti-democratic change.

The vast majority of approved pieces of ID are used to confirm a voter's home address and to confirm whether this person has the right to vote and is voting in the correct riding. The voter information card does both of those things. When voters receive their card, it means that they are obviously on the voter's list. This also means that the address is correct, or else they would not have received their card. However, this card is never enough on its own, and it must be used with another piece of ID. Anyone can vote with a health card, for example. Without this card, someone who does not pay the household bills and who does not have a credit card or driver's license has nothing else to confirm his or her address. Once again, this was the objective of Stephen Harper's Conservatives.

If people were not going to vote Conservative, why let them vote at all? That would not help the integrity of a Conservative victory. No one wants that, so the Conservatives prevented Canadian voters from using the best piece of ID available to a large number of them. Integrity, my foot. These people do not have much integrity at all.

I am particularly proud of Bill C-76, since it will allow mail from the Chief Electoral Officer to be used as a valid piece of ID to vote. This makes sense.

The process we embarked on was long and complex. The Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs worked hard to study each recommendation made by the former chief electoral officer. Of the 130 specific changes in Bill C-76, 109 stem directly from the recommendations in the Chief Electoral Officer's report on the 42nd general election. Furthermore, the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs studied most of the recommendations. The others were mostly technical changes requested by the Chief Electoral Officer.

I am proud to support this bill and to support a government whose vision extends beyond the next election to secure the long-term success of our country and our democracy.

Election Modernization Act

[Robert Aubin, NDP, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Mr. Speaker, this time, I will use every minute and second available to me, since Bill C-76 is a very important bill for anyone who believes in democracy.

When it comes right down to it, MPs of all stripes are just advocates who decided to take their political commitment to the limit and help develop our society to the best of their ability and in keeping with their values.

Every member of the House knows how lucky he or she is to live and participate in a democracy. However, our democratic system, like many others, is far from perfect. We would hope that each and everyone of us would be able to help perfect it and that any bill that would make major changes to our entire electoral system, in whole or in part, would have not only the broadest possible consensus, but complete unanimity.

A bill that affects the very foundation of our democracy should not be a partisan bill. Still, we do have to admit that things have changed a bit ever since the Conservatives introduced Bill C-23, the Fair Elections Act, in the previous Parliament. In our search for a better democratic system, the aim should always be to strive for a consensus. However, we seem to be seeing more and more partisan games, which I believe have no place in a bill like this.

I obviously feel privileged to rise to speak on a bill as fundamental as Bill C-76. However, I unfortunately feel like I am acting in an old movie because the government seems to be assuming it does not need a consensus. The government is using our old parliamentary system to its advantage since that system allows the political party that holds a majority in the House to bulldoze, and I do not think that is too strong a term, its agenda through, rather than striving to reach a consensus.

Even as we debate this topic, something very important is happening in Quebec City. Just months—weeks, actually—before the Quebec provincial election, four parties held a joint press conference to say that, regardless of the outcome of the next election, they all agree that the existing electoral system should no longer be used in our society.

Québec solidaire, Coalition Avenir Québec, the Parti Québécois, and the Green Party of Quebec joined forces to say that the coming provincial election should be the last to use this voting system. That is why I feel like I am in an old movie, unfortunately. Many parties have sung that tune, especially the Liberal Party during the last campaign. The party said loud and clear that this would be the last election with that voting system, which worked fine back in the day.

When this Parliament was created, it was a two-party system. In a society with two parties, one of them will, by definition, get at least 50% plus one of the votes. What could be more democratic than that? Since then, things have changed a lot in Canada and Quebec, as they have in all the other provinces and territories.

A plurality of political opinions and approaches emerged, which all demand representation in the House of Commons. We think that, no matter which party is in government, even if it was the NDP, it is completely inappropriate for a government that wins 39% of the popular vote to get 100% of the power in the House. This is what happened with this government, and it was the same with the previous government. There is a massive dichotomy that needs to be addressed.

The government has backtracked on this specific issue, which was a very important issue for the Liberal Party and the New Democratic Party during the last election. It is clear that the Liberals have backtracked on their election promise, probably because now that they are in power, they want to continue to enjoy full control over this country's democratic institutions.

Now Bill C-76 is being rammed through at the very last minute. I would say it is being done at the eleventh hour, when the acting Chief Electoral Officer does not even know whether he will be able to implement all the different measures this bill contains in time for the next election, because the Liberals dragged their feet so long. First they dawdled with the study on what our new voting system should be. Then they ignored an overwhelming consensus in favour of a mixed proportional system, while trying to convince Canadians that there was no consensus or that the consensus was for something else. That is a funny way to put it, but it shows how desperate they were to dodge the issue.

Not content to have delayed this process, the Liberals also delayed the next process, which was aimed at correcting some of the stalled measures that were stuck behind those they had rejected. However, here we are at the eleventh hour, and they cannot even guarantee that all of the measures we have been discussing this morning and over the past few days will be implemented by the next election.

It is therefore fairly safe to say this has been a total failure, even though, as I will elaborate, Bill C-76 does contain a few measures that are worth studying and implementing.

We are talking about a 230-page bill that will have to be rushed through because, as I was saying, the Liberals have been behind on all counts from the very beginning.

Worse still, this very rushed bill will likely pass thanks to the majority this government holds. This means that the broad consensus that has been the tradition in this House could once again be ignored in favour of the bulldozing effect of a government majority.

After two press releases in quick succession proposing two different names, this week we learned of the appointment of a potential new chief electoral officer. The person responsible for implementing the measures in Bill C-76 has not yet been officially appointed. It is safe to say that problems are piling up.

Let us explore some of the things in this bill that deserve a closer look, such as the issue of financing. As people generally expect more transparency in the lead-up to an election, this bill proposes a number of measures in that regard. However, while promising greater transparency, the bill also raises spending limits at the same time. This means that election campaigns will become much more about money than ideas.

I think that there is a very broad consensus in Canada and Quebec regarding the U.S. election system, because no one wants to see money take precedence over ideas. For years now, money seems to have become increasingly more important. Canadians are well aware that there is a cost to living in a democracy. No one expects elections to be free. I will get back to public financing a bit later, since this aspect is largely missing from the bill. This was an opportunity to restore the balance that was lost under the previous Conservative government led by Mr. Harper, which completely eliminated the per-vote subsidy. I am not saying that this made for a proportional government, but at least the public financing was representative of the public vote and gave additional meaning to casting a vote.

What is more, increasing election spending limits is also problematic and feeds into the trend of making money more important than ideas. In an election campaign, I would like to see people debate ideas equitably rather than see parties inundate people with ads because the rules are not the same for everyone. Conversely, one could argue that the rules are equal for everyone since everyone has the same spending limit, but when that spending limit is at a height that not every party can achieve, then clearly there is an imbalance.

I would also like to address another problem that is widely panned and does not seem to have been resolved by Bill C-76: personal information protection. That is an issue that everyone in Canada and Quebec is concerned about now and not just when it comes to elections, but also in daily life. Every move that is made on the web leaves a footprint and we cannot begin to imagine how much personal information we leave there.

Perhaps members have already had the experience of downloading an app on their cellphone or other device and reading the terms of service. I do not know whether this has ever happened to you, Madam Speaker, but I have tried a few times to read the terms of service, but I have rarely succeed in getting all the way to the end. The times I did manage to finish, I must admit that it was a challenge. However, just because I read the terms, does not mean that I understood them, but people always end up agreeing to the terms because they need the app in their daily lives. Once we accept the terms, we no longer know exactly how much personal information will be shared or how that information will be managed. Bill C-76 does nothing to address that issue.

I would like to quote what a few witnesses had to say about this. Teresa Scassa, the Canada research chair in information law and policy at the University of Ottawa described the solution proposed in Bill C-76 as “an almost contemptuous and entirely cosmetic quick fix designed to deflect attention from the very serious privacy issues raised by the use of personal information by political parties.”

Lori Turnbull, director of Dalhousie University's School of Public Administration and co-author of a document about the modernization of public funding published by the Public Policy Forum said, “It’s a step in the right direction, but it looks as if they were pressed for time and some big problems have been left on the table.”

I have used this image many times: when you take a step forward, you are not actually moving forward, you are just moving your centre of gravity. In order to move forward, you have to take at least two steps. Bill C-76 is only one step.

Funnily enough, Canada does have a privacy act. It is quite a progressive act, and it is often studied by many other countries seeking to perfect their own privacy acts and learn how a united front is needed to protect personal data in our new computer-oriented society.

However, political parties are exempt from Canada's privacy act. For example, a private company that wants to solicit customers by email has to seek their consent to store their email addresses for future correspondence. Political parties are not required to ask for consent. They can even sell the personal data they gather, which to me is an utterly absurd situation that Bill C-76, as drafted, does not address.

Where are the rules for increasing the number of women to a significant level? That is another issue that Bill C-76 does not resolve. In terms of women's representation in the House, we are light years away from parity, except in the NDP. Why? At the very beginning of an election campaign, the very instant the writ drops, the NDP have rules in place that require candidate nominations to be gender balanced from the get-go. If there is no parity at the starting line, how can we hope to miraculously reach parity by the finish line? We ought to thank the NDP for its efforts and make sure more women get into the House.

By voting down the bill introduced by my colleague from Burnaby South, the government missed a great opportunity to make additional strides in that regard. Bill C-76 again misses the opportunity to introduce specific measures to achieve gender parity, or at least something close to parity between 40% and 60%, by the next election. We should not have to wait decades for this. If current trends in the number of women in the House of Commons remain at the same level, it will likely take 40 or 50 years to achieve parity, and even that is not guaranteed. This is an absolutely crucial issue that has been completely overlooked in this legislation.

The bill does contain some important positive aspects, which is why, at the end of the day, I will be voting to support it at second reading, even though I may sound like I completely oppose it. I think it is important to send it to committee so that we may get some answers to relevant questions and see how we can make the most of a bill that has been reduced to the basics and does not really reform our electoral system. That is the role of all opposition members, in other words, not to simply oppose legislation but also improve it.

We do welcome the time limit for an election campaign. Having election campaigns in this era of faster travel and digital media means they can be shorter than back in the day when candidates had to travel across Canada by train, which of course took longer.

Offering a 90% refund for child care expenses is a good measure. We support that.

In closing, democracy does not belong to just the Liberals or any one party in the House. It belongs to all parties in the House of Commons.

I hope the next changes made to our electoral system are based on a consensus.

Information Presented by Government

[Candice Bergen, Conservative, Portage—Lisgar, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I am rising on a question of privilege regarding misleading information that has been presented to the House by the Prime Minister and the Minister of Public Safety.

During question period on February 26, 2018, I asked the government a number of questions regarding a briefing provided to the media by the Prime Minister's security adviser, Daniel Jean. The briefing attempted to explain how a convicted terrorist ended up at an event with the Prime Minister during his trip to India. The reason Mr. Jean gave was that the Government of India conspired and manipulated events in order to ensure the attendance of Jaspal Atwal at the reception. My first question to the government was simply, “What proof does the Prime Minister have that the Government of India did this?”

As you know Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Public Safety did not provide any evidence to this claim, nor did he refute it. Instead he said:

I can say that the invitation that was issued to this particular individual, Mr. Atwal, should never have been issued. Indeed, as soon as it was discovered, it was rescinded by the Government of Canada.

This statement supports the statement made by the Minister of Foreign Affairs when she told the Indian foreign affairs minister that Jaspal Atwal's invitation to the event was an honest mistake. If we follow the evolution of the responses from the Minister of Public Safety on that day, the answers begin to also support the theory of Daniel Jean, a theory that blames rogue elements in the Indian government.

The Minister of Public Safety said on February 26:

...Canada has very strong, very proficient national security and police agencies. They are well trained in what they need to do to protect and advance the Canadian national interest, and they have done their jobs in relation to the trip to India. They have done that job exceedingly well to make sure the best interests of Canadians are served and protected.

On February 27, 2018, the Leader of the Opposition asked the Prime Minister the same question, and the Prime Minister, in his one answer to the Leader of the Opposition's question, combined both the notion espoused by his Minister of Foreign Affairs that the invitation was a mistake, and Daniel Jean's theory laying blame on factions in the Indian government.

The Prime Minister said:

Mr. Speaker, as we have already said, this invitation should never have been sent. As soon as we realized that it had, the invitation was withdrawn.

Canada's national security and law enforcement agencies are non-partisan, highly competent, and very effective. We have faith in them to protect Canada and Canadians. They continue to work very hard to serve and protect the interests of Canadians.

Later in question period, on February 27, the Prime Minister introduced to the House a new character to this saga. He said:

Mr. Speaker, as I have said many times, this individual never should have been invited. As soon as we found out that he was, that invitation was rescinded. The member responsible for the invitation has taken full responsibility, and I will be following up with that member later this afternoon.

The member he was referring to was the member for Surrey Centre.

When pressed as to the conspiracy theory, the Minister of Public Safety out and out dismissed it as false when he said, in response to my question on February 27:

...the hon. member, both today and yesterday, has provided her interpretation of events. In fact, her insinuations and her accusations are false.

At the same time, that same minister and the Prime Minister continued to support the public servant who claimed, and has never retracted or explained to any member of Parliament, or clarified his comments, that the Indian government was behind the events that led to Mr. Atwal's attendance at the reception. This contradiction continued all last week, and it continues to this day, despite more evidence that the conspiracy theory may be bogus.

Mr. Atwal, at a press conference last week, confirmed that he asked the member for Surrey Centre for an invitation to the Prime Minister's event. We in the opposition have given the government ample opportunity to clarify this matter, and it refuses to do so.

This contempt for the House is not unlike a matter that was raised in 2002. In 2002, another Liberal government refused to clarify the record, forcing the opposition to raise the matter as a question of privilege. It would seem that once again the opposition needs to take this extraordinary step and seek the authority of the House to cut through the contradictions and falsehoods to finally get to the truth.

In addition, the official opposition has dedicated its opposition day tomorrow to call on the Prime Minister to instruct Daniel Jean to appear before the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, to give the same courtesy to members of Parliament that he gave to the media about his government's theory regarding the Indian government's involvement in this matter.

It is my sincere hope that the Prime Minister will see fit to not show further contempt for this House and allow his official to at least treat members of Parliament the same as members of the press gallery.

In your ruling of yesterday, Mr. Speaker, while on an unrelated matter, you touched on the issue of respect that members of Parliament are expected to receive from the government and its officials in these situations. You said, Mr. Speaker:

...as Speaker, I understand the member for Abbotsford's frustration and the sense of disrespect that he feels in not having had priority access to a briefing on such a complex piece of legislation. In fact, the Chair not only finds this matter to be unfortunate, but also entirely avoidable.... There is no question that the work of members of Parliament is made more difficult without expeditious access to legislative information. Given this reality, there is a rightful expectation that those responsible for the information should do their utmost to ensure members’ access to it. Not respecting this expectation does a disservice to all. It is particularly disconcerting when the government gives priority to the media over the members of Parliament.

On February 1, 2002, the Speaker ruled in a matter in regard to the former minister of national defence. The former hon. member for Portage—Lisgar alleged that the minister of national defence deliberately misled the House as to when he knew what prisoners taken by Canadian JTF2 troops had been handed over to the Americans. In support of that allegation, he cited the minister's responses in question period on two successive days. The Speaker considered the matter and found that there was a prima facie question of privilege. He said:

The authorities are consistent about the need for clarity in our proceedings and about the need to ensure the integrity of the information provided by the government to the House.

The authorities to which Speaker Milliken was referring included the following from House of Commons Procedure and Practice, second edition, which states on page 115:

Misleading a Minister or a Member has...been considered a form of obstruction and thus a prima facie breach of privilege.

The Speaker, in 2002, accepted the minister's assertion that he had no intention to mislead the House and made the following statement. He said, “Nevertheless this remains a very difficult situation”. The Speaker went on to say:

On the basis of the arguments presented by hon. members and in view of the gravity of the matter, I have concluded that the situation before us where the House is left with two versions of events is one that merits further consideration by an appropriate committee, if only to clear the air. I therefore invite the hon. member for Portage—Lisgar [ironically] to move his motion.

On February 25, 2015, the House leader of the official opposition raised a question of privilege regarding statements made in the House by the former member for Mississauga—Streetsville. The hon. member for Mississauga—Streetsville had deliberately misled the House during debate on Bill C-23, the Fair Elections Act, when he stated that he had witnessed evidence of voter fraud first-hand. On February 24 and February 25, the member for Mississauga—Streetsville admitted that, contrary to his original claim, he had not actually witnessed what he originally claimed to have witnessed. The Speaker found that by taking something the member knew not to be true and presenting it as eye-witness evidence, something so egregious constituted contempt.

I believe we are faced with the same scenario today, except government members refuse to admit it, as the previous Liberal government refused to do. On March 3, 2015, the Speaker delivered his ruling, citing what Speaker Milliken was faced with in February 2002 when the then-minister of national defence provided contradictory information to the House. The Speaker went on to conclude:

In keeping with that precedent, I am prepared to accord the same courtesy to the member for Mississauga—Streetsville.

At the same time, the fact remains that the House continues to be seized of completely contradictory statements. This is a difficult position in which to leave members, who must be able to depend on the integrity of the information with which they are provided to perform their parliamentary duties.

Accordingly, in keeping with the precedent cited earlier in which Speaker Milliken indicated that the matter merited “...further consideration by an appropriate committee, if only to clear the air”, I am prepared in this case for the same reason to allow the matter to be put to the House.

The House has been presented with several conflicting answers to one very simple question about the appearance of Jaspal Atwal at the event in India. This is a grave situation that has not had a satisfactory resolution.

Parliamentarians have a right to obtain accurate and non-conflicting information, even clarification, when asking questions of the government. If the media got this information, members of Parliament should have this clarification. In this instance, this has not occurred.

Therefore, Mr. Speaker, if you find this to be a prima facie question of privilege, I am prepared to move the appropriate motion.

Canada Elections Act

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

Mr. Speaker, this is timely, because the heckling we are hearing between the Liberals and Conservatives only serves to reinforce the point I wanted to make.

In the previous Parliament, the Conservative government only generated more cynicism and changed our elections legislation, making it harder for Canadians to vote.

Now the Liberal government is fuelling cynicism with superficial changes that ultimately will do nothing to correct a serious perception problem that the Liberals themselves created. Everyone who has been watching today's debates heard the Liberals say that the leader of the official opposition was just as bad and that he did the same thing. The Conservatives, for their part, said that what they did was less serious because at least when their ministers attended fundraisers, they met people whose areas of business were not directly related to the department.

I have been an MP for almost seven years now, and I am starting to get pretty sick of giving speeches about all the issues that breed cynicism. Others have talked about this today. As my colleague from British Columbia mentioned this morning, when we go door to door and talk to people, that is what is on people's minds. They say they are not interested, they do not want to donate money to political parties, and they do not want to take out memberships. Worse still, some say they do not even want to vote because of the cynical mood fuelled by stories in the news and legislative half-measures. We will support the changes anyway because one step in the right direction is better than nothing, but everyone needs to understand where this is coming from.

Bill C-50 is a first step. Unfortunately, although I have a lot of respect for the minister, it will probably be the only step. The Liberal government is unlikely to leave behind anything else that qualifies as a legacy of democratic reform.

I have to wonder if it is mere coincidence that this bill was introduced right after the Prime Minister broke his lofty electoral reform promise, right after the dismal failure on that front. This is a big problem for our political system as a whole, not just party financing.

We recognize that some of the changes have made things more difficult. My Bloc Québécois colleague and others spoke earlier about the per-subsidy vote, which is money allocated for each vote received by a party or a candidate.

The member for Beaches—East York spoke about similar issues. He even went so far as to speak about making changes to tax credits for donations. I am raising all these issues to point out that it is possible to be open-minded in this type of debate and to find ways to improve political financing.

We can study all the important changes made in Quebec following revelations about the corruption that occurred over several years, as well as all the changes in political financing and the lowering of contribution limits.

These are all legitimate ideas and we could have a healthy debate about how to provide the financing needed, for better or for worse, to run an election campaign. It takes money to print brochures, inform voters about our positions and important issues, obtain telecommunications equipment for campaign offices, communicate with voters, hear their concerns, and share our positions. We recognize that this is the reality, whether we like it or not.

In that sense, it is very important to find a way to work together in a non-partisan manner to fix this system or at least create a system that instills confidence in Canadians. There are many reasons why that is currently not the case. Sometimes it is because of changes that have nothing to do with political donations as such, but have more to do with the electoral system itself and how it works. I am talking about Bill C-23 from the last Parliament, which had to do with electoral reform, or deform, as people jokingly used to refer to it. That is the type of thing that fuels cynicism and makes all of this that much more challenging.

However, we also have to consider the optics of a minister receiving the maximum donation allowed by law to attend an event with people who have a direct stake in his or her portfolio. What we need to understand is that ministers and regular MPs wield a very different level of power. I agree with the Conservatives on that. I would add that we keep reminding the Liberal government of that fact with each new conflict of interest scandal. Everyone knows that party leaders aspire to be Prime Minister one day and that members of the official opposition or another opposition party could easily end up in cabinet with decision-making power within two or three years. Nonetheless, ministers have the power to make extremely important decisions, hire people, award contracts, spend money, and so on. As such, their ear is much more valuable to have than that of a regular MP.

This does not mean that all members of the House are not prepared to follow the conflict of interest rules—political financing rules, specifically. However, when the government denies that things are different when it comes to ministers and claims in the House that everyone should be on a level playing field, it is insulting the intelligence of those who want to participate in this debate and make real change, so that we can have a political financing system that allows us, among other things, to run political campaigns. People want to see candidates on the ground, which costs money, whether we like it or not, but people also want to have confidence in the financing system.

This morning, the member for Beaches—East York talked about how things work south of the border, and he is right. In other countries, such as the United States, money plays such a dominant role in politics that it has become a problem. For example, my campaign spending cap for my riding would buy about one ad for a U.S. Senate hopeful. We have to acknowledge that our system does have merit. Seeing how bad things are elsewhere makes us feel better about how we do things here, but that does not mean we can rest on our laurels.

Whenever a journalist digs up another scandal, we can pretty much count on the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons and the Minister of Democratic Institutions to say that our system is a good one, spending is in check, and there are strict caps on how much an individual can donate. That is not enough, though. We cannot compare ourselves to the worst of the bunch, places like the United States, where a Supreme Court ruling made the who and how much of election spending a free-for-all. Corporations, unions, anybody can spend as much as they want. Even so, alarming situations that are bad for democracies elsewhere are no excuse for us to be content with the status quo here.

In closing, as I said earlier, there are too many situations in the House that remind me of the cynicism I have seen among too many voters as I have gone door to door as an MP for almost seven years now, and I know that my colleagues have seen the same thing. If we really want to make Canadians less cynical and put an end to political financing scandals, we need to engage in a real debate. The government needs to do more than introduce a bill that is merely a smokescreen designed to hide its broken promises on electoral reform and to try to make people forget about the scandals it has been caught up in. Let us stop pointing fingers and arguing over which political party was worse than the other when in office. Let us seriously consider this reform and the measures that we could change or even those that we could bring back, in the case of public financing.

There are all kinds of interesting questions. Of course, the NDP's main goal when it comes to bringing in true electoral reform is the implementation of a mixed member proportional system. There are also many other issues that need to be seriously considered. That is not at all what we are seeing from this government, and it is not what we saw from the previous government, either.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Madam Speaker, it gives me great pleasure to rise on Bill C-364 to discuss election financing law.

To start with, I will not be supporting this bill. That is not because I do not believe in a stronger role for public financing; I do believe that. It is because the alternative is a stronger role for private financing.

The key question I want to address in our democracy is a complete re-evaluation of political fundraising itself. Is fundraising necessary, and if so, what should it look like? Conventional wisdom is that it is. However, I want us to ask the question honestly and objectively.

Political parties need funds to operate and campaign. That is a given. However, what is a fair way to achieve that funding?

First, parties and riding associations should not have to fundraise in competition with each other. The fundraising should come from the riding, with a share sent to the party in order for it to remain a part of the party, with the specific details left up to each party or riding association to figure out. A party is not a party, after all, without ridings and representatives. The parties themselves are only meant to exist as a vehicle for like-minded members to work together, not as a means for members to become like-minded. That is a discussion for another day.

I disagree with the current fundraising model of 100% private funds, coupled with non-refundable tax credits and expense reimbursements that do not give equal ability to all members of society to participate, which is a fundamental tenet of any democracy. Those who have money can participate and get tax credits. Those who do not have money to participate are not eligible for the tax incentive to do so. Therefore, having less means that each dollar costs less fortunate individuals more in absolute terms, and prohibitively more in relative terms. Once again, those who need are at a disadvantage compared to those who do not, and politicians, with their insatiable need for funds, must necessarily gravitate toward those who have.

Many donors donate because they believe in the cause. However, I think it is naive to believe that all donors do. I am sure most of us have received an angry email or phone call at some point from someone who has given money to either our riding or our party saying, “I am a donor and I am angry.” Personally, I do not take well to this kind of message. I want people to donate because they believe in what we are doing and want us to continue, not in order to tell us what we need to do. If they are angry, I want to know that, not because they are donors but because they are citizens. I want that fact detached from the comment, and I want people who did not donate to express themselves with equal fervour. I am here to represent and work for all of my people to the best of my ability, not just those who supported me or may do so in the future.

I also disagree with the concept of annual per-vote funding, the primary objective of Bill C-364, for the simple reason that how people voted in 2015 may not reflect where they want their financial support to go. At that, it may not be the same in 2016, 2017, 2018, or 2019. If people vote for a Liberal candidate to block a Conservative candidate when they actually support the Green Party, why should the money go to the Liberals and not the Green Party in that circumstance? It does not make sense. If we do have per-vote funding, we should also have a preferential ballot so that the money we assign goes to our first pick, even if we have specified additional choices in order to prevent the unfavourable results that can sometimes come from not voting strategically.

On the other hand, I also do not believe that just because one has registered a political party it is automatically entitled to some funding or an equal level of funding as all the others. It must be tied to that party's actual support in some way. Giving the Rhinoceros Party $18 million simply because it is registered may not necessarily serve the interests of democracy, and providing per-party financing may motivate some people to register political parties for the purpose of simply collecting the money without any actual interest in the electoral process. I think these risks are fairly self-evident.

While I know I am very much in the minority on this, my preferred model for addressing all these concerns is to put a question on the tax returns of Canadians that would go something like this, with the numbers being completely arbitrary for the sake of demonstration here today.

With respect to let us say tax return line number 500, an answer to this section is required for my tax return to be accepted as complete. Therefore, the questions might be, “Question 1, I am entitled to direct $25 to a party registered in my riding or to be held in escrow for an independent candidate to be returned or forfeited if the candidate I name does not register to run in the next election: a) Yes, I would like to exercise this right, or b) No, I do not wish to contribute to any political party or independent candidate at this time.” If we check off no, then we are finished and have met our obligations under this section of the return. If we answer yes, that we do wish to direct $25 to a political party, we have three more questions to answer.

The first question would be, “The party or independent candidate I wish to support in my riding is”, then there would be a blank space or drop-down menu with data provided by Elections Canada for electronic filers. The second question would be, “I would like this money to: a) come from general revenues, or b) be added to my own tax assessment.” The final question would be, “I would like the origin of this contribution to be: a) disclosed to the party or independent candidate receiving it, or b) kept anonymous and confidential.”

Splitting up the questions like this allows those who believe it must be their own funds that contribute to political parties to put their money where their mouth is. However, more importantly, it means that someone who does not have two cents, and someone who is a millionaire, have the same weight in the fundraising process.

Everybody has the option but not the requirement to do so anonymously, so the data cannot be automatically used by political parties. Allowing people to say no to donating at all, and not knowing who, should help force all parties to retain a more positive message. Divisive dog-whistle fundraising will not work on an anonymous tax-assessment-based fundraising model. Being negative would serve to discourage people from contributing to political parties overall, with them answering no to the question of whether to give before seeing the options of who to give to.

The pie can be pretty big if Canadians all have a positive view of political parties, rather than the negative views promulgated today by some elements of our political system to sew division and make people hate, rather than to want to work together.

While the Canada Revenue Agency will no doubt be less than excited to get involved in this manner, and there must be careful and specific controls to protect the privacy of the responses to this question, in my view it is the fairest possible way to ensure that political financing is put on an equal basis by all citizens for those they support here and now, at all times, in all parts of the country.

There are no doubt other models and solutions that could be looked at, but I firmly believe that the question must be asked, and I thank the member for Terrebonne for bringing public financing reform forward for us to discuss.

This legislation also reduces the fundraising limits significantly in conjunction with the reintroduction of per-vote funding. The amount of the donation cap is largely irrelevant if there is still an inequity between donors who have means and donors who do not, and so the cap at $500 or $1,500 is largely immaterial to me. Someone who makes enough to pay taxes giving $400 is still out of pocket only $100, while someone who does not make enough to pay taxes giving $400 is out of pocket the full amount, not to mention possibly out of a home or a few meals. Therefore, I find the particular change proposed in the bill to be fairly meaningless. It would not solve any existing problem.

Finally, the member for Terrebonne's bill has an absolute rather than relative coming into force provision. Given that the bill is only at second reading here in the House and has yet to get through the Commons committee, report stage, third reading and referral to the Senate, second reading at the Senate, Senate committee, Senate report stage, Senate third reading, and royal assent, it is not realistic to suggest that the bill could be in force 24 days from now.

Over the past two years, we have made strides forward on these matters. I do not believe my views on fundraising reflect those of very many of my colleagues on any side of the House, but we are seeing changes both here and in several provinces.

Conservative Bill C-23, the so-called Fair Elections Act, reformed fundraising in a whole lot of ways that were detrimental to democratic society, including removing fundraising costs from capped expenses in an election campaign, and upping the donation limit by 25%, and then indexing it by $25 per year instead of by an an inflation-based formula.

I do not wish to re-litigate that particular bill. As the assistant at the time to the Liberal critic for democratic reform, I had more than enough sleepless nights trying to grok every word of that act once, and it certainly contributed to my motivation to seek a seat in this place so that this kind of abuse of democracy could not happen again.

Our own government's Bill C-50 brought in strict reporting requirements for fundraising events involving the key power brokers of government, and those working hard to replace them, which I think is genuinely important.

The thing about fundraising, and public financing of political parties, of course, is that there is no such thing as a perfect answer, only a balance of imperfect solutions. What I am sure of, though, is that Bill C-364 does not address the fundamental inequalities within our existing fundraising and public financing structure for our political system.

Preclearance Act, 2016

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I think that the current Bill C-23 is much better than Bill C-23 from the previous Parliament, but let us forget about that for now.

The last time I checked the schedule for the train from Toronto to New York, there was a delay at the U.S. border of between an hour and half to three hours. Expanding this train service is very important, and that is what this bill proposes. We see this in Europe. When I travelled from London to Brussels by train, I cleared customs on the England side, before going through the tunnel. It is very efficient.

I want to know what my colleague from Mégantic—L'Érable thinks of the importance of also expanding this customs service to rail service.

Oral Questions

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Mr. Speaker, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Democratic Institutions said that no amendments were accepted to the Fair Elections Act.

He knows that giving false information to the House is a serious matter. In fact, over 40 amendments were accepted to the Fair Elections Act. I would appreciate it if the parliamentary secretary might want to take the opportunity to correct the record on that point.

Democratic Reform

[Maryam Monsef, Liberal, Minister of Democratic Institutions]

Mr. Speaker, when the former government decided to bring forward the Fair Elections Act, did the Conservatives consult with parliamentarians? Did they consult with Canadians? Did they hold a referendum? Did they include the voice of the Chief Electoral Officer and include his feedback in the changes they brought forward? They did not.

We have learned from their mistakes. We will engage with Canadians.

We have empowered a special all-party committee to hear from Canadians what their views are before thoughtfully bringing forward a plan for the House for deliberation. We will do that in a respectful and inclusive manner.

Opposition Motion—Special Committee on Electoral Reform

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am not sure how to respond to the notion that people do not vote for the policies that the parties put forward. The reality is that in an election campaign, parties posit what changes they are going to make. The changes specifically with respect to the electoral system were made very clearly, certainly by our party and by others, that the last election would be the last run on a first-past-the-post system.

I reflect on the types of ways that changes were made to our electoral system previously. For example, in the so-called Fair Elections Act, we saw broad and sweeping changes made without any sort of consultation, without engaging other parties, without engaging Canadians, which is what we have to move away from.

Today, the spirit of co-operation in working with other parties, of being able to find that commonality, is exactly what Canadians are seeking.

I hear from my constituents that they have the expectation that I will keep the promises I make to them. This was certainly a significant one in the last election.

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Skeena—Bulkley Valley for moving this motion and sharing his time with me.

I would like to begin with a confession. When I first got involved in politics, I did not really think that democratic reform was of much interest to regular people. That is true some of the time. As MPs, we knock on doors and listen to people talk about the economy, health, education, and other issues. Sometimes they even talk about issues that, while not within federal jurisdiction, concern them nonetheless.

In 2013, I was pleasantly surprised when the Conservatives introduced Bill C-23, which made significant changes to our electoral system. Unfortunately, the changes sometimes caused serious problems for our system. Local people outside the Ottawa bubble took an interest. Constituents came to see my colleagues and me in our riding offices about this because they were concerned. People also sent us letters and petitions.

It became clear to me that it was not always the top priority. Still, when a government proposes major changes in the area of democratic reform, people realize that these are significant changes to how they vote for their MPs.

The same thing is happening now. Since the Liberals came to power following the 2015 election, they have been proposing to change the status quo. The electoral system is fundamental to our democracy, and people are concerned about the changes that are being proposed to the system. They want to know how this is going to happen. Unfortunately, what the government has proposed so far is not what Canadians were hoping to see. If the proposed changes were to be accepted, this would allow the party in power to unilaterally decide how to go about changing something that is so important to our democracy.

What we are proposing today is very interesting. The minister repeated several times that what is important is hearing the opposition's proposals. She also said that she is open to those proposals. That is good, because here we are with a proposal that I hope will be supported by the minister and her party. The proposal aims to change how the committee is formed in order to require that any changes made to our democracy have the support of at least one opposition party.

At this time, the Liberals have a majority on the committee. They can go ahead with a unilateral change and come back to the House with a proposal that would very likely pass with the Liberal majority here.

Obviously, the Liberals still have the majority of the seats in the House of Commons, but they should also get the support of an opposition party. As proposed in the motion by my colleague from Skeena—Bulkley Valley, the committee's composition would reflect the percentage of votes, based on how Canadians voted in the last election. That way, our Bloc Québécois colleagues and our Green Party colleague would have a vote.

As a result, we believe that the way the committee is composed would help in achieving consensus and making changes to our electoral system that are acceptable to Canadians. They would know that a parliamentary consensus was reached on the changes. The composition of the committee would be more proportional and more representative of how Canadians voted in the election.

The committee's work will be very important. It is an opportunity for us to break out of the Ottawa bubble.

The minister is proposing that every member hold consultations in his or her riding. I am not saying that consultations are not important. In fact, consultations on various issues are at the heart of an MP's work. Holding consultations, going door to door, and collecting signatures for petitions are central to an MP's work. However, this could never replace the work of Parliament or a committee.

The Standing Orders generally establish the makeup of the other existing House of Commons committees. The government's reasoning was that it was using the normal proportions. However, the normal proportions are based on what they themselves called a false majority. If the government truly wants to reach a consensus and hear from the opposition parties, it should not use that false majority to determine the committee's makeup. That is very important.

Unlike individual members, a committee has the ability to call witnesses and benefit from the expertise of all parliamentarians. Earlier, my colleague from Saanich—Gulf Islands spoke about the findings of an expert study. That is the essence of what a committee does.

My constituents and I have our own knowledge, opinions, and expertise. However, that can never replace a consensus. We must consult Canadians, experts, and parliamentarians from the other parties to reach a consensus that reflects what Canadians want and need in a 21st-century electoral system.

This is an interesting conversation to have, since the first-past-the-post system is several centuries old. It is not bad just because it is old, but we must always keep an eye on how our electoral systems are designed.

For example, many people are following the primaries in the United States. It is very interesting, since this process dates back to a time when people like farmers, for example, sent delegates because they did not necessarily have the time, resources, or ability to travel to a political party's convention.

Delegates were therefore sent to choose Republican and Democratic candidates for the presidential election. However, because technology has advanced and travel has become easier, cutting travel time between states, some Americans think it is time to reconsider this system.

That is exactly what we are doing here in Canada. Our system dates back to when there were just two parties. Now there are several more. Three parties are recognized in Parliament, and five parties are represented here, so we can and should be asking ourselves this question.

I know what the government members mean when they say that 65% of Canadians voted for parties that want to revisit the status quo, even though they do not always say it in good faith. Let us have that conversation.

In closing, I know that some of my Conservative colleagues will say there is nothing wrong with the status quo. All the more reason for them to participate in the conversation and support our proposal to give them a greater voice in the committee, a voice that reflects the number of people who voted for them. That is exactly why this proposal is so important. It is designed to ensure that all MPs in the House have a voice and that we engage in this very important conversation.

We must not fear change, but if we proceed, we must do so properly. We must not exclude those whose voices may not be as loud but are nevertheless just as valid. That was the challenge with Bill C-23. The Conservatives' changes had a negative impact on people who tend not to vote or who find it harder to do so.

When making such a major change, we have to listen to people and ensure that we find the right solution. We have to do it properly. If we do it thoughtlessly, we will realize later on that we made mistakes. This is about our democracy.

I am proud to support my colleague's motion, and I invite all members to join me. Their voices are at stake.

Citizenship Act

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I believe that was the Fair Elections Act, which the previous government brought in.

We have a very ambitious electoral reform package, and we have a very competent and articulate minister who is open for ideas and thoughts. I would suggest, for the member, that he might want to share his concerns, as other members have done, in regard to the Elections Canada Act. I can assure the member that the minister is approaching it with an exceptionally open mind, looking for good ideas to make sure we have a democracy that is improved from the way it was when the previous government made changes that deprived some people of the opportunity to vote.

Digital Privacy Act

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

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased today to speak to the very important Bill S-4. It concerns the sharing of personal information in the digital age. It deals mainly with the way in which we legislate against companies responsible for the loss or sharing of information. We know this is a very sensitive issue because we are in the digital age where more and more personal information is found online. We think first of banking information, and also of information that sometimes seems not that important, but that is nevertheless part of peoples' private lives. It is information that we share on social networks, such as photos.

This covers all kinds of of complex issues, such as copyright, that we have addressed in the House since the last election, and the dissemination of information pertaining to national security. We had an important debate on this issue during the debate on Bill C-51. We learned that information technology companies, or startups, had concerns about some of the bill's provisions.

Of course, we are all familiar with the infamous story of Bill C-30, where the minister of public safety and emergency preparedness at the time told us that we stood either with the government or with child pornographers. This example shows just how big an issue we are dealing with and the Conservatives' poor record in this regard.

First, I would like to mention something very important and very simple: the obligation to review the privacy legislation every five years. Obviously, this is very important given how quickly technology changes. Unfortunately, such a review has not been implemented. A number of bills were introduced in this regard, but they died on the order paper when the Prime Minister prorogued Parliament. There was, of course, Bill C-30, which is a whole other story, and there was also the bill introduced by my colleague from Terrebonne—Blainville. That bill, which the government refused to support, sought to implement a robust privacy review process, give more power to the Privacy Commissioner and have clearer legislative provisions.

Bill S-4 includes similar provisions. However, they do not go far enough and there are still worrisome loopholes. One of the grey areas that I am particularly concerned about has to do with organizations, such as banks, that could share private information. These organizations are required to report a loss of personal information to the Privacy Commissioner only “if it is reasonable in the circumstances to believe that the breach creates a real risk of significant harm to an individual”. That may seem clear, but when it comes to legislative measures, we can see that there is a lot of leeway in how this provision of the bill is worded. The company could decide that no one's privacy was really violated and that there was no risk of harm to the individual and simply not report the privacy breach.

One of the flaws in this bill is the requirement for a court warrant, which my colleague from Terrebonne—Blainville brought up earlier and which she included in her bill. The Supreme Court recently ruled that any invasion of privacy by the government and any request that the government makes to a private company that is in possession of our information require a mandate. There is no such requirement in this bill, which is extremely worrisome. That is why I made the link earlier to Bill C-51 and the debate on Bill C-30, which did not end up taking place because we managed to get the government to back down. The government seems to be on the wrong track and does not seem to take privacy seriously.

Its record is a great example of that. How many times does the House need to hear criticisms about mismanagement at the Canada Revenue Agency, for example, during question period or at every possible opportunity, whether it is when bills are introduced and petitions are presented or at press conferences?

This department is in possession of the most sensitive information on Canadians, such as their social insurance numbers and their tax information. The department has been the victim of data breaches, and the government does not seem to be taking any responsibility. That makes it hard for us to trust that the government will require private companies to comply with high privacy standards when it is not capable of doing so itself. This situation is extremely worrisome.

We know that this is a complex issue because more and more things are done online. As far as matters of national security are concerned, we know that as legislators we have work to do. We wanted to propose amendments to ensure that this bill went further and complied with the Supreme Court decision. Like a number of witnesses in committee, we question the constitutionality of this bill in its current form.

If I am not mistaken, the 18 amendments the NDP proposed were all rejected. True to form, the Conservatives did not listen to any of the testimony or pay any regard to the amendments proposed by all the parties. The amendments proposed by the NDP were all based on what the public had to say and on the very hard work of my colleague from Terrebonne—Blainville, who was trying to get suitable provisions for 2015, not 2000. Technology changes and so does our reality, and we have to adjust accordingly.

In this context, there are a number of troubling aspects. First, this bill was introduced in the Senate, which, naturally, we criticize every chance we get. The Minister of Industry made an announcement about how he wants to proceed in the digital age, but instead of introducing this bill in the House himself, he introduced it in the Senate. That is one problem.

The second problem is that the Conservatives wanted to skip second reading and send the bill straight to committee. That is not a bad idea in and of itself. The NDP has asked for the same in order to study certain extremely complex files.

For example, we asked to take this approach for Bill C-23, which we called the “electoral deform” bill. Since the government wanted to go straight to committee, we thought it was willing to accept amendments and listen to witnesses, but that did not happen.

The third problem concerns another of the government's bad habits: the honour of the 97th time allocation motion was bestowed on Bill S-4 in order to limit debate. Unfortunately, at this rate, the Conservatives will have moved 100 such motions by the time the election is held. To be blunt, that is pretty shabby.

Although it is important to protect Canadians' privacy and to do what it takes, in 2015, to implement an approach appropriate for the digital age, recent Supreme Court decisions have cast doubt on the constitutionality of this bill.

This bill does not go far enough, and since the government wants to limit debate and does not accept the amendments and the work done in committee, we cannot and will not support this bill. I am very pleased to rise in the House to say that.

Citizen Voting Act

[Laurin Liu, NDP, Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for his very interesting speech. He eloquently presented our position on Bill C-50 and the reasons why we are opposed to An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act.

This bill basically deals with the right to vote of Canadians living abroad. This bill is very important because it directly affects one out of three Canadians. Unfortunately, I see that we are debating this bill under a time allocation motion. In fact, it is the 95th time allocation motion that the Conservative government has imposed on the House since 2011. Despite the fact that we have raised a number of concerns with this bill, the government does not want to have this serious debate in the House, which I find disappointing.

I am also disappointed by this government's approach in terms of the bills it has introduced in the House concerning Canadians' right to vote. A few years ago, it introduced Bill C-23, and I was able to voice my concerns about it in the House. It restricted the right to vote of many Canadians, especially marginalized Canadians. In fact, the bill actually prevented them from voting. Bill C-23 primarily prevents young people from voting, as it does aboriginal people and vulnerable citizens, such as the homeless. Basically, the voter card will no longer be accepted as a form of identification when people go to their polling station to vote in an election. With this bill, 120,000 Canadians who had to have someone vouch for them during the last federal election may not be able to vote in the next election. Bill C-23 is extremely problematic.

However, today, we are debating Bill C-50, which could prevent another cohort of Canadians from voting. I am talking about the 1.4 million Canadians who live abroad. We know that there are many reasons why Canadians choose to live abroad. Some of them are going to school, while others are working and are very mobile. I am the NDP deputy science and technology critic. I therefore talk with many scientists who find very interesting jobs or contracts that require them to live abroad for several years. I am also thinking of some of my constituents who often travel to the United States, including retirees who choose to spend their final years there. They are still very attached to Canada and they feel as though they are 100% Canadian. They would like to have the right to vote in Canada's general elections.

I would like to give a little bit of background to explain why this bill was introduced in the House and why it is so necessary. The bill is before the House because of an Ontario Superior Court decision. That court ruled that paragraph 11(d) of the Canada Elections Act, which prevents Canadian citizens who have been living abroad for more than five years from voting, is unconstitutional. We therefore have a problem. The court forced this government to take action. The decision was rendered in the case of Frank et al. v. Attorney General of Canada. It is a case that will be quoted often in this debate.

At first glance, the bill seems to harmonize the legislation with the court's decision. However, we need to be careful. We on this side of the House did our homework, and we found that that is not the case.

In fact, the bill does not bring the act in line with the Ontario Superior Court ruling. Bill C-50 does not repeal subsection 11(a) of the Canada Elections Act, and the government has still not withdrawn its appeal of the Frank ruling.

The government is talking out of both sides of its mouth. It talks about this ruling and claims to want to find a solution to the problem, but it has introduced a bill that is not consistent with the Ontario Superior Court ruling. In fact, it has introduced a bill that will cause even more problems for Canadians living abroad.

Bill C-50 will make it more difficult for all citizens living abroad to vote, whether they have been abroad for more than five years or for less. Furthermore, the bill provides for new prohibitions on the types of identification that the Chief Electoral Officer will accept from any citizen living in Canada or abroad, which could seriously compromise the votes of many Canadians come election day.

Before going into detail about the problems with this bill, I would like to talk briefly about Bill C-575, which was introduced by my colleague from Halifax. The bill is clear and unequivocal. It is the NDP's response to the decision in Frank et al. v. The Attorney General of Canada.

This bill, which was introduced in good faith, gives all Canadians living abroad the right to vote. I would like to know why my Conservative colleagues did not simply accept and adopt the bill introduced by my colleague from Halifax, which is in line with the court's ruling.

Unfortunately, the Conservatives' bill ties Elections Canada's hands and makes voter identification requirements so complicated that Canadian citizens living abroad will have a much harder time voting. They are doing this for no reason at all.

I listened to my Conservative colleagues' speeches, but I did not hear one single citation or study showing that the measures in this bill are necessary and valid. Back when the Conservative government was advocating for Bill C-23, it was also unable to quote one expert who thought the measures in the bill were a good idea.

Since I have only a minute left, I would like to go into more detail about the provision that removes the Chief Electoral Officer's discretionary power to determine what forms of identification are acceptable under certain circumstances. For example, under clause 143, the Chief Electoral Officer will no longer be able to accept a foreign driver's licence as a main form of identification or even a secondary form of identification to corroborate a main one. We have to wonder how many Canadians living abroad keep a driver's licence that is no longer valid.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Mr. Speaker, there seems to be a trend happening from Bill C-23 until now where consultations have not taken place, to the point where members in committee find themselves struggling to fix some of the mistakes that were made initially, which have been pointed out by many in the House earlier. The lack of consultation is certainly alarming. We were expecting this to address the Frank decision directly; instead, we got what was a different piece of legislation in addition to the challenge to the ruling that was made.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Mr. Speaker, on the matter of the court case that gave rise to this bill, we think, although the minister did not say that, that court case said, or the end result was that every Canadian, regardless of where he or she lives, has a constitutional right to vote and it cannot be taken away by means of an artificial time limit. The government, with the other hoops that it is putting in this bill, would appear to be taking away that right to vote, not just for the people who have lived outside of Canada for more than five years, but for all persons who live outside of Canada, because it will now become effectively impossible for them to properly cast their ballots in a reasonable timeframe.

With Bill C-23, the government also made it more difficult for persons who are on the margins of society, those who do not have documentation, who do not have access to myriad personal information because sometimes they are homeless or not living in a place that is permanent and as a result, it will become almost impossible for them to cast ballots.

[Laurin Liu, NDP, Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the NDP is definitely the only party in the House that is prepared to defend the right of every Canadian to vote in a general election.

Can my hon. colleague speak briefly to the previous bill, Bill C-23, which dramatically limited Canadians' right to vote?

Would he also comment on the NDP's position and proposal regarding Frank et al. v. Attorney General of Canada?

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Mr. Speaker, there are several problems outlined, and they have been directly addressed, in some cases, but in other cases not so much. One of the problems arising from this, which I asked about earlier, was the coming into force, which the Chief Electoral Officer has told us is going to be very problematic, given the changes in Bill C-23 and now changes here.

Does the member agree that this would be overly problematic for Elections Canada, which does not have the resources for that?

[Alexandrine Latendresse, NDP, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Louis-Hébert for his comments and his question. He raises a fundamental issue in the debate we are having here today on Bill C-50 as well as the debate we held last year on Bill C-23.

Right now, the biggest threat to our democracy in Canada is low voter turnout. That is our biggest problem and that is what we should be trying to fix, by whatever means necessary. We as politicians should be joining forces to try to address the problem of voter apathy and low voter turnout. It is a truly serious problem.

However, the Conservatives have become paranoid about massive electoral fraud by people who use vouching, although that is not at all the reality. There is no evidence whatsoever; nothing like that has ever been documented.

Faced with the immense problem of very low voter turnout, the Conservatives simply shrug their shoulders. They are not worried about it because, ultimately, they know that with fewer people voting, they can hold on to their little powers and their small majority, given to them by a minority of Canadians.

The only thing that matters to them is being able to hold on to power and control. They really do not care whether democracy is advanced in any way.

[Alexandrine Latendresse, NDP, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor for his question. He has been very involved with us on this issue and he spent a lot of time studying Bill C-23 with us. When we were studying the bill in the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, he proposed a number of amendments that ultimately could not be debated.

He asked an excellent question. We knew that was a problem with Bill C-23. The Chief Electoral Officer told us many times that these were massive changes.

There are the changes from Bill C-23, the changes to electoral boundaries, the addition of 30 new members to Parliament and some very complicated voting restrictions for millions of Canadians living abroad. In addition to all of that, Elections Canada is not receiving any kind of additional assistance to implement all these measures.

Indeed, the fact that the government is introducing bills to amend the Canada Elections Act less than six months before an election causes major logistical problems. I think we will notice an extreme drop in voter turnout as a result of these rules.

This is a serious issue that we need to look at. I hope that this will come up in committee and that we will be able to discuss it in depth.

[Alexandrine Latendresse, NDP, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, before I begin, I want to say that I find it very unfortunate that this is the 95th time the Conservatives have imposed a time allocation motion. I think it is positively shameful that in our democracy, in 2015, the Conservatives will not let us have an honest discussion in the House of Commons on something like closure motions and time allocation motions.

Many of the solutions proposed could help us create a more vibrant democracy. The Conservatives have always rejected the solution proposed by the NDP to have limits on when time allocation motions can be used. I find that unfortunate. Ironically, when the Liberals imposed too many time allocation motions, the Conservatives were the first to denounce it, saying how wrong it was and how limiting debate was an affront to democracy.

Now the Conservatives have set a new record. I think there is an explanation for this. The Conservatives have realized that this is no longer making headlines. Early on, when they began moving closure and time allocation motions, that got a reaction out of people. People wondered why the Conservatives were doing that, and they were not happy about it. Now, 95 time allocation motions later, people are sick of it. There is a certain point where people stop talking about it, because it becomes redundant and there is nothing more to say on the matter. Saying that the Conservatives are attacking our democracy elicits responses like “Yes, but that is the way it is and the way it has always been”. This is nothing new, and people eventually ignore the situation. However, the reality is that we are once again faced with closure on debate. I truly believe that the Conservatives must have some sort of goal to move 100 time allocation motions before the end of the 41st Parliament. It is really unfortunate, but that is just the way it is.

Today I will be sharing my thoughts on Bill C-50. It is yet another bill to amend the Canada Elections Act. This time the amendment has to do with voting from abroad.

Bill C-50 is the solution the Conservative government is proposing in response to the legal problem caused by the Ontario Superior Court ruling in Frank et al. v. Attorney General of Canada.

I would like to take a bit of time to go over the events that brought us here in order to help those watching at home who may not have all the facts they need to properly understand our discussion today.

Summing things up like that will make it easier for me to explain why I refuse to support this bill. At the same time, I will have the opportunity to share with my hon. colleagues a few suggestions for improving this bill.

First, as I was saying, the impetus for introducing this bill last December was the decision by Justice Michael Penny of the Ontario Superior Court to nullify a part of the Canada Elections Act, specifically paragraph 11(d) regarding certain restrictions on voting applicable to Canadians living abroad.

Up until that verdict was handed down a year ago tomorrow, Canadian citizens living abroad for more than five years would lose their right to vote. Justice Penny held that this loss of the right to vote violated a constitutional right guaranteed by section 3 of the charter, which states that “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 prescribed time limit was contrary to the spirit of the charter because it could not be justified under section 1, which guarantees the right to vote in a free and democratic society. Justice Penny further held that voting is an inalienable right under the charter. That is what is at the heart of the discussion we are having today, and it is this key point that informs my entire understanding of the problem.

We must say it over and over again: every Canadian citizen has the sovereign right to cast a ballot during an election. It is simple. However, this statement has two logical consequences. First, anyone who would attempt to hinder or prevent a Canadian citizen from voting is guilty of very serious wrongdoing. Furthermore, and this is the impetus for the bill, as a moral entity, Canada must do everything in its power to ensure that its citizens can exercise their right to vote during an election. In other words, the state administration must adjust to its citizens and not the opposite. Best efforts must be made to facilitate, encourage and honour the citizens' democratic exercise.

This view of the right to vote that I just explained will be upheld by all the courts in the land, no matter what happens.

I do not believe that I am mistaken when I say that, in addition to the courts, the people themselves will confirm this interpretation of our constitutional rights and defend it. It would seem that the only person who has not understood this is the Minister for Democratic Reform. However, I am not here to argue with and insult the government. I would like all of us to work together to find a solution to this problem.

A consideration related to what I said earlier should be addressed here. We agree that the right to vote is an inalienable constitutional guarantee. The right to vote is also a civil responsibility. A citizen has the right and the duty to vote. However, he or she does not have an obligation to vote. Refusing to exercise one's democratic right is, in my humble opinion, also guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms because abstaining from voting or spoiling one's vote constitutes a valid democratic gesture. A vote does not have any qualitative aspect. A spoiled ballot is still a ballot. I am dwelling on these details, these facts, because I want to be clear and I want to properly identify the essential nature of the right to vote. I would like my colleagues to correct me if they believe that my definitions are incorrect.

I would like to come back to the judge's verdict. This Superior Court decision took effect immediately and struck down the five-year limit set out in paragraph 11(d). After all—and I am asking those who are listening this question—why five years? What was the rationale for that timeframe? Why not 6, 10 or 20 years? I am sure that some thought went into that decision when the Canada Elections Act was reviewed in the 1990s, but this number still seems rather random to me. I am not sure when this provision was added to the Canada Elections Act, but perhaps migration was less common or more permanent at that time. When a person left for more than five years, it was only logical to assume that they were never coming back. After all, international travel was not always as easy and common as it is now.

I think that this is one of the shortcomings of the decision to quantify the loss of the right to vote at five years, a flaw that remains in the bill despite the fact that the bill is supposed to fix it. Everything I am about to say now should be taken with a grain of salt. I am going to try to describe the perception that Canadians have of themselves when they take shortcuts. In their minds, Canadians are not the sort of people who tend to emigrate. People leave for a year or two, but then they come back. They may go to the United States or Great Britain to go to school, or they may move for a diplomatic post or because they are in the military and they are stationed abroad. Otherwise, being an expat is not very serious and is more an act of social rebellion than anything else. That is basically the stereotype we have about ourselves. However, it is quite close to the reality of many Canadians. Some Canadians do a lot of travelling. Many of them have dual citizenship and share their time between two countries. These people follow Canadian politics, talk about Canada in their second country and keep up with current events in Canada. These people are full citizens and they have the same constitutional guarantee to the right to vote as every other Canadian.

This was confirmed by Justice Penny in his ruling. If a rose is a rose is a rose, then a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian. No matter where a Canadian may be—even on Mars—they have a right to vote. The Office of the Chief Electoral Officer quickly responded to this Ontario Superior Court ruling, and it announced that it would no longer apply the parts of the Canada Elections Act that had been invalidated. In theory, the right to vote was thus expanded to a pool of about 1.5 million newly enfranchised voters. This was a historic decision. An entire group of people had once again been vested with the most fundamental right in our Constitution. It was anachronistic, but still exciting. Just last week we celebrated the anniversary of women obtaining the right to vote in Quebec. Need I remind members that aboriginal people just obtained the right to vote in their own country in 1960?

The five-year period set out in the Canada Elections Act was a remnant of an bygone era, and this ruling appears to have completely eliminated this exclusion.

Although this speech will soon take a more negative tone, I am very happy that the last restriction on enfranchisement in Canada has been eliminated.

With respect to selective inclusion, I would like to share a quote from David Smith of the University of Saskatchewan:

Voting is the hallmark of citizenship, both symbolically and practically....

....at different times, the House of Commons admitted and the House of Commons excluded, but in each instance, the House of Commons defined Canada.

The value of the right to vote as a guarantee of the legitimacy of this House demands absolute respect on our part.

However, this decision creates a big problem. These 1.5 million citizens who will now be able to exercise their right to vote will be added to the approximately 2.8 million other expats who were already eligible to vote.

Electoral logistics need to be properly set up so that these millions of people can vote. After all, as I said, the state is responsible for facilitating the process and collecting ballots everywhere in Canada.

This is where things get a little less fun because we are getting right into the frustrating world of political calculation.

Let us start with the good ideas and the brilliant initiatives. In February, my colleague from Halifax introduced Bill C-575, which presaged Justice Penny's decision and attempted to ensure that absolutely all Canadian citizens residing abroad would have the right to vote.

The thinking behind Bill C-575 is self-evident. In the interconnected and instantaneous world of globalization, it a good thing for Canadians to live and work around the world. The House must take immediate action to confirm these citizens' right to vote.

I would imagine that everyone agrees with the member for Halifax's ideas on this, but of course, such a historic and generous initiative from the opposition could not be tolerated, much less endorsed, by the government. The Conservatives would rather die than take the lead and accept a perfectly acceptable opposition proposal.

Hubert Aquin wrote:

Political partisanship is a means of action, not a mode of thinking.

A year and a half later, the Conservatives are finally taking action. Bill C-50 is the Conservative proposal for dealing with the consequences of Justice Penny's ruling.

However, the minister's response goes much further. In response to a clear legal decision regarding an even clearer problem, we have a vague proposal that is like a reflection dimly seen in a mirror, as St. Paul put it.

When you take a closer look at the proposals in Bill C-50, it becomes very clear very quickly that this bill is not about empowering citizens.

This bill accepts the basic premise that Canadians abroad have the right to vote, but it does so in a backwards way. Expanding the constitutional right that is the very essence of the bill and should be showcased does not actually appear in the bill and can only be read between the lines. It is an odd masterpiece of inversion, like a photographic negative.

In his speech introducing the bill, the minister showed no signs of excitement. This bill is not about the right to vote, nor is it about righting a historical wrong, far from it. Rather, it is about tyring to combat electoral fraud.

The minister said, and I quote:

The citizen voting act has three principal objectives: the first is to help prevent non-citizens from voting in federal elections; the second is to require voters living abroad to provide proof of identity, past residence, and citizenship; the third is to create one set of rules for all Canadians voting from outside the country.

The main focus of the bill is the fear of these so-called collateral misdeeds, which are presented as going hand in hand with the privilege that the government is taking such great risk to provide to Canadians living abroad.

From the outset, the government makes it clear that there is the risk of serious abuses, which are listed and may be impossible to prevent. The government's message is that it is full of goodwill, but the electorate abroad is asking for the impossible and, accordingly, the privilege to vote will come with very strict measures.

It is as though the government were saying that it was giving us the right, but in order to exercise that right, we would have to jump backwards through rings of fire in a hoop skirt. We might go so far as to say that the government is completely disregarding Justice Penny's ruling and not really giving Canadians who live abroad for more than five years the right to vote.

The government did not welcome the decision with great enthusiasm and appealed the Frank ruling. Let us not forget that it also tried to impose a moratorium on the coming into force of the ruling. Clearly, the Conservatives were hoping the problem would go away.

Nonetheless, as I said earlier, no court in this country can justify restricting a Canadian citizen's right to vote. This is the new reality, and we must implement the necessary means to ensure that everything works as it should.

In my naivety, I thought this democratic progress would be heralded for what it says about the maturity of our country. However, I again forgot that I was living in one reality whereas the Conservatives were living in a world of Stalinist paranoia where having a passport is a betrayal.

Under the guise of harmonizing the procedure—creating one set of rules, according to the minister—the Conservatives are turning what they consider to be a reversal of legal fortune into a win. Not only are they not really giving the right to vote to Canadian citizens who live abroad for more than five years, but they are also taking it away from the other 2.8 million Canadians, with a few exceptions, such as people in diplomatic postings and members of the Canadian Armed Forces.

As my colleague from Toronto—Danforth wrote in an article published in the National Post on February 3:

In fact, Bill C-50 uses the court’s rights-expanding ruling as an excuse to actually undermine the voting rights of all Canadians abroad, regardless of how long they have resided outside of Canada. It does this by generating delays that could easily prevent voting in time for election day and that creates disincentives for voting by making it unreasonably difficult.

This is what Bill C-50 is proposing to do: Canadian citizens living abroad who want to exercise their right to vote during an election will have to prove two things. First, they will have to provide proof of citizenship, which goes without saying. Second, they will have to provide proof of address for the place where they last resided before leaving Canada.

To better understand all that, we can propose a hypothetical scenario. Suppose that in 2011, I decided not to stand as a candidate in the federal election, and I decided instead to live happily somewhere abroad. Had I done that, I would have remained the same citizen I was, with less contact with the political world than I have now, a normal citizen with concerns other than the legislative changes debated in the House of Commons. Furthermore, being abroad, I would work regularly to maintain my ties to Canada. I would make an effort to consult the Canadian media and keep abreast of what is happening.

Say I want to vote in the October 2015 election. I am sure that, if I have to go through a whole process to be able to vote, it is better to get started earlier rather than later, so I go online to see what that process involves. If I search for “voting from abroad, Canada”, the first hit takes me to a Government of Canada website. On that website, it says:

If you live abroad, you may apply to be added to the International Register of Electors and vote by special mail-in ballot in future federal elections at any time.

That is no longer true because of Bill C-50. It goes on to say:

To apply, complete an Application for registration and special ballot for Canadian citizens residing outside Canada, available online through Elections Canada, in person at any Canadian government office abroad, or by calling Elections Canada...

Send your completed application and copies of your supporting documents to Elections Canada in Ottawa. Once your completed application has been approved, your name will be added to the International Register of Electors. When a federal election, by-election or referendum is called, Elections Canada mails a special ballot voting kit to all eligible electors whose names appear in the International Register.

In order to remove inaccurate information from the register—according to the government, there are 40,000 non-Canadians on the list—voters who are living abroad are going to be asked to reconfirm their place of residence.

Canadians living abroad generally believe that they will be able to just pick a riding in which to vote, but in reality that is not how it works. Canadians who are living abroad and who have not lived in Canada for a number of years sometimes have difficulty obtaining tangible evidence that they lived at their last place of residence before moving abroad.

Seeing this measure in the bill gives me a feeling of déjà vu and reminds me of the discussions that we had about Bill C-23 last year. It is very simple. Under the guise of improving the accuracy of voter identification and combatting election fraud, the Conservatives are actually making the rules as complicated and as difficult to follow as possible. In a way, they are doing as much as they possibly can to interfere with Canadians' right to vote. As I said, it gives me a feeling of déjà vu and reminds me of Bill C-23.

I do not need to remind the House about all the bad provisions that were passed by the Conservative government in its reform of the Canada Elections Act in Bill C-23. There were so many measures aimed at simply lowering voter turnout, such as no longer allowing the voter information card or vouching as a means of identification, that we can no longer trust this government when it tells us that it is doing good things or that it wants to help Canadians; we know that the underlying philosophy of undermining Canadians' right to vote as much as possible is always there.

That is why I obviously cannot support Bill C-50. We will make a number of suggestions to amend and improve this bill. With Bill C-23, we barely had enough time to debate half of the amendments proposed by the NDP.

I hope that this time we will be allowed to carefully study this bill for real in the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs and that the government will be open to improving it as much as possible.

Bill C-50—Time Allocation Motion

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Mr. Speaker, as I have just arrived in the House, I hope I do not sound too repetitive after my colleague from Toronto—Danforth.

From Bill C-23 to this bill, Bill C-50, there has been an overall theme. The overarching theme here concentrates on issues and problems that are overblown. We have used this expression before with the prior legislation, and now with this legislation as well, which is that in many cases the Conservatives are cruising for a solution to a problem that does not exist.

The Conservatives do not want people to be shopping ridings when they are living internationally, choosing any riding they wish. To a certain degree, I understand that concept. However, by doing this, it is making it very hard on individuals to go back to the prior addresses. In many cases, some of them are students and unable to do that. Not only that, but the vouching process or the attestations have to be done in that prior riding, which may be impossible. That could be many years prior.

These problems created by the Conservatives are fundamentally keeping people from their charter right to vote. It is their right. That is why my colleague was correct in saying that this did not address the judgment from the court and therefore has to be remedied.

In addition, there are the time constraints on this, time constraints within the legislation itself and time constraints regarding the enactment of the legislation. This is a strange 30-minute debate, because we are talking about time allocation as well. I will not get into that too much.

I am getting into the bona fides of the bill, because I will not have that opportunity too much longer. Therefore, we should look at that. I know the debate will continue soon.

Is there not a great concern about the timeliness of this, about the full debate, as to allow people, even if they live internationally, that fundamental right to vote, as given to them under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms?

Bill C-50--Time Allocation Motion

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Mr. Speaker, back to the substance of the bill once more, one of the issues brought up by the Chief Electoral Officer was the fact that time is not on Election Canada's side for this. That was several months ago, so we should have a thorough debate about this to realize that the time impact is going to be great. Getting over Bill C-23 was bad enough. Now we have this one.

In addition, there are several questions that need to be asked. For instance, Armed Forces personnel would not be involved, but what about the spouses or partners of these individuals? They would also have to go through this routine. As my colleague pointed out, debate is of the essence, because they would have to register each and every time internationally. Why not maintain the international list of electors?

Citizen Voting Act

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

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for the kind of debating that really elevates the scrutiny of bills in the House. There was a conscious effort to address a number of concerns that were heard in the first part of the debate so far. I truly appreciate the effort.

I want to ask two quick questions in clarification.

First, it is not true that it is merely an extension to the existing Bill C-23 procedures because subsection 143(2.11) is reworded to prohibit the authorization of any documents to be used for ID unless issued by a government entity in Canada or by an entity incorporated or formed in Canada.

The wording is done in a way that a number of possible things that are currently among the 39 pieces of ID may no longer easily qualify. Private leases that are not issued by corporations is one. The other is that it will be very unclear whether utilities bills, credit card bills, et cetera necessarily meet this new definition.

I am not saying this is deliberate, but the government has tried to come up with a definition of documents originating in Canada that actually, it appears, would not cover all 39 that currently exist. I know Elections Canada is very concerned about the administrative chaos that this could cause.

Second, is there any harm in extending the period when one can actually register, especially when we have fixed statutory elections?

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Minister of State (Western Economic Diversification)]

Mr. Speaker, it gives me great pleasure to rise in the House today to speak to this act, which addresses some important concerns that have been raised in recent court rulings, which have been discussed in debate already today. As well, it clarifies some of the procedures by which certain types of voters participate in our democratic process.

As the debate was going on today, I had the opportunity to listen to a few of my colleagues' concerns and some of the technical questions that were raised. I would like to use the bulk of my speech to try to address some of the concerns raised in the House today.

I was very pleased to hear that there was some general consensus on the need to remedy the fact that, according to Elections Canada, there are approximately 40,000 non-citizens on our voters list at present. My colleague from the Liberal Party, the member for Winnipeg North, just asked what some of the recommendations were. I believe that this particular fact was brought forward by Elections Canada. There seems to be consensus in the House on the sharing of information between Citizenship and Immigration and Elections Canada to ensure that only those who are eligible to vote, as per our country's legalities, are actually on the voters list. That is a very positive thing.

Just to clarify for the House, this act would authorize the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration to provide the Chief Electoral Officer with names, genders, birth dates, and addresses of non-citizens so that Elections Canada could cross-reference and remove them from the National Register of Electors.

One of the things that came up several times, both in questions and in speeches, was that there is no evidence of riding shopping. I want to go back a bit, because through this Parliament, we have had some fairly substantial debates in this House on how the electorate ties into local representatives. I believe that we are even going to be talking about it today with respect to the reform act. That is a very worthwhile debate. How do elected representatives function in this place? How do we do our jobs, and what is the tie between the electorate and the elected representative?

We need to ensure that this particular relationship is enshrined in our legislation and protected. The reason we have 308 members of Parliament here is to recognize the fact that there are different interests in different communities in this great, vast country of ours. The question becomes how we ensure that the integrity of that relationship is maintained. The context of this act addresses that.

Going back to that riding-shopping phenomenon, my question for the House is this: How do we know that this is not happening? Right now, there is no verification process for electors living abroad who are on the international list of electors. As well, because there is no process in place, there is no audit procedure to ensure that compliance rules are being followed. I am actually quite supportive of putting legislation in place that would require the verification of the different voting requirements contained in this bill for that reason. It would ensure that those who are abroad have a tie to their elected representative and would ensure that there is a verification process that every other Canadian citizen who is participating in the voting process has to follow.

Just to clarify, what we put forward as a government in the citizen voting act would ensure that Canadians living abroad would follow the same rules as those living in Canada. The bill would require that they prove their identity and most recent Canadian address, using the same documentation as voters who live in Canada use under the Fair Elections Act.

I was pleased to hear my colleague from Toronto—Danforth earlier today. He stated that it is relatively easy for attestations to occur under the amendments made in Bill C-23. “I believe” was the term he used. This attestation procedure would continue to exist under this particular act. Having this requirement for verification would ensure that we have the data that would ensure both compliance and a link to a particular community and an elected representative in Canada.

There was a bit of a discussion as well about ballots going to the wrong address and whether this was a real problem. We go to great lengths in this country to ensure that the balloting process at on-site elections during a writ is sacrosanct. We have to make sure that ballots are handled with the utmost care. That is the reason we have scrutineers in our election campaigns.

We should be trying to prevent problems and ensuring that a ballot, which gives people a democratic right to vote for an elected representative, is being sent to a correct address. I do not think we should be arguing over whether this is a problem. It is a problem if it goes to a wrong address. This act would rectify that.

The 60-day coming into force period was discussed earlier today as well. With respect to the criticism that there would be no time for Elections Canada to adapt to the new rules, the House needs to understand that what is being proposed in this legislation is an extension of existing procedures and not the reinvention of a wheel.

When I work with my department officials, I always like to give a shout-out to the hard-working public servants within WD Canada. We work toward a goal. We ask what the legislative requirement is. One of the most important roles of the public service is to implement and execute directions from government. We try to put together a project plan. We put resources around that to ensure we have a plan in place to execute the needs of the government direction.

There certainly is a clearly defined need to have this implemented, given that the Frank ruling that came out adds approximately 1.4 million people to our voting list. Therefore, we need to ensure there are procedures in place in short order to protect the integrity of the voting process in Canada. Given the need that has been precipitated out of this ruling, as parliamentarians, I hope we would look at ways to make this happen through committee debate, rather than saying this cannot be done without giving any specific reason.

The issue of the families of diplomats came up. The Canada Elections Act has always clearly spelled out who is exempt from the different requirements for out-of-country voting. The Canada Elections Act applies a separate set of rules for members of our armed forces. They are under different circumstances than many of those who are living abroad. They are deployed in short order. Sometimes they do not know how long they will be overseas or where they will be. We want to ensure that the men and women of our armed forces have every right to participate in the democratic process. That is why there are separate rules for them.

However, it is worth re-emphasizing that this act puts in place a set of rules for voting overseas that is consistent among voters across the country. Whether they are on vacation, or are a snowbird or have moved abroad, they would have one very similar set of rules that would be applied across the board. That is a positive thing. People on vacation have used the special balloting rules without incident for a long period of time. I think it is reasonable to say that those rules can be extended to others, especially those people who have been out of the country for a certain period of time.

There was also some debate regarding the requirement for identification from a Canadian source and whether that would disenfranchise voters. We had this argument with respect to Bill C-23, and I hope there was some consensus respecting the 39 eligible pieces of identification listed by Elections Canada. It is a robust and comprehensive list. That set of identification is also pertinent to this act, and I think in no way disenfranchises people. There are 39 forms of ID. Surely, there is something on that list that can be shown to meet the requirements in the act.

With respect to there not being enough time for people to register, to get their ballot and to vote, people already do this with the special ballot rules. If my colleagues would avail themselves, the special ballot rules are readily available on the Elections Canada website and many of the rules contained in this act are similar. Again, this has been happening with ease for a lot of people.

Out of curiosity, I went to the Canada Post website to see how long it took for a letter to reach its destination. It states that it is four to seven business days for international letters. Given the variety of ways that people can register to vote, be it online, at the embassy or by fax, there is a way for people to get that information and interact.

Therefore, I support this law. It provides great clarity, given the Frank ruling.

[Alexandrine Latendresse, NDP, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I listened carefully to the speech by my colleague, who is also my neighbour, near Quebec City, Quebec. I would like to ask him a question.

I have been working on the issue of democratic reform for a long time. He mentioned how many changes his government has proposed to the Canada Elections Act to date. We know that the main changes were in Bill C-23, which was introduced last year and amended a number of things. With a lot of pressure from the official opposition, from our party, the Conservatives ultimately backed down on several fairly major points in Bill C-23, in particular vouching.

In the case of this bill as well, I would like to know whether he would be open to changing some elements of the bill to make it as effective as possible, in particular to improve access to the vote for Canadians living outside Canada, rather than restricting it as is being done here. Voting is being made more difficult for all Canadians, not just for those who have been outside Canada for more than five years. Could we find ways of facilitating it as much as possible, rather than making it more difficult?

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question.

We do not want to buy into conspiracy theories, but the Conservatives' speeches seem to indicate some fear of the unknown, whether we are talking about Bill C-23 or Bill C-50, which is being debated today. They use scare tactics, claiming that people will cheat the system and that non-Canadians will try to vote in our elections. Last time we heard about people who would cheat and vote several times.

Like my colleague, I have to wonder why they are doing this. Perhaps this issue does not concern Conservative voters. I do not think that is the case, since everyone, regardless of their political beliefs, should be trying to make it easier for voters living in Canada or abroad.

As my colleague mentioned in his question, as I said in my speech and as all of my colleagues have said, while other developed countries are using these technologies or using other means to make it easier for citizens, especially with respect to deadlines to register to vote, the Conservative government seems to want to make things harder.

Then we wonder why people are so cynical and why voter turnout is so low. The Conservatives need only look in the mirror.

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

Mr. Speaker, members may have noticed that some of my colleagues and I are fighting a little cold. If we do not seem all there, it is not because we are not interested in this topic.

Bill C-50 obviously deals with an important issue. The government addresses the same problems and same visions of democracy that we saw in Bill C-23 on election reform—or electoral “deform”, as we nicknamed it.

There are a number of problems with this bill. Before I get into them, I want to give a brief background. This bill came about because of a ruling by the Ontario Superior Court stating that it was unconstitutional to prohibit Canadian citizens living abroad for more than five years from voting in a federal election.

This is an important issue, especially in 2015, in light of the global village phenomenon. We have increased access to other countries and opportunities—this is especially true for young people. I am thinking about young university grads who want to pursue opportunities abroad without ruling out the possibility of returning home. They remain invested in their home community even though they are abroad.

The right to vote has always been essential, because at the end of the day, it is the very essence of what it means to be a citizen. With how easy it is now to find information and follow the events leading up to an election, the right to vote is increasingly important for citizens living abroad, considering the global realities of today's world.

I would like to mention another very important point that also relates to the right to vote, which, as I said, is the very essence of citizenship. The number of Canadian citizens residing outside Canada translates into a lot of money for the public purse because those individuals pay taxes. We all know the famous slogan that served a certain American cause very well: No taxation without representation. This is another important factor that must not be overlooked, beyond the principles of citizenship. Those people pay taxes, and ultimately, they are entitled to have a say in how their tax dollars are used, that is, in the governance of their home country, where they are citizens.

There are a number of problems, but there is one that we already saw with Bill C-23. The government sees problems; some are legitimate, others do not even exist. They are scaremongers. Last time, the government talked about fraudsters, as though there were thousands of fraudsters across the country trying to steal the right to vote from other citizens. Obviously, there were some dubious findings there. The idea was that many non-citizens were trying to take advantage of the right to vote.

Earlier, I heard an hon. member allude to the fact that non-citizens were receiving ballots abroad, as though this happened frequently and there were wide-scale electoral fraud. That being said, some media reports indicated that it was hard to tell the extent to which citizens abroad were affected. If the journalists who were focusing on this issue were unable to dig up these numbers, I do not see how an hon. member can make this observation. What is more, when my colleague from Sherbrooke asked the hon. member whether there were any studies to back her comments, she was unable to provide an answer.

The point I am trying to make is that instead moving forward and finding progressive ways to improve our electoral system, the government always takes a step backward. Instead of moving forward, it takes two steps back. That must be extremely frustrating for the people who, like the NDP, want to see a higher voter turnout. That is the problem we saw with Bill C-23, which had negative consequences for seniors, aboriginal people, young people and students. We see the same problem here.

The thing that strikes me the most is the French example. In 2012, I went to France with my colleagues to observe the presidential election.

I was surprised because I did not know that France had elected representatives—senators and members of the National Assembly—who represent constituencies outside of France. They represent French citizens who live outside of France. I know one person in the area, in Gatineau, who is a French citizen. This is a well-established system because French citizens living outside of France even receive campaign material from political parties.

That says a lot about how important it is to the Republic that all French citizens be properly represented, not just French citizens residing in France. This relates to what I was talking about at the beginning of my speech: in the new global village, where more and more citizens are pursuing opportunities abroad but staying connected to and involved in their communities, the governing body should represent not just residents but all citizens, no matter where they live.

As pointed out by my colleague from Toronto—Danforth—who does an excellent job of developing our positions on democratic reform—the French system has another component: the right to vote by Internet. The Americans allow U.S. citizens living abroad to vote by email.

While other countries look for solutions that will make it easier for citizens living abroad to vote, our government seems to be stuck on making it more difficult. A fine example—and that is another problem with the bill—is the issue of people living abroad who serve the government. We think of course of members of the Canadian Forces who are deployed abroad. The government will say that they are still exempt from the five-week period proposed in Bill C-50.

Although the government is not saying as much, this is a step backwards from what was already in the act. I will explain. Previously, diplomats were also exempt because, after all, they also serve the country, Canadians and the government abroad. Now, diplomats will have to follow the same laborious process as all other Canadians living abroad. They do not get a break even though they are abroad to serve their country.

The same is true for military families. It is a good idea and it is important—and I am not being sarcastic here—to grant exemptions to members of our Canadian Forces. However, we also need to think about their families. Some of these members are undoubtedly accompanied by their 18-year-old children. Some have spouses who also have the right to vote. The government is forgetting to look at the big picture when it comes to people who are living abroad.

Today in his speech, the Minister of Foreign Affairs spoke about the team and the public servants who served him abroad. As my colleague from Sherbrooke mentioned, people like that, who are working for a minister and serving the crown—it is important to point that out—are also not granted an exemption from this long and sometimes difficult process. As a result, they will have to use courier services, which Elections Canada has no legal obligation to use. They will have to turn to courier services that sometimes take a long time to deliver things and, in some countries, are difficult to use. There are many problems with this.

This once again shows, as Bill C-23 did, just how much difficulty the Conservatives have resolving problems, making it easier to access the electoral system and increasing voter turnout. They are once again introducing a bill that makes the process even more complex and forces Canadians to work even harder to exercise their right to vote. The right to vote should be an automatic part of citizenship. The government has the responsibility to make this process easier.

In closing, I would like to quickly mention one more thing, which I did not have time to really talk about. Once again, students are affected. When I was going to McGill, I saw how easy it was for American students to vote, even though they were living in Montreal. However, Bill C-50 contains an error that requires any lease used by a student as proof of residence to be for an official university residence.

Students who are going to school abroad and living off-campus as an individual and not in accommodation such as a university residence cannot use their lease as valid proof of identity.

It is because of these types of problems that we are forced to oppose yet another botched bill on an issue as fundamental as our democracy.

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

Mr. Speaker, right now, citizens of France living overseas can vote electronically, and Americans living abroad can vote by email.

Bill C-23, the unfair elections act, contains a provision that stipulates that the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada must conduct a pilot project or test on electronic voting but that he must obtain the consent of the entire House of Commons and the Senate—not just one committee, but the entire Senate.

Does my colleague think that this is a coincidence?

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister and for Intergovernmental Affairs]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke.

I am very pleased to rise in the House today to speak to the citizen voting act, which was introduced by my colleague, the Minister of State for Democratic Reform.

Our government has a strong record of democratic reform. We ended the per-vote subsidy. We made the House of Commons more representative with the Fair Representation Act. Most recently, we closed loopholes for big money, ensured that everyday citizens are in charge of democracy, and made it harder to break election laws with the Fair Elections Act. All of these initiatives have strengthened Canada's democracy and reinforced confidence in our electoral system.

Today I am very pleased to discuss our government's latest democratic reform initiative, the citizen voting act. The bill would ensure that everyone who votes is a Canadian citizen, and it would require voters living abroad to follow the ID rules set out in the Fair Elections Act.

Specifically, the citizen voting act would ensure that only Canadians vote in federal elections by requiring proof of citizenship from everyone voting in federal elections while abroad. This would not apply to Canadian Forces members.

Second, the bill would allow the Chief Electoral Officer to cross-reference the National Register of Electors with Citizenship and Immigration data to remove non-citizens from the voters list.

Third, the bill would put an end to the possibility of riding shopping by ensuring that non-residents receive a ballot only for the Canadian address at which they last resided.

Fourth, the bill would apply the same voter identification rules to all Canadians. Under the Fair Elections Act, Canadians living inside the country must prove who they are and where they live. Canadians support this requirement, and that is why the citizen voting act would expand it further to residents living abroad.

Finally, the bill would create one set of rules for voting from outside the country. Anyone voting while abroad, whether temporarily, on vacation, or permanently, will need to apply for a ballot in the same way and follow the same rules.

Given the limited time that I have today to discuss the citizen voting act, I am going to focus on a couple of items. First, I will focus on riding shopping.

Currently the Canada Elections Act permits non-resident voters to choose the riding that they vote in. They can select from one of four options. First, they can choose their last place of ordinary residence. Second, they can choose the address of a spouse, a relative, or a relative of a spouse. Third, they can choose the address of a dependent. Fourth, they can choose the address of someone with whom they would live if not residing outside of Canada.

Voters living in Canada do not have such flexibility. They must vote where they live at the time of an election. They cannot choose the riding in which they want their vote to be counted, and justly so.

Geographic representation is an essential characteristic of our electoral process. Canadians in each electoral district elect the candidate who they feel will best represent their interests and those of the community. Particularly in this vast country of ours, territorial-based representation ensures that diverse communities are represented in the House of Commons.

I am sure members may think that when an expatriate voter chooses his or her riding, proof of past residence is required. However, they would be wrong: Canadians living abroad are not required to provide proof to Elections Canada of their last Canadian residence. By stipulating that a non-resident voter's last place of residence in Canada would be their residence for voting purposes, the citizen voting act would end the unfair option of riding shopping and standardize the rules for resident and non-resident voters. This would ensure that each voter has a direct and meaningful connection to the riding in which he or she is voting.

I would now like to turn to the issue of voter identification.

The citizen voting act would ensure that Canadians living abroad would follow the same rules as those living in Canada. The bill would build on the Fair Elections Act by requiring Canadians voting by mail—both residents and non-residents—to include proof of identity and residence in their application for a special ballot. This requirement is similar to the rules set out in the Fair Elections Act.

The Fair Elections Act, adopted last June, contained important measures to reinforce the integrity of the vote by strengthening ID rules. According to Ipsos Reid, in April 2014, when debate about the Fair Elections Act was at its height, 87% of those polled agreed that it is reasonable to require someone to provide proof of identity and address before being allowed to vote. The citizen voting act would make this requirement consistent for all Canadians, both resident and non-resident.

The same three ID options for voting at the polls would apply to those applying to vote by mail: either a government-issued photo identification with the name or address; or two pieces of identification authorized by the Chief Electoral Officer, one with address and both with name; or two pieces of authorized identification with name and an oath or declaration of residence that is attested to by another properly identified elector.

In the case of non-residents, the attestation process would enable them to provide proof of their last residence in Canada by an oath or declaration. The person providing an attestation would be a fully proven resident or non-resident qualified to vote in the same electoral district as the person applying for the special ballot.

To account for the potential difficulty that non-residents might face in obtaining an attestation as to their former residence in Canada, the citizen voting act would allow the attestor for the previous residence of a non-resident to be qualified to vote in the same electoral district not to be of the same polling division. This is a slight variation to the attestation process for Canadians voting at the poll that was introduced by the Fair Elections Act.

A non-resident Canadian applying for a special ballot must also provide, in addition to his or her own identification proving his or her identity, copies of identification providing the identity and residence of the person providing the attestation.

Standardizing the voter identification requirements for resident and non-resident Canadians removes preferential treatment for one group of voters over another and obviously just makes sense.

Our government recognizes the unique circumstances of members of the Canadian Forces. A completely separate set of rules found in division 2 of part 11 of the Canada Elections Act governs their voting procedures. Canadian Forces members serving abroad can vote at the location they are stationed, and the citizen voting act would not affect those rules.

In conclusion, our government remains committed to ensuring that our electoral system meets the needs of voters, both in Canada and abroad. The amendments being made by the citizen voting act are necessary to ensure the fairness of the electoral process and to ensure that one set of rules applies to all Canadians.

To summarize, the bill would strengthen Canada's election laws by, first, ensuring only Canadian citizens vote in federal elections; second, putting an end to the possibility of riding shopping; third, applying the same identification rules to all Canadians; and fourth, creating one set of rules for voting from outside the country.

These important advancements will bring greater accountability, integrity, and accessibility to Canada's fundamental democratic process. These are common sense legislative changes, so I would encourage all members to support the citizen voting act.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for the clarification and also for talking about the flexibility within the system.

There seems to be an exercise where that flexibility is being cut at every corner, so it therefore becomes an exercise of blaming them for voter suppression. Suppressed votes will be a result of what the government feels are administrative fixes.

What is the government's responsibility? A government is responsible for allowing a person to vote if that individual is 18 years or over and a Canadian citizen. There are special circumstances for people who live outside of Canada. Therefore in this situation, if they have an attachment to where they came from last, their home, then obviously they should be allowed to vote there. I would not want to give people the right to go all over the country and choose whatever riding they want. Nobody does. In its press release, Elections Canada did not describe that as a problem. I am at a loss to find out how people can gang up, go into a particular riding, and overturn the results based on people living outside the country who get to choose whatever riding they want. That is not their intent either. The flexibility allows these people to exercise their right under section 3.

The second part is the lack of time Elections Canada would have to adjust itself to the new realities in light of the fact that it also has to deal with the realities of what was Bill C-23. It is impossible now for Elections Canada to do this. If the government wants to fix administratively what is happening with Elections Canada and give it some help, then it needs to give Elections Canada some time.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Ottawa—Vanier.

To the consternation of my colleagues, I was not attempting a bait and switch there. I apologize, but I am sure that members have the deepest respect for the member for Ottawa—Vanier, as I and his constituents do.

I want to start by saying many of the points have been brought out already, and by way of background I want to say that I am a firm believer in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, where in section 3 it says everyone has a right to vote, providing they are a Canadian citizen and 18 years of age or over. The bill raises a lot of questions as to stifling that ability, and that is why I have questions. As another colleague pointed out, obviously with the majority in the House, this bill will end up going to committee, assuming that all members of the governing party vote in favour of this, and when it goes to committee, serious amendments should be sought. I mean serious.

There is one instance where it is positive. The rest, however, raises many questions, and as my colleague pointed out, may result in some chaos, certainly in the administration of our elections, regarding electors outside of the country temporarily or permanently.

I want to talk about some of the things in Bill C-50. I will get to the Frank decision in just a few moments, but first of all, I want to talk about eliminating the register of electors who temporarily reside outside of Canada and incorporating the information found in it into the register of electors. Basically there is a harmonization process that is going on with the process of special balloting.

When we hear Conservatives and the minister, in particular, talk about the same set of rules for both, a lot is being missed, in the sense that the circumstances are different either way. Remember that what is tantamount or most important is not the administration of this and the efficiency of the administration of this. What is most important is that nobody's rights are violated by denying them the right to vote, which is what people talked about with Bill C-23 and now Bill C-50 regarding the suppression of vote. That is the absence of any accusations of that being the intent.

Nevertheless, there is a level of suppression that is a continuation of what we had last, from vouching now to this, not to mention what the voter information card dismissal brought about in the last round of legislation.

The bill would require Canadian electors who reside abroad to apply for registration and a special ballot after the writs are issued at each federal election, stipulating that electors may only receive a special ballot for the address at which they last resided in Canada.

There are a couple of things here. What made it easier in the past was that people could register to vote living outside the country. Now they could only do it when the writ is dropped, and as pointed out before, the time period is of the essence here. The time period would become so narrow. Again these are special circumstances where voters live outside of the country, so we are making it particularly hard for them to do that, in light of the fact that they do have the right to vote.

The bill would require an external auditor to report on election workers, compliance with special ballot voting, procedure, and requirements for every election, and add the offences of attempting to vote by special ballot while knowing that one is not qualified to vote. It refers to electors temporarily residing outside of Canada, electors residing in Canada improperly attesting to the residence of more than one elector, and attesting to the residence of an elector when one's own residence has been attested to.

What we look at here is that we know the government wants to cut down on election fraud. We have heard all this before. It does not want to send a ballot to an address outside of Canada that could be picked up by a non-Canadian citizen. At the same time, we are reverting to a previous argument. The theme is a solution that is looking for a problem. Once again we find it within Bill C-50.

One thing that was brought about in the bill—and I will get to this right now because we agree with it—is authorizing the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration to provide the Chief Electoral Officer with information to help the CEO to delete the names of non-citizens from the register of electors.

We grant that it is a process that should be done and should be looked at. Virtually everyone in the House would agree that this is the type of measure that should be taken for the sharing of information to make sure we can exercise our right to vote.

The history behind people outside of the country being allowed to vote goes back to the First World War. The soldiers who fought valiantly for us while overseas were given the right to vote. That is a natural extension of being a Canadian and living in the country that we do, which is so great and wonderful. That extension still applies. There are extensions for people who work for the Government of Canada, whether they work for the military or several embassies around the world, to be able to vote as they would if they were residing in this country.

The question I have, and it has yet to be answered, is with respect to the families, particularly spouses or partners, who are eligible to vote but face different rules than do the people who are employed by the Government of Canada. That is problematic because they have to go through the process of re-registering every five years and the others do not. Therefore, there are different rules applying to two different people who are living in the same residence in another country for the same reason. I hope that some of the amendments would address this issue as we get closer to looking at it in committee.

In 1993, the rules were changed further to allow more people the right to vote. However, we again had the five-year rule that if they had been outside of the country for more than five years they were not eligible to vote, which is their right, despite the fact they are above the age of 18 and Canadian citizens. The Frank decision recently decided that was not good because it denies those Canadian citizens above the age of 18 who happen to reside outside of Canada, whether long or short term, the ability to exercise their right to vote under the Constitution.

In looking at the Frank et al decision, I see that section 3 of the charter states:

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.

The Frank decision posed this to the government to take action. However, there is some confusion in Bill C-50 as to whether that was done. I am not a constitutional expert, but in reading it I have yet to square it as to where the vote of these people who are more than five years outside the country has been protected, because it is not protected at all. I think an administrative nightmare has been created for many of them to do that. In the past they could register once they were outside the country. They cannot do that anymore. They have to wait for the writ to be dropped. That puts them in a tricky situation as far as timelines are concerned. I understand there are some online mechanisms that the minister has pointed to that would remedy this, but by the same token there is still that process.

The verification of signatures for those people outside of the country appears to be absent from this, or I have yet to see it. I hope the minister can clarify the situation. That qualification is no longer there. It would have made it easier to identify and verify those people based on two signatures, one on the ballot and one on the application form, and that would have gone a long way toward helping Elections Canada. That is something we have to look at.

I would also like to talk about vote shopping. The government has stated on several occasions that vote shopping is a problem. For those Canadians who are not aware of what vote shopping is, in its base form, those people can choose the riding in which they want to vote. However, Elections Canada has never stated that it was a big problem or that there was too much abuse and the law had to be changed. I again go back to the theme that it was a solution looking for a problem. Unfortunately, it would impede their ability to vote; it would impede their right under section 3 of the charter. Therefore, in looking at this, we see the government wants to cut down on an abuse that we are not sure existed to any extent, by making it problematic for those who want to legitimately vote in the riding they left when leaving Canada. That raises many questions.

My final point is with respect to this coming into force in only 60 days. I cannot see how Elections Canada can administer all of these rules in that 60-day period.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Mr. Speaker, we have been through this on a few occasions now, where we have talked about changes to the Canada Elections Act, and here we go once more.

I agree with 99% of his speech. However, one of the issues that I would like to address with him is the issue of coming into force. It states that it would come into force 60 days after royal assent. On top of Elections Canada getting used to the changes made in the former bill, Bill C-23, this will be a particularly hard thing to do, especially when we are dealing with outside entities, and especially with issue he brought up of the Canadian entity.

How do we get the poll clerks trained to the point where they are able to recognize that? It could result in the mass confusion he talked about. I am not sure if he addressed that issue, but could he address the coming into effect of this particular piece of this legislation?

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank the minister for his presentation. Along with my colleague from Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, I acknowledge that this may not be the best day for the minister in terms of his health. Accordingly, in the spirit of what we heard from the Minister of Foreign Affairs, I may be a little more gentle than I was intending to be.

Some here might have had a chance to read the piece that came out today in the National Post, where I make it very clear that I do believe—this sounds like how I started the debate on Bill C-23, what we call “the unfair elections act”—that the effect, at minimum, of these changes in Bill C-50 would voter suppression of citizens living abroad, and something that I am not sure the minister is fully aware of, namely, that it could create chaos with voting in Canada, because of the changes to a section that would prohibit the Chief Electoral Officer from authorizing any use of ID that basically does not have its origin Canada. I will explain why that could cause those problems.

I will stick with this phraseology that “in the result”, this is the problem, although seeing what has been knowingly put in the bill, I honestly think that the minister has to realize what these impacts would be. I hope that with some of the presentations during this debate and some of the criticisms he is already beginning to receive, he will be open to some serious amendments, including a couple that, to follow his own line, would be quite simple and could actually get rid of some of the serious blocking effects that I see. It is also important to note, although the minister did not really make hay of this in his own speech today, that in the presentation back in December when the bill was tabled, there very much was an effort to spin this bill in a way that created two false impressions. This is important to know.

One is that the press release in the backgrounder made it seem like the government was implementing the Frank judgement, which basically said that citizens away for more than five years now have the right to vote from abroad. It was very unclear from the presentation whether or not the Frank judgment was being accepted. It is important that everyone knows that Bill C-50 would not remove any provision in the Canada Elections Act that was struck down by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in the Frank decision. It is still sitting in the statute. The reason for this is that the government has clearly decided it is going to continue to fight to prevent citizens who have been away for more than five years from voting. It is appealing the decision, and it even sought a stay of the trial judgment to try to prevent it from going into effect. The Court of Appeal for Ontario denied that stay.

The fact of the matter is that the government is still actively seeking to keep as disenfranchised Canadians who have been living abroad for more than five years, yet the presentation of the bill made it look like this was somehow an effort to bring things into line. If this were really bringing things in line with the Frank judgment, all the government would have to do would be to adopt the suggestion by the member for Halifax in her Bill C-575 and simply repeal the same sections the judge found to be unconstitutional in the case. Instead, the Frank decision is being used as a supposed reason for a wholesale change of issues that never arose in the Frank case. It is important to ensure that the Frank judgment does not carry the government along in any sense where people think the government is actually respecting that judgment. It is still appealing it.

Second, the press release directly claims that all Bill C-50 would do is to apply the same voter identification rules enacted by the so-called Fair Elections Act, Bill C-23, and extend those rules to Canadians voting from abroad. There is some truth in that. There are some analogues that get brought forward. For instance, the vouching for an address gets brought forward. However, Bill C-50 inserts a new prohibition on the kinds of documents the Chief Electoral Officer could designate as identity documents. It would apply to documents used by all.

The new subsection 143(2.11) would apply to all electors and would basically create additional limitations on what the Chief Electoral Officer would be free to authorize by way of identity documents.

Because of the wording in that provision, this would have impacts in Canada. It would also make it extraordinarily difficult for some Canadians abroad to produce the right kinds of ID that now they have to produce. They would not be able because of this change. This is new. This was not in Bill C-23.

I just want to set the scene by making clear that this is the case.

It is also important to note, to set the scene, although the minister has downplayed it in his presentation today, and I acknowledge that. There was a sign it was not going to go this way. There is virtually no reality to the idea that there is a fraud problem from voters from abroad. The judge in the Superior Court, Mr. Justice Penny, basically said that those kinds of claims were so unreal as to not even constitute a pressing and substantial reason under section 1 of the charter to limit the right to vote.

“Riding shopping” is not something that Elections Canada has ever seen as being a problem. All that happens at the moment is that multiple points of contact are available to increase the chances, the ease with which somebody from abroad can vote. The idea that there is something illicit going on when people choose to vote where their parents live versus choosing to vote where they last lived seems to me to be a spin that is designed to make this look palatable or necessary when there is actually no problem. There is no such thing as “riding shopping”, except perhaps in the minister's imagination.

It is important to clarify that when the minister talks about 40,000 non-citizens being on the register, this was brought to his attention—and I am glad that two years later he is acting upon it—by the Chief Electoral Officer. The new mechanism that would allow the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration to allow Elections Canada access to the non-citizen database that CIC has would be great. However, it is important to note that we are talking about a fear, by error, that approximately that number of people are on the national register, not on what is, until this point in time, the international register. To get on the international register, one has to actually show one's citizenship.

It is a separate issue that would be dealt with in the bill, but it should not be confused with anything to do with a concern that non-citizens are voting from abroad. I fear that, unintentionally, the minister's emphasis on that could allow people to think this is what is going on. No, the issue is cleaning up the national register for people who are in Canada. That is fine. That one particular piece is a good thing in the bill.

I do feel duty-bound to note that Elections Canada was not consulted on this, except for the discussion a couple of years ago on the issue of trying to ensure non-citizens were removed from the national register where they appeared in error. That will probably prove to be a problem at the time of committee because we will probably hear some very detailed testimony from Elections Canada about many problems the bill would create.

As long as the minister is open, seriously open, to changing them, because these have not been foreseen because there has been no consultation, we might well end up with a productive committee process. If the minister thinks it has all been thought through and that whatever he hears from Elections Canada will not change his mind, then we will have a serious problem. What we will have, in effect, is the minister confirming that the intention here is to make it much more difficult to vote from abroad and that it is not just the unfortunate result of how the act was written.

Let me go to this issue that is the sleeper issue. It is the question of subsection 143(2.11). It is a new provision that would basically create a new prohibition on the Chief Electoral Officer. It says:

—the Chief Electoral Officer is not permitted to authorize...a type of identification that has been issued by an entity other than...a Canadian government, whether federal, provincial or local, or an agency of that government; and...an entity that is incorporated or formed by or under an Act of Parliament or of the legislature of a province or that is otherwise formed in Canada.

It is fairly complex wording.

The bottom line, as the minister made clear, is to ensure that ID only originates in Canada, essentially. That seems to be the general idea. The problem, however, is that it has been done in a way that might actually end up creating some serious administrative, and even more serious problems, in Canada.

This new prohibition, which is intended to deal with voters from abroad so they have to somehow produce Canadian-originated ID, is going to have an impact on everybody who shows up on election day in Canada.

What is the reason for that concern? First, “formed in Canada” is not a legally known concept and is not defined in the bill. The question of what an “entity formed in Canada” means is going to produce some serious problems in Elections Canada trying to scope it out, and then having that interpreted on election day by pressed election officials. We really need to ensure that this will be clear. Obviously the intention is probably that organizations like the CNIB are covered, and it is not just documents issued by corporations--for example, utilities bills, et cetera. However, the language is used in a way that is very unclear.

Here is an issue. Now a voter can use a Visa, Amex, or MasterCard bill as one piece of ID to show an address. However, people could show up with it, and the deputy returning officer or the chief poll officer could look at it and ask if Visa is a company incorporated or formed in Canada, is there a Visa Canada, and who has issued the document. The chance of that kind of minute questioning will be a problem, even if it seems far-fetched. It will create serious workability problems. I know for a fact that Elections Canada is concerned about this extra burden and the mistakes that could be made.

The second thing is that it is not at all clear to me that private leases will be caught by this wording, as I asked in my question for the minister. The language is all about corporations, entities or government agencies. There is no scope there for a document that has effectively been issued by an individual, which is what private rental leases are. They are often a form of identification to prove address that students in university tend to use.

The bottom line is that this will create workability issues that I do not think the minister intended to create, but that we will hear about in committee from Elections Canada. The unworkability issue is major.

I am also concerned that some party scrutineers who now would be allowed to ask to inspect identification documents as a result of Bill C-23 would see these new rules as an opportunity to ask, more often than they should, for proof that this new provision has been met by whatever document has been presented by somebody showing up.

If somebody shows up with a Visa bill, somebody might ask the deputy returning officer if that is a document issued by an entity formed in Canada. Maybe it is a document issued by an entity doing business in Canada. We can imagine the opportunity for mischief that could occur.

I am being a bit like the minister in that I am looking down the line at what kind of abuse is possible. The minister looks in one place and I look in another. We have to talk about that.

In my remaining minutes, I want to talk about what everybody knows is a big concern. The big concern here is that the new requirements for citizens voting from abroad can be extremely onerous. They can produce delays that can result in ballots not arriving in time to be counted.

The primary problem is the requirement that voters have to register for each election, apply to receive their ballot or register, the same kind of thing collapsed into one, only once the writ has been dropped. People have to be aware that it has happened. They have to register quickly enough in order to ensure that all the mail can occur. As the minister has said, sending in their application, even if that is virtually, and receiving the special ballot and mailing it in and doing that from Dar es Salaam, New Delhi or Sydney, requires time.

There are all kinds of reasons to think that the way the mail service works or the way citizens abroad may be not be immediately on top of when a writ has been dropped could result in timelines that could be almost impossible to make. Currently, people can register in the international register at any time. However, I believe we will hear testimony from Elections Canada saying that currently when people wait to register until the election has been called, there is an increased incidence of the ballot not arriving in time.

A system has been created in this new bill whereby that problematic situation that we already know exists, for some who wait too long to register, get their ballots and mail them in, is now scripted as the only way. Therefore, the delay issue is huge.

We should also not underestimate the problem of ID. The longer people have been away, the chances that they have retained Canadian-issued IDs, apart from their passports, may go down dramatically. In some jurisdictions when people get local drivers' licences, they actually have to hand in their old drivers' licences. People who are hoarders, and have kept every ID they have ever had, may have no problem. However, with no notice, many of the two million Canadians already abroad may already have sort of jettisoned or lost the IDs that they now have to use.

They cannot rely on the Chief Electoral Officer to issue a list of acceptable foreign IDs that go along with proving people's addresses. Let us say people still have to prove their last known addresses in the way the bills wants, but they can use their passports and some foreign piece of ID as corroborating ID. The Chief Electoral Officer is not permitted to allow that, even though a foreign driver's licence is at least as good in proving who one is as a Canadian licence. It has nothing to do with the address, but it does with identity. Therefore, there are serious problems with actually producing two pieces of ID for some abroad that we have to take into account.

Let me now talk about vouching. The bill would get rid of the possibility that people could vote where they would have a strong connection to relatives and would focus only on people's last known addresses. The problem is they have to prove it affirmatively. If people do not have pieces of documentation saved, such as a driver's licence, which in New York state they have given up to the Americans, then they basically will have to rely on this new vouching provision.

The new vouching provision says that people have to provide proof of their last place of residence, so they would have to contact their neighbours and ask them if they remembered them when they were neighbours seven years ago. They would have to ask them to do this attestation. They would need a statutory declaration, see their IDs to prove they are voters, have them fill out a form, get the form back to them and then include it in their package in applying to vote. We can obviously see that the one big problem is the delay this will create. The need to have someone vouch for them within a 35-day election campaign period will already make it virtually impossible to meet that deadline.

The other issue is that all the same rules in Bill C-23 apply. A person cannot vouch for more than one individual. If a family of four living abroad can only find one neighbour who still lives where the family used to live and the neighbour lives alone, that neighbour can only vouch for one of them. The other three are out of luck.

Therefore, it is very clear that the issue of how the vouching system would work will not be as relatively easy as it is in Canada when somebody on election days goes with the person to vouch for him or her. The idea of saying that the rules are the same for those voting in Canada and those voting abroad is a very formalistic understanding of equality, because when the same rules are applied to very different circumstances, there is a serious disadvantage in complying with the rules. The committee will find example after example like this and the minister will really have to get his mind around them.

Let me give another example. Students going abroad to get their masters degrees or Ph.D.s quite often are heading off from a previous university. Now, sitting in London, Paris, or New York, they will have to prove that their last residences were in university towns and pretty much the only people who know that was the case are former students, who themselves have moved on. How will a proper vouching system be created for that particular case? It may sound like an imaginary issue, but it is not. When we think about students moving around internationally, they usually move from a university town or an address that they lived at to obtain their education.

What I would say is that in its result, Bill C-50 is a clear exercise in suppressing the votes of citizens abroad in a way that is diametrically opposite to the spirit of the Frank judgement, which the minister started out by invoking as the reason for these changes.

In sympathy for the minister and his illness today, as he seems to have the flu, I will not hit too hard any more, but I very much hope that he is not doing this intentionally in the bill. I also hope that, for once, we will be able to make serious changes at committee based on the evidence that there are problems with this bill.

Amendments to Standing Orders

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise to speak to this motion. I want to say right off that I appreciate the effort made by the hon. member to bring this matter forward. He is a very amiable member of this chamber, and I appreciate chatting with him from time to time on matters in the House.

I can fully understand, as I am sure everyone in the House understands, the frustration that would drive him to bring forward this motion. It is very hard for the independent members in this chamber, because they are not accorded rights equal to recognized parties. That is what our system is. Why is the system that way? It is not that there have not been a lot of changes proposed. New forms of interaction have been proposed by the government side--individual members at least--and by our party.

Certainly, the way we operate in this place can be improved, but I think it is really important for us to recognize our responsibilities. We are here because we were elected, and we were elected in certain numbers, which resulted in three parties being represented in this place, and in certain numbers. We are between 90 and 100 members. The government has considerably more, another 20 or 30 members, and the Liberal Party has a certain number of members. Then we have some independents who tend, from time to time, to stand up and say that they are a party, but in fact, they are independent members.

Everyone here wants to make sure that everyone has a right to participate, because they too were elected by their constituencies. However, as a number have said who have been debating this motion, it is very important that we recognize the system and the way this place operates.

If I had my druthers, I would prefer that this place operate by consensus, but that is a dream for the far future. It is our dream in the New Democratic Party that this can best be achieved through proportional representation. Some of the members of the third party say they like that idea. Other members of that party say they like first past the post, because perhaps they could be the commanding party in the next election.

I think we have to recognize that our system is the system it is, and the electorate brings us forward and we are here representing the constituents. In so doing, we can still change the system. We can try to improve it in some way.

One of the things we have tried to do on this side, certainly in our party, is try to be equitable in the way we represent our constituents. If others in this House had the opportunity to join our caucus, they would see a lot of the debate that goes on. One thing we have in common is that we agree that there should be gender balance. We agree that all regions of this country should have a voice in this place. We believe that both official languages should be represented in debates in the House, in question period, and in committee.

It is not always easy to bring that balance, but we certainly endeavour to do that, and we think it is a really important principle for this place that those basic principles be represented.

Unfortunately, while we know that the member means well and is trying to reform the place so that everyone has an equal, or at least a fair, voice, the proposals the member is bringing forward will not enable that to occur. Every member having a chance to ask a question per week would make it very difficult to provide any kind of cogent representation in question period.

It is very important to recognize that the official opposition has a very important role in this place. It is our duty in the parliamentary system to hold the government of the day accountable, so it is very important that we have the opportunity to be strategic. To do that, we have to have the freedom to decide who will be raising the questions of the day.

The certain aspect or concern the member has raised is committees. Certainly in our party, we can recognize his frustration. We have our own frustrations as the official opposition. I myself have been very frustrated by the difference between this government and the same party but in a previous Parliament, where there was much more toing and froing on what we would discuss in committee, how we would discuss it, and the witnesses who would come forward. We also discussed amendments when the bill was before us, or even in a report.

There are enough frustrations. I do not think we need to make it more complicated with lotteries and those kinds of systems.

We have, from time to time, as some of my colleagues have pointed out, actually supported some of the initiatives of the independents. For example, we defended the rights of the independents when the government moved to constrain the right of independents to table amendments at report stage. We have been very clear. We should be given greater rights in this place.

We also supported the amendments to Bill C-23 proposed by one of my colleagues from the Edmonton area, the member for Edmonton—St. Albert, that would have allowed independents to form riding associations and engage in fundraising between elections. We are open to good proposals that come forward and to giving everyone in this place who is duly elected greater opportunities to represent, speak to, and engage their constituents and speak for them when they come to this place.

Again, we have endeavoured to provide the same kind of balance in committees that we have in question period. We endeavour to have both official languages represented through our party, to have a gender balance, and most important of all, to develop expertise, which goes back to the proposals for changing question period. It is very important that the questions we bring forward are based in knowledge, experience, and work at the ground level on the issues of the day that are brought forward either by the government or other members in this place.

I would close by saying that I commend the efforts of the member in bringing the motion forward. He has taken his one spot to speak to a motion in this place to bring forward parliamentary reform. My hope is that the government will finally listen to our proposals and that we will bring together all the representatives in this place to come forward with procedures and policies to make sure that we actually work better together and co-operatively in the interest of Canadians.

[Robert Aubin, NDP, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I often have the habit of starting my presentations with a quote. I have another one today. All quotes have their shortcomings and do not apply 100%, but I would like to quote Blaise Pascal, who said that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”. The spirit of this quote could apply here. The motion introduced today does not represent hell, but the means proposed are not in keeping with the intentions of the motion. I will have the opportunity to explain.

Members will have already understood that I will be voting against this motion for the good reason that we do not have before us a bill, but a binding private member's motion. Therefore, I will not be referring to the two hours of debate, because the two hours allocated for this motion will be two hours of discussion. We will have the opportunity to listen to the arguments for and against from each member who speaks, of any political affiliation, including independents. However, we will not have the opportunity to take this discussion to a higher level where we can ask questions of others or of ourselves and talk about where this motion could be taken further and improved.

Since we are talking about a binding motion, it means that even if we mostly agree with the motion, it would take effect immediately, without any further discussion. A bill would have to go through the regular process, which involves a clause-by-clause examination in committee and a more thorough debate. Most members could have likely gotten on board with that approach.

I understand the member's concerns, but good intentions must be combined with appropriate methods in order to achieve truly democratic parliamentary reform. That is the main weakness of this motion. The motion proposes a legitimate principle, but the methods suggested for achieving it are somewhat questionable or even completely inappropriate.

I want to say right away that I am opposed to this motion, as I already mentioned. Before getting into the mechanics of this motion, I would like to make an analogy, but once again, no analogy is perfect. For those who are watching at home, we are fairly fond of sports here in the House. If we compare a political party to a hockey team, it is easier to understand the problem. It would be one thing if we let players choose their position on the team. They might choose based on talent but they might also choose based on the fact that forwards have better statistics and score more goals than defencemen. If we also asked players to choose their captain, their coach and even their general manager, it is easy to see how this would cause problems that would negatively affect the team's performance. The success of a hockey team or any sports team, like the success of a political party, depends on the ability to put the right person in the right place to do the right job.

In that regard, we are still trying to maintain a balance between members' opinions and our party-centric parliamentary system. Concretely, we are trying to make Parliament work effectively while enhancing the independence of members and their role of representing the interests of their constituencies.

As hon. members know, the public pays close attention to question period. Beyond how it appears in the media, question period is an opportunity for our audience and our constituents to keep abreast of the most pressing national and local issues. For that reason, it is appropriate for a party to be able to develop a strategy for effectively exercising oversight over the government's activities. This motion hinders the opposition's ability to organize and to check and analyze the government's policy choices. The motion proposes mechanisms that totally exclude the strategic dimension of this exercise.

In examining the content of the motion, I get the impression that the hon. member does not know what a party is trying to achieve during question period.

We ask questions to draw attention to local and national issues and show the flaws and contradictions in the government's policies. The ultimate objective is to put pressure on the government and make it reconsider its positions or, quite often, make it do something.

With this motion, it seems as though my colleague wants to turn question period into a game in which the objective is for every member to ask a question. To make the game even more fun, my colleague is suggesting that members take turns, on rotation, asking the questions they want to ask.

We can already imagine, if not the disorganization, how difficult it would be to organize an efficient question period in which we hold the government accountable. I remind members that it is important for every member to participate in this process, but we must keep in mind that we need to see results from our right to ask questions of the government. The most important thing for members of a team is for the team to be successful and to hold the government accountable to the people we represent.

The objective, then, is to push the government to change direction and, more importantly, to reveal to the public the flaws, if not the failures, of its public policies, while putting forward our point of view regarding the day-to-day concerns of our constituents. The motion completely alters the role of question period, because it would prevent the parties from working together and coming up with a consistent, effective strategy for putting pressure on the government on certain issues.

I would remind members that on many bills debated in the House, our effectiveness in question period as the official opposition party has forced the government to make some compromises and back down on some important points. Consider, for example, Bill C-23, which we asked about on a daily basis until the government backed down on some of the more controversial parts of its election reform.

Another example would be rail safety. Our collective effectiveness pushed the government to phase out DOT-111 tank cars, thereby making for safer rail shipment of dangerous goods, particularly flammable liquids like oil.

I find it hard to believe that these issues could have been dealt with as effectively in the kind of random, arbitrary question period that this motion is proposing. What is more, how can this motion ensure that there will be equal representation of genders, languages and regions? Those values are central to our objectives and they will be completely overlooked by the parties if this motion is adopted.

The same can be said of the lottery that would allow members to choose the various committees they wish to join. Once again, it is clear that any team strategy could go out the window. I am not saying that it definitely would and that this is unavoidable. However, there is a real risk that people would choose a committee for the wrong reasons, because one has a higher profile than another or because they are hoping to get re-elected. The basic premise of the work we do as parliamentarians is that everyone's skills should be put to the best possible use. In other words, we should be putting the best person in the best position to get the best results. The lottery being proposed would not achieve that objective.

There are many other reforms we could have worked together on and even agreed on in order to promote the important role that MPs play in the House. I will just quickly mention the option that we put on the table, since I am running out of time. We proposed that after 2015, we no longer use this unfair election method where votes are not given equal value or importance in the House. Proportional representation would eliminate or alleviate many of the problems that this motion is looking to resolve.

I would like to conclude by, unfortunately, restating my intention to vote against this motion. I think that the gap between its objectives and the methods proposed to achieve those objectives is too great for me to be able to give it my support.

Reference to Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs

[Alexandrine Latendresse, NDP, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to very important issue. In my opinion, the motion moved by the House leader of the official opposition is of utmost importance. I want to emphasize that the amendments proposed by my colleague from Toronto—Danforth are also very important. I am truly pleased that most of the members of this House will be supporting this motion, because it will send a clear message to the Canadian people. As my colleague said several times during his speech, we cannot let this kind of thing go on, and assume that, as parliamentarians, we are armour-plated and protected and nothing can touch us.

Last week's charges against the member for Peterborough are very serious. There is no argument that the elected members sitting in the House of Commons must not have been convicted of charges as serious as violating the Canada Elections Act. It seems so simple, that I find it all deplorable.

I would like to speak more specifically about one point. In fact, it is a strange coincidence that this happened today of all days. I want to remind the House that in the amendment presented by the hon. member for Toronto—Danforth, in (ii), he specifically mentions the steps to be taken with regard to a member's benefits, including his or her retirement pension.

Today, as it happens, the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs was conducting a clause-by-clause study of Bill C-518, introduced by my colleague fromNew Brunswick Southwest. This bill very clearly states that a member of Parliament or a senator cannot, by resigning, escape the consequences that his or her expulsion from the House or Senate would entail. This speaks directly to this motion and the situation we are facing today.

The hon. member for New Brunswick Southwest has repeated over and over that what he was ultimately trying to do with this bill was to close a loophole. The loophole resulted from the fact that when a senator or member was found guilty of breaking a law or having otherwise done something that would lead to his expulsion from the House or Senate, instead of waiting for the House or Senate to take the appropriate measures and decide to expel him, the person concerned could simply say that he had had enough and was resigning.

And what would happen? Such persons would be entitled to their pensions, as if nothing had happened. Life would go on, happily. They could get their money, and neither the House of Commons nor the Senate could do anything about it. This has never happened in the House, but it has happened several times in the Senate. That is the problem my colleague from New Brunswick Southwest has tried to solve with his bill.

And what happened then? The question is fundamentally rather complicated, because there are many aspects involved. It was necessary to be as inclusive as possible, but without including too much, of course. Thus, there were several options open to us. Was it necessary to draw up a list of infractions that could lead to this result?

In the end, I think that my colleague, the hon. member for Toronto—Danforth, has found the best solution. He introduced an amendment this morning, during the clause-by-clause study of the bill. I repeat, this only happened this morning. The hon. member simply proposed to amend the act to provide for cases where the House or the Senate are involved in the process leading up to an expulsion. We could insert wording in the act providing that if the House or Senate passed a motion recognizing that an individual had resigned, but was still a member or senator, his or her pension would be revoked.

Therefore, all we need to do is give ourselves the power to use the same process as that followed for expulsion. That way, we would cover all cases where a person has been found guilty of violating the Canada Elections Act, for example. The House would find it unacceptable that such a person was entitled to his pension simply because he resigned before being held accountable to the House or the Senate, because that is not relevant. That person should not be entitled to a pension.

That was by far the best solution, but in the end another amendment was passed earlier, probably by the committee's majority, as we can all surmise. That amendment lists a number of infractions, but only those under the Criminal Code. If a person is found guilty of any one of them, the law will apply.

All of this will apply only after the law is passed, which is very specific to their amendment. There is no retroactive provision, although several experts told us in committee that it would not be a problem to make it retroactive.

When the NDP amendment was rejected and we knew that the majority amendment was going to be adopted, we introduced amendments to the amendment to try to add certain specific aspects regarding the Canada Elections Act.

We are elected members of Parliament and we must stand for election every four years—or less often, if there is a minority government. As elected members, we must go back to the people and ask them to vote for us. And now I am told that a member can remain in place here without suffering any consequences, despite having broken our country's election law.

Last spring, when we were debating Bill C-23, we saw how little respect the Conservatives have for the Canada Elections Act and how ready they were to change it all to gain an advantage.

Regarding what happened this morning, it is worthwhile to read the short title of the bill introduced by the hon. member for New Brunswick Southwest: “Protecting Taxpayers and Revoking Pensions of Convicted Politicians Act”. It is quite strange that a bill with such a fine title and such an interesting principle does not apply in any way to a person who violates the Canada Elections Act.

That is why I think the amendments proposed by my colleague from Toronto—Danforth to the motion on which we are about to vote are very important. Even though this bill has gone through today's clause-by-clause study, it is even more important than ever to return to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs and ask the members to look into the strategy concerning the member's benefits, particularly his pension.

Today we saw that there is a lack of consistency and the results will not be what my colleague from New Brunswick Southwest had hoped for. He talked about similar situations, even though at the time he obviously did not know that a member of his own party would be convicted of a crime. Nonetheless, the fact remains that it is the same principle and such principles should apply to all members and senators.

I encourage all my colleagues to support this motion. I will vote in favour of this motion because I like to think that by doing so there will be a little more justice in this world.

Amendments to Standing Orders

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

My apologies, Mr. Speaker. I went off on a bit of a party tangent.

However, I will say that we do this for a reason, for national interest, to allow someone to sit at cabinet from any particular region of the country, in the same way that the constitution of committees would also benefit from that. I do understand that he is saying they can trade, if need be. A lot of that might happen under his particular motion. However, it is rather prescriptive in how it handles this. Remember, we only get one vote for this and then all of the rules are changed instantly. I would go back to that argument about the procedure and House affairs committee.

The other part with regard to committees is that I have no problem with there being more members, allowing for the fact that there are 30 new seats coming into this House. That is right: we are going to go from 308 members to 338 members across this country.

My final point is that I agree with my colleague from the official opposition. On Bill C-23, we also supported the voice of the independent member of Parliament by allowing that person to have more power within the committee structure. It is a bit difficult to do, but nevertheless it is legitimate. When that person runs as an independent member of Parliament, some of the freedoms and obviously some of the rules that benefit certain parties should benefit that member as well.

As the Liberal Party, we have made moves lately for reform, such as transparency of all of our expenses. We would take the partiality out of the Senate.

We look forward to this debate, and hopefully within the next hour of debate we will also shed more light on all of the topics that my hon. colleague has brought forward, because it is quite—

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

Mr. Speaker, that was probably the most gracious wrapping up I have heard in ages.

First, we need to remember and take note of the context in which our colleague opposite spoke. This motion is a take it or leave it deal.

We are voting on a motion that, if adopted, will immediately amend the Standing Orders. These amendments will not be sent to committee and will not undergo a more in-depth legislative review.

That is quite important, because my hon. colleague across the way has already pointed out a couple of problematic parts of the motion that are not mere technicalities, as I think the sponsor might suggest they are. Rather, they are mistakes in the drafting of the bill, which suggests there may be others that we have not yet found.

The motion seeks to increase the independence of members who belong to a recognized party in the House and the rights of independent members. These are principles worthy of our support.

However, this motion does not give sufficient consideration to the legitimate and critical role that parties play in the Westminster system and tradition. It therefore does not establish a fair balance between the rights of members as individuals and the effective operation of the parties and thus of the House of Commons and this Parliament.

The motion does not make it possible to strike a fair balance between promoting the independence of members and maintaining the legitimate role of parties in our British-style parliamentary system, which is party-oriented. This is particularly true when it comes to the changes proposed to the methods used for selecting committee members.

I would like to point out that the NDP has been proposing democratic reform initiatives for years, the most recent of which sought to give the Speaker more authority. We are working on more practical and balanced reforms that will increase the independence of members while still allowing this Parliament to operate.

This includes defending the rights of independent members, as we did when the government wanted to restrict the right to propose amendments at report stage and when we supported the amendments to Bill C-23 proposed by the hon. member for Edmonton—St. Albert, which would have allowed independent members to form riding associations and raise money between elections.

The NDP continues to work on other balanced reforms in order to increase the independence of members, including during question period and in the work in committees, and to make Parliament work. We will present those in due course.

Let us now talk about fairness. The lotteries form the basis for the proposal by the hon. member for Haute-Gaspésie—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia for forming committees. The lotteries are purely formal exercises of fairness, because they leave no room for a conscious effort to promote real equality. It would be impossible for a party like the NDP to ensure that both sexes are equally represented in committee with the hon. member's proposed reform.

The whip and the House leader pay attention to these criteria when they designate members for the committees. We would not be able to be as proactive when it comes to other considerations regarding diversity, including regional representation, and the ability to communicate in both official languages.

We can also consider things that have an impact on the effectiveness of Parliament. In our system the opposition—especially the official opposition—must be in a position to resolutely hold the government accountable for its actions. In many ways, the domination of the executive, primarily as a result of the combined powers of the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister's Office, has so compromised the role of the House of Commons during times of majority government that we need to protect the remaining tools the opposition has to remain effective. We need to ensure that the most informed opposition members sit on the committees that study the issues they are knowledgeable about or that are related to their role as critics. We also need to ensure that the role of oral question period is not compromised by a weakening of the coordinated strategies that the opposition parties sometimes use during this period to ensure that the questions being asked of the government—sometimes over a period of several days or weeks—are consistent and persistent.

One recent example was Bill C-23, the so-called Fair Elections Act. Members of the NDP asked questions every day for weeks. The government ended up making concessions in some areas, which is very important.

My colleague's motion would hurt the opposition's ability to hold the government accountable during question period by making this period less organized and less effective.

I would finish by returning to the point made by my colleague across the way. There is a drafting problem in the motion, which basically says the lists for composing committees are taken from the list for the consideration of private members' business. The member's draft then says that ministers, as well as Speakers and Deputy Speakers, shall be removed from the list.

In fact, ministers would not be on that list in the first place, because it is the list for private member's bills. Also, parliamentary secretaries now appear not to be part of the list draw because they would not be part of private members' business, but it was clearly not the intention of the member to exclude them. Therefore, my worry is that there are other drafting problems, and that is certainly one of them.

I would end by saying that probably the most important reform, apart from reforms that we will be bringing forward on question period and on the composition of committees, has to be how we structure the House of Commons in the first place.

In the NDP we believe strongly that our electoral system is broken and is unfair. We believe that if we had a proportional representation system, the way in which the House is elected would profoundly change the way the House works. That would include how question period would work. It would create a rebalancing of the power of MPs within parties and it would create a more collegial environment that would be more open to compromise.

At some level, the member's motion has to be lauded, because the underlying concern is real. He is concerned about Independents who are not part of a recognized party in the House, and he is obviously also concerned about the independence of members who are in a party but who at any given time may feel they are not getting the roles they would like, either in question period or at committee.

These are real concerns and they do have to be addressed, but I firmly believe that the way that the motion has been drafted and the fact it would be immediately implemented if we voted for it mean that we have to wait for reforms that will accomplish some of what the member is trying to do with a differently drafted reform.

Incorporation by Reference in Regulations Act

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

Mr. Speaker, the short answer would be that I do not have any great confidence that the government will proceed that way. The way in which Bill C-23 was handled suggested that strong consultation was not part of the modus operandi of the government.

The bill may be a bit different. It purports to be technical only but the government acknowledges it is about a very central part of the modern administrative state, the regulatory power, and it is well aware that testimony, as well as some speeches in the other House, have revealed some serious concerns.

In light of the fact that the bipartisan and bicameral Standing Joint Committee for the Scrutiny of Regulations has repeatedly said that there is a problem with delegating regulatory authority to external bodies through the open incorporation by reference technique in particular, I would hope that the concerns of that standing committee do not get lost simply because the bill ends up before the House, having started in the Senate, with another committee having to scrutinize the bill.

As often happens, we sometimes have moments in the House when it feels very co-operative. It certainly has felt like that the last couple of days for very obvious reasons. I would urge the government to take that approach on this because we are on board with the fact that cleaning up how we deal with incorporation by reference in an extremely important area of law-making. The problem is that the government may inadvertently end up creating some democracy deficit problems.

Digital Privacy Act

[Hélène LeBlanc, NDP, LaSalle—Émard, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House today to support the motion to refer Bill S-4 to a committee before second reading.

Bill S-4 amends the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act. I will talk a little more about that, but first I want to take a moment to talk about the motion itself, which aims to send the bill to committee before second reading. This is somewhat strange; this is the first time the current government has done this in recent memory.

It is rather interesting and makes me wonder. Why this measure right now? Why did the government decide to do this, when there were other bills? Is it because the government has its doubts about Bill S-4 and wants to send it to committee, we hope, to solve the problems in the bill? That is what I am wondering.

Although we requested that some highly contested bills be sent to committee before second reading, such as Bill C-23 on election reform, Bill C-33 on first nations education and Bill C-3 on transporting oil along our coasts, the government refused. I have to wonder why it refused to do so and why it is now making the rather unusual—or at least uncommon, in recent history—move to send Bill S-4, a bill that comes not from the government, but from the Senate, to committee before second reading.

Procedure is not one of my strong suits, but there are experts here who can clear this up for us. I find it rather interesting that when we send a bill to committee before second reading, as this motion would do, the scope of the proposed amendments can be much broader. In other words, we could make more extensive amendments since the study in committee is not restricted by the principle of the bill, which has not yet been approved by the House. That is interesting. We can hope that Bill S-4 will be amended and that we will end up with a more polished product, if I can call it that, so that it will be more acceptable as we go into second reading.

Bill S-4 makes a pretty significant change to the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act. I took a look at this act, which received royal assent in April 2000. As members know, 14 years is an eternity in the digital world. A lot of things have happened in the past 14 years. This act was the result of an extensive consultation with a wide range of experts at all levels.

This work was accomplished through broad consultation in 2000. It is clear that since 2006, with this government, consultations are restricted to very specific groups. It is interesting to see that in 2000, there was a broad consultation that culminated with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act. Here is what that legislation does:

An Act to support and promote electronic commerce by protecting personal information that is collected, used or disclosed in certain circumstances, by providing for the use of electronic means to communicate or record information or transactions and by amending the Canada Evidence Act, the Statutory Instruments Act and the Statute Revision Act.

That is the legislation that is being amended now. Another interesting part of this law is schedule 1. Certain principles were set out in the legislation about to be amended, and they are particularly interesting because they were set out in the National Standard of Canada entitled Model Code for the Protection of Personal Information. The 10 principles are as follows: accountability; identifying purposes; consent; limiting collection; limiting use, disclosure, and retention; accuracy; safeguards; openness; individual access; and challenging compliance.

I went to the trouble of reading those principles. I found them very interesting and I urge all members to read them. Like it or not, as members, we receive personal and confidential information in our riding offices. That is why we too have a responsibility to respect these principles of personal information and electronic document protection.

Right now, we are talking about a motion to refer Bill S-4 to committee before second reading. I mentioned that this has not happened often in recent parliamentary history. In the time I have left, I would like to take a quick look at what Bill S-4 will change.

This bill will make major changes to to the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, which I just mentioned, by allowing personal information to be shared without the knowledge of the person concerned or without their consent under some circumstances. To me, that is a questionable way of protecting personal information. Companies would be allowed to share personal information under certain conditions.

As I read the bill, I really thought that there needed to be a better explanation of these conditions and some examples. For example, in a business transaction, when should personal information be shared without clients' consent?

Some aspects of the bill are positive, such as requiring organizations to take various measures when a data breach occurs. Even the current government has some transparency problems in this regard. The third aspect seeks to create offences in relation to the contravention of certain obligations respecting breaches of security safeguards. The fourth aspect would allow the the Privacy Commissioner, in certain circumstances, to enter into a compliance agreement with an organization.

Those are the four main aspects of Bill S-4 that raise concerns. Other aspects of the bill are positive and constitute a step in the right direction. That is why I support the motion to send Bill S-4 to committee to resolve the problems it contains that could result in a breach of privacy.

[Hélène LeBlanc, NDP, LaSalle—Émard, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for her speech.

Why does she think this bill is being referred to committee before second reading? We asked for the same for other rather problematic bills such as Bill C-23 on electoral reform or the bill on tanker traffic.

In her opinion, why is this bill being sent to committee before second reading?

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

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to address this motion by the government to have Bill S-4 go to committee before second reading, which is a rare event in the House. This is a procedure that was made possible for the first time in 1994 amendments. I believe it stemmed from the 1982 McGrath committee's report that said that committees should more often be used at the early stages of legislation to make sure that things are caught and that a wide variety of perspectives are taken into account in drafting legislation and, frankly, to make the role of MPs more meaningful than is often the case when a bill is studied only after second reading in committee.

As we know, in committee after second reading, and after hearing any amount of testimony from witnesses that could suggest serious problems with a bill, the amendments are often extremely constrained by the rule that they must fit within the principle of the bill. Quite often that means that the principle is understood by the chair or the legal staff advising the chair as simply the principle of a given provision, and therefore, an attempt to work more broadly than the narrow purpose of a given provision is often ruled out of order.

Beyond that, I have found so far in committees, since arriving in the House, that there seems be a reluctance at the moment, on the part of the advisers to chairs, to understand that bills can often have multiple purposes and not just a single purpose. Therefore, in the end, after second reading, committee work often really is an exercise in frustration, because a lot could be done to perfect a bill that is technically ruled out of order due to the fact that we have to work within the principle of the bill as voted at second reading.

It is great that this bill is going to committee before second reading. It will hopefully allow, in the spirit of what this procedure is all about, a full, frank hearing, from all kinds of witnesses, about the problems I hope the government understands are in this bill. I hope this is also the reason the minister has decided to send it to committee before second reading. There can be true dialogue and engagement among MPs, obviously with the government watching what is going on and giving its input through government MPs, so that this bill is taken apart and rewritten in the way this procedure would allow.

I myself stood in the House to move unanimous consent to have Bill C-23, what New Democrats called the unfair elections act and the government called the fair elections act, referred to committee before second reading, exactly for the reasons I have just given. There were so many obvious problems in the bill. Not sticking to the principle in the bill and working collegially across party lines would have benefited the study of that bill. In retrospect, New Democrats realize how true that was. Although we got serious amendments passed, with pressure from backbench members of the government suggesting changes that helped us in our efforts, that bill would be much better if it had gone to committee before second reading.

There is another procedure that, in the spirit of openness, I am hoping the minister might consider. To date, it has not been the practice of the government to table opinions about the constitutionality or charter compliance of a bill. Given the real concerns that exist with respect to warrantless access to information that is contained in this bill as kind of a compendium bill to Bill C-13, I would ask the minister to please consider, for once, having the Department of Justice table a written opinion on the constitutionality of this. Why does it think that the Spencer judgment coming out of the Supreme Court of Canada does not apply or, if it applies, that the bill is written in a way that justifies it under the charter?

So often in committee there is minimal to no good testimony from the civil service side on why, supposedly, the Minister of Justice has certified that a bill is in compliance with the charter. We know that the standard for the minister doing that is a very minimalist standard.

I will read from the Senate testimony on Bill S-4 from Michael Geist, of the University of Ottawa, to tell the House why having that additional procedure as part of the referral to committee before second reading would be useful. He says:

Unpack the legalese and you find that organizations will be permitted to disclose personal information without consent (and without a court order) to any organization that is investigating a contractual breach or possible violation of any law. This applies both [to] past breaches or violations as well as potential future violations. Moreover, the disclosure occurs in secret without the knowledge of the affected person (who therefore cannot challenge the disclosure since they are not aware it is happening).

That is an extremely good summary of a core problem with the bill in terms of the fears it raises that it has gone too far. It would purportedly create an updated regime to protect privacy and in the process would potentially ram through new problems with respect to Canadians' privacy.

I would like to now, in my last couple of minutes, go over a few points that I hope come up in committee.

I wish to thank a constituent, Mr. John Wunderlich, an expert in privacy law, who worked with me on the weekend to better understand the bill. These are points that I hope do have discussed.

In paragraph 4(1)(b) of the act, the definition of who this would apply to would move from just employees to employees and applicants for employment. In that context, this leaves hanging the question of how much or how little this would apply to companies whose business is to conduct background checks. The committee should solicit feedback on this. In my view, the background check function in the employment sector is done far too often and too deeply and already constitutes a systemic privacy invasion in the employment sector. Therefore, this extension needs to be looked at.

The next thing is the definition of valid consent. While it is welcome, because it brings clarity, the committee should note whether the current systems asserting consent on the web actually provide meaningful information to web surfers about just how many entities will be given access to either some or all of their personal information. Right now, there is a real risk that so-called valid consent, as outlined in the bill, would actually piggyback on the systematic sharing of information that people have no idea is being shared. The act could become a smokescreen behind which individual profiles were built and shared across businesses.

I have already spoken about the potential for the warrantless invasion of privacy because of the fact that organizations could seek information from others when they are simply investigating breaches of agreement or fraud. We should keep in mind that when they are investigating fraud, it is not just in the criminal context. All of this involves civil questions as well. An example is fraudulent misrepresentation.

The “real risk of significant harm” test for companies in particular to decide whether they are going to inform the commissioner and at another stage inform persons of breaches of privacy is a problematic standard in the sense that it is actually very general, and it is probably too low. There should be a presumption for disclosure to the commissioner, and it should be left up to the commissioner to either determine, or assist the company in determining, whether this is significant enough to let the persons whose information was released know that it happened. At the moment, it is an entirely discretionary system, based on a very vague standard, which may mean that data will be breached without people actually knowing it and being able to take the measures necessary to protect themselves.

Those are only three of the more specific concerns that need to be looked at. There is a lot in the bill.

I have a final comment, and it may be a rather strange one. I am looking at my colleague across the way. The privacy legislation from Alberta should be looked at very closely as a reference point for whether the government has gotten certain things wrong. That province has gotten things right.

Democratic Reform

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

Mr. Speaker, I stand with two petitions to present.

The first is a petition to stand up for Canadian democracy. Now that Bill C-23 has been passed, the petitioners ask for the government to bring forward genuine electoral reform to stop fraud and prevent money politics from distorting our elections.

There are hundreds of signatures on the petition.

Time Allocation Motion

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today on this question of privilege about closure.

I am rising at my first opportunity on this question of privilege, given that between the Speech from the Throne in October and when we adjourned June 20, there had been 21 occasions on which closure of debate occurred, and I maintain that the exercise of my rights and the rights of my colleagues in this place have been obstructed, undermined, and impeded by the unprecedented use of time allocations in the second session of the 41st Parliament.

Mr. Speaker, in presenting this fairly legal argument to you, I propose to leave out page numbers and citations because I have prepared a written version of this for your office and I hope that will be acceptable to you that I skip page numbers in this presentation. Hansard may not have the numbers of the debates, but I hope there is enough context so people can find them.

I belive this excessive use of what is often called “guillotine measures” is a violation of the rights of all members of Parliament, but I would like to stress that there is a disproportionate impact on members such as me who are within either smaller parties, that is less than 12 members, or who sit actually as independents, because in the roster of recognizing people in their speaker slot, quite often those of us in the smaller parties or independents simply never get to speak to the bills at all.

My question, Mr. Speaker, bears directly on what your predecessor said in this place on April 27, 2010. He said, “...the fundamental right of the House of Commons to hold the government to account for its actions is an indisputable privilege and in fact an obligation.”

In the autumn of 2011, in a ruling concerning the member for Mount Royal, Mr. Speaker, you yourself said that to constitute a prima facie case in regard to matters of obstruction, interference, molestation or intimidation, you need to “...assess whether or not the member's ability to fulfill his parliamentary [activities] has been undermined.” At that moment in the same Debates, you had the occasion to reflect on “...the Chair's primordial concern for the preservation of the privileges of all members,...” and you added, “As your Speaker, one of my principal responsibilities is to ensure that the rights and privileges of members are safeguarded, and this is a responsibility I take very seriously.”

I now have occasion to turn to other words that will guide us in this matter. From the Supreme Court of Canada in the Vaid decision, in the words of Mr. Justice Binnie, speaking for the court, he outlined the scope of parliamentary responsibility and parliamentary privilege for the management of employees and said, “Parliamentary privilege is defined by the degree of autonomy necessary to perform Parliament’s constitutional function.” He went on to say at paragraph 41 of that Supreme Court of Canada judgment:

Similarly, Maingot defines privilege in part as “the necessary immunity that the law provides for Members of Parliament, and for Members of the legislatures of each of the ten provinces and two territories, in order for these legislators to do their legislative work”.

I would repeat and emphasize that, because although the Vaid decision was on a different fact set, Mr. Justice Binnie spoke to our core responsibility as parliamentarians when he said that we must be able, as legislators, to do our legislative work.

Mr. Justice Binnie continued in the Vaid decision to say:

To the question “necessary in relation to what?”, therefore, the answer is necessary to protect legislators in the discharge of their legislative and deliberative functions, and the legislative assembly’s work in holding the government to account for the conduct of the country’s business. To the same effect, see R. Marleau and C. Montpetit...where privilege is defined as “the rights and immunities that are deemed necessary for the House of Commons, as an institution, and its Members, as representatives of the electorate, to fulfill their functions”.

Mr. Justice Binnie went on to find further references in support of these principles from Bourinot's Parliamentary Procedure and Practice in the Dominion of Canada.

These are fundamental points. The purpose of us being here as parliamentarians is to hold the government to account. It is obvious that no legislative assembly would be able to discharge its duties with efficiency or to assure its independence and dignity unless it had adequate powers to protect itself, its members, and its officials in the exercise of these functions.

Finally, Mr. Justice Binnie—again, for the court—said at paragraph 62, on the subject of parliamentary functions in ruling that some employees would be covered by privilege, that coverage existed only if a connection were established between the category of employees and the exercise by the House of its functions as a legislative and deliberative body, including its role in holding the government to account.

As I said earlier, this approach was supported by your immediate predecessor. In a December 10, 2009 ruling, the Speaker of the House, the Hon. Peter Milliken, said that one of his principal duties was to safeguard the rights and privileges of members, and of the House, including the fundamental right of the House of Commons to hold the government to account for its actions, which is an indisputable privilege, and in fact an obligation.

It is therefore a fundamental principle of Westminster parliamentary democracy that the most important role of members of Parliament, and in fact a constitutional right and responsibility for us as members, is to hold the government to account.

The events in this House that we witnessed before we adjourned on June 20, 2014, clearly demonstrate that the House and its members have been deprived of fulfilling constitutional rights, our privilege, and our obligation to hold the government to account, because of the imposition of intemperate and unrestrained guillotine measures in reference to a number of bills. Over 21 times, closure has been used.

It is only in the interest of time that I am going to read out the numbers of the bills and not their full description. Bill C-2, Bill C-4, Bill C-6, Bill C-7, Bill C-13, Bill C-18, Bill C-20, Bill C-22, Bill C-23, Bill C-24, Bill C-25, Bill C-27, Bill C-31, Bill C-32, Bill C-33, and Bill C-36 were all instances where closure of debate was used.

In many of the instances I just read out, and in the written argument I have presented, closure of debate occurred at second reading, again at report stage, and again at third reading. The limitation of debate was extreme.

A close examination of the guillotine measures imposed by the government demonstrate that the citizens of Canada have been unable to have their elected representatives adequately debate the various and complex issues central to these bills in order to hold the government to account. Members of Parliament have been deprived and prevented from adequately debating these measures, through 21 separate motions for time allocation in this session alone. It undermines our ability to perform our parliamentary duties.

In particular, I want to again highlight the effect that the guillotine motions have on my ability as a representative of a smaller party, the Green Party. We do not have 12 seats in the House as yet, and as a result we are in the last roster to be recognized once all other parties have spoken numerous times. Quite often, there is not an opportunity for members in my position, nor for independent members of Parliament, to be able to properly represent our constituents.

Again, I should not have to repeat this. Certainly you, Mr. Speaker, are aware that in protecting our rights, as you must as Speaker, that in this place we are all equals, regardless of how large our parties are. As voters in Canada are all equal, so too do I, as a member of Parliament, have an equal right and responsibility to represent the concerns of my constituents in this place, which are equal to any other member in this place.

As speaking time that is allotted to members of small parties and independents is placed late in the debates, we quite often are not able to address these measures in the House. This would be fair if we always reached the point in the debate where independents were recognized, but that does not happen with closure of debates. My constituents are deprived of their right to have their concerns adequately voiced in the House.

Political parties are not even referenced in our Constitution, and I regard the excessive power of political parties over processes in this place, in general, to deprive constituents of equal representation in the House of Commons. However, under the circumstances, the additional closure on debate particularly disadvantages those constituents whose members of Parliament are not with one of the larger parties.

Mr. Speaker, in the autumn of 2011, in your ruling considering the member for Mount Royal and his question of privilege, you said that one of your responsibilities that you take very seriously is to ensure that the rights and privileges of members are safeguarded. The principal right of the House and its members, and their privilege, is to hold the government to account. In fact, it is an obligation, according to your immediate predecessor.

In order to hold the government to account, we require the ability and the freedom to speak in the House without being trammelled and without measures that undermine the member's ability to fulfill his or her parliamentary function. As a British joint committee report pointed out, without this protection, members would be handicapped in performing their parliamentary duty, and the authority of Parliament itself in confronting the executive and as a forum for expressing the anxieties of citizens would be correspondingly diminished.

To hold the government to account is the raison d'être of Parliament. It is not only a right and privilege of members and of this House, but a duty of Parliament and its members to hold the government to account for the conduct of the nation's business. Holding the government to account is the essence of why we are here. It is a constitutional function. In the words of the marketers, it is “job one”.

Our constitutional duty requires us to exercise our right and privilege, to study legislation, and to hold the government to account by means of raising a question of privilege. This privilege has been denied to us because of the consistent and immoderate use of the guillotine in regard to 21 instances of time allocation, in this session alone.

This use of time allocation, as you know, Mr. Speaker, is unprecedented in the history of Canada, and infringes on your duty as Speaker to protect our rights and privileges as members. As you have said many times, that is your responsibility and you take it very seriously. However, these closure motions undermine your role and your duty to protect us. Therefore, it diminishes the role of Speaker, as honoured from time immemorial.

In fact, you expressed it, Mr. Speaker, in debates in the autumn of 2011, at page 4396, when you had occasion to reflect on “the Chair's primordial concern for the preservation of the privileges of all members..”, and when you added, “As your Speaker, one of my principal responsibilities is to ensure that the rights and privileges of members are safeguarded, and this is a responsibility I take very seriously.”

Denying the members' rights and privileges to hold the government to account is an unacceptable and unparliamentary diminishment of both the raison d'être of Parliament and of the Speaker's function and role in protecting the privileges of all members of this House.

In conclusion, I submit to you, Mr. Speaker, that the intemperate and unrestrained use of time allocation by this government constitutes a prima facie breach of privilege of all members of this House, especially those who are independents or, such as myself, representatives of one of the parties with fewer than 12 members.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your consideration in this matter. I hope you will find in favour of this question of privilege, that this is a prima facie breach of the privileges and rights of all members.

Democratic Reform

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Minister of State (Democratic Reform)]

Mr. Speaker, with royal assent, the fair elections act will be enacted today. Identification will now be mandatory in order to vote.

With today's royal sanction, we have finally and happily achieved the fair elections act, and it will be passed into law.

We will have royal assent. We will have a requirement for physical ID every time someone votes. No longer will politicians be able to use loans to get around donation limits. We will have independent investigations. It is fair, it is reasonable and, as of today, it will be the law.

[Robert Chisholm, NDP, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I have two petitions. The first one is signed by hundreds of my constituents and other Nova Scotians who are appalled by Bill C-23 and the affront to democracy.

Bill C-24—Time Allocation Motion

[Libby Davies, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I will start by saying “71”. That is the number of times that the government has brought in closure on debate in the House. It is a record, by the way. I am sure by the end of the day, it will be 72, and if not today, it will be tomorrow.

The minister said that the NDP is saying the same thing over and over again. The NDP has a lot to say on this legislation because it is important legislation. It is more a matter of him not liking what we have to say and that he would like to dismiss it.

He also said that the system is working very well. I can understand that. From his point of view, the system is working very well when the government controls it 100% and can basically bypass the legislative process in the House.

I do need to point out that no witnesses were heard when the bill was at committee. The government says that pre-consultation was done. The fact is that we abide by due process at committee, hearing parliamentary witnesses at committee. That is an integral part of the parliamentary process. Quite frankly, I am shocked and disturbed that the minister is not taking responsibility and does not see the error in trying to bypass a legitimate process at committee. There is no excuse for it.

Of course, it is the government's prerogative if it wants to hold pre-consultations. However so many bills, whether it is Bill C-23 or this legislation, are being rammed through the House without due process, and that negates the very reason we are here. We were elected to hold the government to account, to examine legislation, and the committee process is an important part of that.

Again, we are having another vote on a closure motion, a censure on debate, on an important bill. How can the minister defend that? How can he defend bypassing an important stage at committee?

Democratic Reform

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Now, the information is coming out, Mr. Speaker.

The Conservatives' deeply flawed Bill C-23 failed to effectively target deceptive phone calls. Now we can see why.

At the trial of a former Conservative staffer, one of the witnesses has just stated:

This scheme was clearly wide-spread, national and well organized. It required access, and ultimately complicity from someone higher up in the campaign....

Given these troubling allegations, would the government agree to finally introduce a bill that would actually go after these kinds of national voter suppression crimes, yes or no?

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Speaker, Bill C-23, the electoral “deform”, has been criticized far and wide. Just today, at the electoral fraud trial in Guelph, we learned that Andrew Prescott—

Canada-Honduras Economic Growth and Prosperity Act

[Dan Harris, NDP, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise tonight to speak to this bill. It is the first time I have risen to speak to a bill in a while because of the time allocation that keeps being brought forward by the government and has prevented me, as the member of Parliament for Scarborough Southwest, from representing my constituents' views on things like the budget or Bill C-23, the unfair elections act. The Conservatives continually cut off debate.

I am rising to speak to Bill C-20, an act to implement the free trade agreement between Canada and the Republic of Honduras. I have to say that I find it disturbing that the government is now presenting this bill. I believe that Canadians hold true a certain set of values based on decency, fairness, a respect for human rights, and, yes, the law as well. Many Canadians are very proud, as am I, of our country's record of peacekeeping in areas of international conflict. Many Canadians are proud of our tradition in history of being champions of human rights around the world. This bill is a definite departure from those values Canadians hold close and that we proudly identify as our own that make us all proud to be Canadians. This bill underscores the trend in Conservative foreign affairs that focuses less on our shared values of decency and fairness and respect for human rights and more on the narrow interests of a few industries.

It is disturbing, deeply troubling, and very sad. It is hard for me and for many Canadians to understand why the Conservatives would even want to negotiate a free trade agreement with a country like Honduras, which hat has one of the most horrendous records on human rights. I was particularly disturbed after reading the testimony and opinions of some of Canada's leading experts on foreign affairs in Central and Latin America. Stacey Gomez, coordinator of the Canadian Council for International Co-operation’s Americas Policy Group, had this to say about a free trade agreement with Honduras:

We have long maintained that under the right conditions, trade can generate growth and support the realization of human rights. These conditions simply do not exist in Honduras....until there is a verifiable improvement in the country’s democratic governance and human rights situation...the Canada-Honduras FTA will do more harm than good.

This is really the measure with which we have to negotiate and look at every trade agreement that we would sign with other countries in the world. The simple reality is that we are not going to get 100% of what we want in every trade agreement. It is not going to be 100% good and 0% bad no matter where we turn to do trade. We always have to find that right balance between the economic goods and the potential harms that might exist in a trade agreement. That is whether we are negotiating one with Europe, with China, or with Honduras. In this case, with Honduras, we truly do believe that this trade deal would actually enable the continued human rights abuses. It would enable the further degradation of life for many people in that country because it would embolden the regime that came about as the result of a military coup to continue doing the kinds of things that it has been doing.

That is why we also believe, as Stacey Gomez does, that the Canada-Honduras FTA would do more harm than good.

Before the provincial election was called in Ontario, I was out doing my regular “have your say” canvassing, where I go out to speak to constituents at their doorsteps to find out what issues matter to them. On that particular occasion, I was going out and speaking to constituents about the cuts that are proposed and coming to Canada Post, the ending of home mail delivery. I ran into a couple in an apartment building near Victoria Park and Queen Street who, out of the blue, thanked me for opposing this trade deal. I have to admit that I was taken aback because foreign affairs and trade is not a topic that comes up on the doorstep very often in Scarborough Southwest. I asked these constituents why they had problems with this particular trade deal. They worked for an agency that does work in Honduras, one of those agencies that is trying to shine a light into those dark places in the world. Only two weeks earlier a Honduran staff member of that organization had been killed and is now one of the numbers of people who have been eliminated by the regime. That loss was felt throughout the organization. Sitting at their doorstep, it was clear to me the impact it had on these two individuals. This is the kind of thing that all of us we try to leave work at work and not bring home at night, but it was clear that had impacted them and they were taking that loss back home with them at the end of the workday.

It is hard for me, and I think for many Canadians, to see how the country of Honduras comes close to meeting the criteria that would justify us signing a trade agreement, the one that determines there would actually be more good generated than harm.

Many Canadians are wondering perhaps what is really at play here. Testifying before the Standing Committee on International Trade on April 22, 2013, Sheila Katz of Americas Policy Group, Canadian Council for International Co-operation, told members that “the Americas Policy Group has recommended that Canada refrain from concluding free trade agreements with countries that have poor democratic governance and human rights records”.

She also said that, “Canada's eager recognition of a president who came to power in a military coup in Honduras in 2009” is another example of “Canada prioritizing the trade pillar of its Americas strategy above the rest. Since the coup, hundreds of regime opponents have been intimidated, arbitrarily arrested, disappeared, tortured and killed”, just like the person who worked for that agency that two of my constituents work for.

Further, she said that, “The Americas Policy Group is concerned that Canada has validated this regime by adopting a business-as-usual approach and signing a free trade agreement with Honduras, in spite of its horrendous human rights record”.

Honduras is a very poor country with a seriously flawed human rights record and a history of repressive undemocratic politics. The democratically elected government was toppled by a military coup in 2009 and subsequent governmental actions and elections have been heavily criticized by international observers as failing to meet acceptable democratic standards. NGOs have documented serious human rights abuses; killings; arbitrary detentions of thousands of people; severe restrictions on public demonstrations, protests, and freedom of expression; and interference in the independence of the judiciary. Of course, we perhaps have been encountering some of that here at home recently, but it really cannot be compared when there is an argument between the Prime Minister and the Chief Justice compared to the kinds of things and the interference that happens in Honduras, which is far worse. That said, none of it should be tolerated.

Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world and is considered the most dangerous country in the world for journalists, the ones who tell the stories about what is happening in the country. They are the people who tell the stories about what is happening in a parliament or the stories of what a government is doing that shines a light on the things that are happening back home.

Transparency International ranks it as the most corrupt country in Central America, yet our government is forging ahead, pushing to get this trade deal brought forward into law and having us sit until midnight. However, with all of these problems with the bill, where are the Conservatives to defend their actions, to get up and say this is why we should be signing the trade deal? Have we heard from any of them here tonight? They passed a motion to make us sit until midnight then they do not have the decency to get up and stand in their places, to actually take their speaking opportunities in order to defend the bills they are bringing forward.

Before we even include tonight, the Conservatives had missed 22 of the last speaking opportunities since the House started sitting late. That is at least 220 minutes of time they could have been using to defend their actions and to push their government's agenda ahead. Instead, they are asleep at the wheel. They actually got up and spoke last night. It was about time, but they only got up because the NDP was bringing attention to the fact that they were not showing up, that they were not doing their jobs. Well, New Democrats stand here every single night doing our job.

Honduras also has the worst income inequality in the region. After Canada struggled to get a multilateral deal with the Central American economies as a whole, Canada approached the weakest political actor, Honduras, and worked to negotiate a one-off deal as part of an ideological drive to get FTAs signed. In August 2011, the Prime Minister announced—

Oral Questions

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Speaker, in a moment I will seek unanimous consent to table a document.

During members' statements, the member for Mississauga—Streetsville called on the member for Marc-Aurèle-Fortin to apologize. I want to point out that the member already apologized, which was appropriate.

I would mention, and I think it is ironic, that the member for Mississauga—Streetsville has never apologized for deliberately misleading the House on Bill C-23.

I seek unanimous consent to table this document, the response from the member for Marc-Aurèle-Fortin. He did the right thing.

When is the member for Mississauga—Streetsville going to do the right thing and apologize for his comments in the House of Commons?

Democratic Reform

[Ted Hsu, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I present a petition today put together by a citizen from Aurora, Ontario, who I understand organized this petition through Facebook and other online media. It is signed by people from all over Ontario, including my own riding. It concerns Bill C-23, the so-called fair elections act.

The petitioners would like to tell the House that experts disagree with the bill, were not sufficiently consulted, and do not support the bill. They call on the government to withdraw the legislation.

Dairy Producers

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, that has nothing to with the record harvest. It has everything to do with this whole “trust us” attitude that the government proclaims to the farmers. Its actions do not reflect what it asks Canadians to do, which is to trust it.

Now we have the very important issue of supply management. We know the government has been soft at best in affirming strong support toward supply management.

When we look at what has taken place with the comprehensive economic trade agreement in principle between Canada and the European Union, some red flags and concerns have been raised regarding certain industries in Canada. One of those industries, specifically, is the cheese industry.

The Liberal Party as a whole has been exceptionally supportive of freer trade and the idea of free trade agreements. However, at the same time, it has been encouraging and calling on the government to be more transparent in exactly what it is saying abroad. What is the government attempting to negotiate? To what degree is it putting our farmers at risk? Canadians have these concerns.

I am pleased to hear that the government seems to want to support the motion, and that is a good thing. The problem is that it would not be the first time the government has voted in favour of a motion and then, months later, seems to contradict it. All we have to do is take a look at the fair elections act to exemplify that.

I am grateful that at the moment the government members seem to be somewhat supportive of supply management.

However, I am an optimist. I believe there might be hope at the end of the day for the Conservatives in making that solid commitment to supply management. I would like to hear that commitment more often. I say that because I am genuinely concerned about industries, not only in my home province of Manitoba, but, as pointed out in the motion, the province of Quebec and in fact all over Canada as well. There has been an immense benefit.

It was interesting what we heard about the agreement between Canada and the European Union, and it is important that we realize it is far from being complete. I suspect there might come a day when we will achieve that free trade agreement with the European Union. Hopefully, if things go well over the next couple of years, it could be a Liberal administration signing off on it. In that situation, supply management would be well taken care of.

Members over there are a little sensitive on this issue. Maybe they see the writing on the wall.

However, it is not only the Liberal Party that has raised the issue of ensuring that people are aware of the ramifications. Some interesting points were raised by the Dairy Farmers of Canada. We need to have more discussion on this. European Union access will total 31,971 tonnes, or 7.5% of the Canadian cheese market.

I am very proud of a local company we have in Manitoba, Bothwell Cheese. The company came into being in 1936. The member for Provencher gave me the thumbs up. He is very familiar with Bothwell Cheese. If one lives in Manitoba, one has to be proud of that company. It is the best cheese in the world. In fact, I think it is their marble cheddar cheese that we could honestly say is the best product in the world. We are very proud of that fact. Our cheese manufacturers can excel, not only in Canada but also abroad.

However, many cheese companies still are concerned about the percentage of cheese and want to maintain as much as possible the percentage of the current market in Canada. Total imports will reach 38,171 tonnes, or about 9% of the current Canadian consumption. It is a significant increase. How is the government responding to this issue? There are a number of issues that have to be taken into consideration when we start to talk about these kinds of numbers. We are talking about jobs, quality of life for farmers and quality of product ultimately.

We can look at the financial compensation. There are all sorts of hidden tariffs out there. We need to get a better sense of what the government is talking about when it is sitting at those trade negotiations. When we start talking about these kinds of numbers, we really need more transparency. We want the government to be more transparent in what we hear from the European trade negotiations, discussions and so forth.

There is serious concern from our dairy farmers with the equivalent of farm quota cuts. There are serious concerns about the fine cheese market in Canada and the rationalization that will have to take place with our dairy herds.

So much can be said about this important issue.

The Liberal Party supports the motion. We are concerned about the government's lack of a solid commitment to supply management. We want more transparency on the issue of negotiations.

Protecting Canadians from Unsafe Drugs Act (Vanessa's Law)

[Libby Davies, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I do not think we disagree. I am glad the consultations were held. In fact, I am assuming that the member is saying that those consultations were held before the bill was tabled. I think he said it helped in the final drafting of the bill, which is very important. I wish that had been done with Bill C-23, that there had been some consultation with somebody—that is, the Chief Electoral Officer or other political parties—as it fundamentally changed the Canada Elections Act. I am glad it happened on this bill, but it is kind of a rare thing.

My comments at the beginning were more that, while the government introduced the bill in December, it did not come forward for debate until March, and then it was for a couple of hours, which is pretty minimal for second reading.

We are here debating the bill today, and I know some of my colleagues want to speak on it because they feel very strongly about it. They are not on the Standing Committee on Health, so I hope they will have an opportunity to do that.

I also hope that the bill will go to committee quickly and that we can get into it there. I am glad it has finally come back to the House to be debated today.

Extension of Sitting Hours

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I saw the member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley rising. I am sure he would have pointed out that, according to the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, in 2013, of the jobs the current government managed to cobble together, 95% were actually part-time, and we have 300,000 more unemployed than we did the year before. Therefore, the Conservative government, I guess in keeping with not showing up to evening sessions, is a part-time government. The Conservatives are only able to stimulate the economy with part-time jobs, and that is not even going. I know my colleague for Skeena—Bulkley Valley would also mention the fact that tens of thousands of jobs were lost last month.

We are talking about a government that right now does not seem to be doing much right.

It is rather sad that the government is again moving this motion that it is imposing with its majority. The NDP is always willing to work evenings. There is no doubt about that and we have proven it many times. Every June since 2011, NDP members were always in the House ready to debate bills and provide advice. The problem is that this government does not listen and is not prepared to listen to good advice. I will come back to that in a moment.

We are very familiar with the results. We know that bill after bill has been rejected by the court. The government is then often required to make amendments to the botched parts of the previous bill. The government seems to want to bungle everything, not just services to Canadians, but also the legislative process that leads to the introduction of appropriate bills and proposed amendments to improve bills in order to help Canadians. This process does not seem all that complicated, but it is unfortunately often botched by this government.

I am referring to the Conservatives' use of closure and time allocation motions, which is on par with their use by the Liberals when they were in power. It is appalling that this government systematically wants to shut down debate and deprive members of their right to speak. Each time, 280 members, on average, are deprived of their right to speak. The Conservatives vote for these closure motions. That is ridiculous.

In ridings where a Conservative member was elected—I am not so sure they will be re-elected the next time—that member takes away his own opportunity to speak on behalf of his constituents. The Conservatives say they want to shut down debate and therefore they do not want their constituents in Calgary, Red Deer, Lévis or any other riding to be represented in the House of Commons. They want to shut down debate. Thus, the vast majority of Conservative members seldom talk about the needs of the people in their riding or bills introduced in Parliament.

The Leader of the Government in the House of Commons has just stood up and said that the Conservatives are going to work harder, but that also happened last year. My colleague from Skeena—Bulkley Valley knows what I am talking about. Last year, the Conservatives were not in the House to speak. One evening, there was six hours of debate and only a single Conservative member was in the House to speak. Only one Conservative member spoke in six hours. The government moves time allocation and closure motions, and the Conservative members remain silent instead of speaking.

Members of the NDP, on the other hand, are always in attendance when the sitting hours of the House are extended. We are always there to fight, to improve bills and to solicit comments about bills. Meanwhile, the Conservatives are nowhere to be found. They do not come to the House, or perhaps one of them will show up over the course of the evening. As we said earlier, during the debate on S-12, no Conservative members came to speak about the bill. Not one, and we were there for six hours. What were they doing?

I do not know. It is not as though they were out consulting their constituents. The Conservatives are not here. They are not speaking.

I am going to come back to this momentarily, but the result is that we end up with botched legislation because the government does not listen and the Conservative members do not even speak on behalf of their constituents. Honestly.

We receive a generous salary from our constituents, the taxpayers. We are here to work to help our ridings move forward. I represent the riding of Burnaby—New Westminster. It is my duty to be in the House to stand up for the interests of the people of Burnaby—New Westminster.

If members decide to stop speaking, to systematically go along with the government's time allocation and closure motions and therefore deprive their ridings of the right to speak and if, on top of that, members do not even show up for the evening sessions in the House of Commons to contribute to the debate and the legislative process, then this approach becomes a complete sham.

I am fairly certain—and I would take a bet with any Conservative member—that this year, we will have the same problem as we did last year and the year before: 90% to 95% of the time, the NDP, or sometimes other opposition members, will be speaking and the Conservatives will not even be here.

The reasoning behind this motion does not make sense. The Conservatives are not the ones who will be here working. The Conservatives will not be here representing their constituents. The Conservatives will not be here giving passionate speeches about their ridings. They will not be here.

The proof, as we will soon see, is the way this motion is structured. The way the government decided to structure the motion is evidence of how much it will once again diminish the democratic rights all Canadians value so strongly. Canadians across the country want us to be in the House. They want us to represent them, regardless of where we are from.

For example, my colleague from Sherbrooke is an extraordinary young man, and he does a good job representing his riding. He is always in the House and speaks often. He is here; he represents his riding. He understands how important it is to represent Sherbrooke in the House of Commons. The same goes for my colleague from Hochelaga. Her riding is not the wealthiest riding in Canada. The average family income in her riding is below the average. She is always here representing the people of Hochelaga and talking on their behalf. She gives speeches on the importance of affordable housing. That is because she understands her role as member of Parliament.

Members on the Conservative side, on the other hand, refuse to speak at second reading or at report stage because there is a time allocation motion, and they refuse to show up on evenings when we have extended debates. How can the government expand the scope of its activities when it does not listen and when government members refuse to speak on behalf of their constituents? They refuse to defend government bills, they refuse to take action, they refuse to present amendments and they refuse to offer anything at all when it comes to legislation.

In such circumstances, voting Conservative does not mean a great deal. When people voted for the Conservatives, they voted for members who are controlled by the Prime Minister's Office, not members who rise in the House, defend their constituents' rights and speak on their behalf.

I want to speak to the motion now because I know that many of my colleagues are reading it. We want this to be a useful study of an important motion. For those who are watching, I will go step by step.

To begin, the majority government, as usual, wants to force a decision on the House. Unfortunately, debate and democracy are foreign concepts for the Conservatives.

They are proposing that commencing upon the adoption of this order and concluding on Friday, June 20, 2014, on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, the ordinary hour of daily adjournment shall be midnight, except that it shall be 10 p.m. on a day when a debate, pursuant to Standing Order 52 or 53.1, is to take place.

As I said, we do not object to working until midnight. However, what actually happens is that the members opposite rarely show up to speak in the House. Opposition members are the ones who really contribute to the debates, and that is a major problem. If the government listened to us, it would not be problem, but that is not the case.

This has caused many problems with bills in the past. More than once we had to make amendments to botched bills with subsequent legislation, or, again, the Supreme Court clearly indicated that the bills were not in order.

Today, the Conservatives are proposing that we adjourn at midnight, or 10 p.m. if a debate pursuant to Standing Order 52 or 53.1 is to take place. That refers to emergency debates.

My colleagues in the House, including the hon. member for Laval—who works very hard for the people in his riding—and the hon. member for Montmorency—Charlevoix—Haute-Côte-Nord, are always listening to their constituents and are always ready to raise questions that often result in an emergency debate.

A few weeks ago, in fact, an emergency debate was held in accordance with Standing Orders 52 and 53.1. That debate on the kidnapping of young Nigerian schoolgirls by the terrorist group Boko Haram was proposed by the member for Ottawa Centre. Many people from across the country came here to attend the debate, and people were still talking about it when I returned to my riding, Burnaby—New Westminster, last week.

Now the government wants to prevent us from holding emergency debates before 10 p.m. If the Chair decides that there is to be an emergency debate, that debate cannot begin before 10 p.m. For working people in eastern Canada, who have families and work hard, that is late. They will be denied their right to tune in.

It will not be so bad in my riding because of the three-hour time difference. For example, 10 p.m. here is 7 p.m. back home. That is a reasonable time. However, for the vast majority of Canadians, this government motion deprives them of their right to tune in to the emergency debates that will take place in the coming weeks.

Second, when we look at the second clause of this motion, which deals with recorded divisions, we see that what the Conservatives would now do is put in place a voting system that would have votes occur at the conclusion of oral questions, in the middle of the afternoon. This proposal reveals the whole intent of the government.

The Conservatives say that they want to work harder. We have already ripped up that argument by showing that when they said they wanted to work harder that last year, over 90% of the time it was not Conservatives but New Democrats doing the work. Only one Conservative member would show up every night to speak in the House of Commons, so this idea that somehow the government wants to work harder is simply not true.

Paragraph (b) deals with recorded divisions demanded in respect of any debatable motion before 2 p.m. on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. In this case the vote would stand deferred until the conclusion of oral questions on that day, while if a division is demanded after 2 p.m., it would stand deferred until the conclusion of oral questions on the next sitting day.

What the Conservatives would do is basically do away with those evening votes. Not only do they not show up to speak, but they also do not even want to show up to vote. This could be perhaps the laziest motion ever put forward in the House of Commons by the government. It is far from wanting to work harder, as we have shown quite clearly when 90% to 95% of the time it is the New Democrats carrying the heavy load.

We are fine with carrying the heavy load. We come from humble roots and we are hard workers. Everybody acknowledges that, and that is why 90% to 95% of the time it is we who do the hard work in the House.

However, now the Conservatives want to even do away with evening votes. They are saying, “No, that is too hard. It is too hard voting at 6:00 or 7:00 at night. We do not want to show up to speak”.

This is a licence for laziness. That is what the government has brought forward. The Conservatives want to make sure that motions are voted on around question period time so that folks can show up around question period and then do whatever it is that Conservative MPs do in the evening. I have no idea of that.

I should also point out that, in this motion, the same goes for private members' business. Where this motion mentions Wednesdays governed by this order, it says that recorded divisions will be deferred until the conclusion of oral questions on the same Wednesday. As for other private members' business, the motion says that this too will be deferred until the conclusion of oral questions on the same Wednesday. That is the same thing.

This is really a licence for laziness. As we have shown, 90% to 95% of the time, the Conservatives are not the ones showing up to speak in the House. They do not want to vote in the evening, not even on private members' business. They want to curtail all of these activities and make sure that no votes happen in the evening.

What difference will that make? The NDP will still be here working. We work hard. We have a reputation for working hard. We come from humble roots and we represent our ridings well. I know that the members here this afternoon are very hard-working, and we will continue to work hard. Votes, including votes on private members' business, will now be held in the afternoon. That means the Conservative members will have their evenings free.

That is really the problem. As we move through this motion, we see time and time again that this is like a giant recess for the Conservatives. They have structured this so that they do not have to have votes in the evening anymore. They do not show up to speak in the evening 90% of the time, depending on the evening. It is New Democrats who actually put in the representation of their ridings. What we are seeing again is the Conservatives, through this motion, giving themselves an evening off.

The real clue to what the Conservatives are doing, this licence for laziness, is that they will not show up to speak or to vote, but they are telling the NDP that we can do our stuff and speak on behalf of our constituents. They have also proved that they are not willing to listen to the good advice we offer them, which is why they got into so much trouble having to amend legislation they brought forward previously and having pieces of legislation rejected by the Supreme Court. If they had listened to us and to Canadians, they would not be in so much trouble.

The key to this is paragraph (h): “No dilatory motion may be proposed, except by a Minister of the Crown after 6:30 p.m.” The essence of the motion is that Conservatives will not show up to speak in the House of Commons. They will not show up to participate, because they do not do that; they let harder-working members do that. They will also not show up to vote in the evening. They will not show up to vote on private members' legislation, and they will not show up to vote on public legislation. That is why they want the votes after question period, when it is convenient.

That means that the Conservatives are shutting down the rules of the House so that only they can use them. It is incredible. If we had not been through Bill C-23, in which they were trying to cook the next election campaign, it would be unbelievable that after all the decades, a century and a half and more of Canadian parliamentary democracy, a government would say that the rules will exist, but the government members will be the only ones who can use them. Only Conservatives can use these rules. Only a minister of the crown can use these rules.

We will have this period. I know it, because we went through it. The member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley knows it full well, because I think he probably spent more time in this House than any other member. Night after night, there will be no Conservatives here wanting to speak, or maybe one member of Parliament from the Conservative Party will want to speak. However, the Conservatives will not show up to vote, because they are having all the votes deferred to question period, when it is convenient for them, and they are now saying that all the rules of the House apply only to them. Only they can use them. They are basically putting handcuffs on every single member of the opposition. They are saying that only a Conservative can use the rules that normally function that make this democratic place a democracy. Only the Conservatives can use them. It is unbelievable.

If we had not been through the unfair elections act, where the Conservatives were trying to subvert the next election campaign, we would actually think this could not be Canada. These are not Canadian values. That is what they are doing. They are putting in, and writing it out so that any Canadian can see, “No dilatory motion may be proposed, except by a Minister of the Crown after 6:30 p.m.”

This is not an approach to try to work harder. The Leader of the Government in the House of Commons was trying to slide that by us a little while ago, and we simply do not believe it. The evidence simply shows that this is not the case. Conservatives will not be showing up to speak in the House. They did not last year. They did not the year before, and 90% to 95% of the time they let the heavy lifting be carried by New Democrats. We are strong, we are tough, and we do not mind doing it. We will do an even better job in 2015 once we are the government. That is when we will really see changes, when the heavy lifting actually benefits people directly through good governance.

I can tell members something else we will not be doing. It is what I mentioned half an hour ago.

I am enjoying this. I am not sure when I am going to sit down, actually. I think my colleagues from the NDP are appreciating it too.

I just want to mention what happens when due diligence is not done. Conservative members should know this, but they are muzzled. They vote for time allocation and muzzle themselves, so they do not actually speak on legislation in the House. There are 280 MPs, on average, who have their right to speak on legislation ripped away every single time, the dozens and dozens of times, the government has used closure techniques. Sometimes it calls it time allocation, but it amounts to the same thing; it is closure. Every time the government does it, 280 MPs, on average, are denied their right to speak. They do not show up to the evening session to speak. One does, and that is normally it. Then 90% to 95% of the heavy lifting is done by the NDP.

What is the result of this? I will give three examples. I could give tons of examples. I could probably speak for 14 hours on bad, botched Conservative legislation. I could do that, Mr. Speaker, and I am sure you and the public would find it interesting, but eventually we are going to have to go to question period. I am going to mention only three examples.

The Conservatives rammed Bill C-38 through the House without due care and attention and without showing up for evening sessions. Bill C-38 was one of the omnibus bills. The member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley raised major concerns about it at the time. The Conservatives botched the bill. They botched it so badly that the next bill they introduced had to fix the mistakes they made in the first bill. They rammed Bill C-38 through the House with time allocation. It was omnibus legislation, which was quite all right, except it was wrong. It was badly botched in a way only the Conservative government could do it.

It was so badly botched, the government had to introduce another piece of legislation, Bill C-45. Bill C-45 had to fix all the problems in the previous bill. Was that a good use of taxpayers' money? Was it a good, use of this legislative process? The government rammed through Bill C-38 but botched it so badly that it had to bring another piece of legislation in to fix it. That is like bringing one's car in to get fixed and driving off without the wheels. It is incredible. We went through another process, with Bill C-45, to fix what was wrong with Bill C-38.

That is just a snapshot of how the government handles legislation. It is like the guy who has a hammer and thinks everything is a nail. Conservatives think everything is pavement and they can steamroll over all of it, except that when legislation is badly botched, there are consequences.

That brings me to another piece of legislation, Bill C-4. It is the same kind of thing. The Conservatives tried to throw a whole bunch of things in the bill, a laundry list, except that the Supreme Court rejected part of that legislation. As we know, the Leader of the Opposition has been raising this repeatedly in the House.

We have a problem whereby botched legislation leads to more time wasted, because the Conservatives have to introduce other legislation to fix the bad legislation they forced through in the first place without listening to the NDP. If they had listened to the NDP, they would not have had the badly botched legislation in the first place. If they do get it through the House, then, as we saw with Bill C-4, the Supreme Court says, “Sorry, you badly botched this legislation and it is not constitutional”. As a result of that, we have to reject part of this legislation.

This is the real problem. It is not that the government, as it likes to say, does its job and produces a quantity of legislation, so everyone should give it a pat on the back. It is bad legislation in so many cases. It is legislation that has to be fixed. New Democrats always offer the amendments and the fixes. We are always there to try to direct the government. We often feel as if we are trying to direct a puppy, because it seems to get distracted often.

The reality is that the work the government does should be very important. The legislation the government presents in the House should be very important. There should be a proper legislative process. There should be amendments that are considered. There should be a process people can actually respect. That is not what happens under the government.

The government just throws legislation out without due respect for parliamentary traditions. It refuses to listen to the opposition to develop the legislation so that it can actually accomplish what it purports to set out to do when it puts the legislation on the floor of the House. The government will not take amendments, will not listen to debate, actually shuts down the debate, and rams legislation through. This costs Canadians enormously.

Every time the government has to provide new legislation to fix the old legislation, and as has happened a number of times in the past few weeks, every time the Supreme Court says that what the government is doing is simply not constitutional, it costs Canadians.

We have this motion that is a licence for laziness. It dismisses Conservatives from voting in the evening. It dismisses Conservatives from having to participate in debates that are actually quite important, because that is how we get legislation fixed, particularly the shoddy legislation the government tends to present in the House.

Now we have a government that has such profound arrogance that it says, quite clearly, “No dilatory motion may be proposed, except by a Minister of the Crown”, which means that no dilatory motion may be proposed except by a Conservative, except by a minister of the crown, after 6:30 p.m.

What the government is doing, at the height of its arrogance, is saying to Canadians, “Hey, we are just going to run this government, this country, exactly how we want, and we do not care about the consequences”.

We care about the consequences. We care when we see shoddy legislation that has to be corrected, and it takes months of work, because the government did not get it right in the first place. We care when the Supreme Court says that what the government is doing is unconstitutional.

We care when we see, right across this country, growing concern about the government's arrogance and its attacks on a whole host of institutions, not just in the elections act but in the attack on the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and Sheila Fraser. How could anyone attack Sheila Fraser? The Conservatives have been doing just that.

When we see all those attacks, we see a government that has simply done its time. It no longer has any sort of legitimate agenda but just wants to lash out at its perceived enemies and wants to set a perception that is simply not true.

With this motion, this licence for laziness, Conservatives get off scot-free. They do not have to vote in the evening. They do not have to show up in the evening. The government has said it is going to handcuff every single member of the opposition to their desks and not let them use any proper parliamentary procedure after 6:30 p.m. Only the government can.

That arrogance is something Canadians are becoming increasingly aware of. That arrogance is something Canadians are saying they have had enough of. In the most recent poll, the Prime Minister had an approval rating of one-third of Canadians. Two-thirds of Canadians disapprove of the work he is doing.

The leader of the Liberal Party has falling approval levels, but he did better. It was 50/50.

The top approval level in the country is for the Leader of the Opposition. Two-thirds of Canadians see his work in the House of Commons and approve of it. They see him as strong and as defending Canadian democracy.

That is what we are going to continue to do. We are going to ensure that legislation is effective. We are going to continue to speak out and work hard on behalf of our constituents. We are looking forward to that day, October 19, 2015, when we can get rid of the government and start having an NDP government that is going to fully respect our democratic traditions here in the House of Commons and right across the country.

[Peter Van Loan, Conservative, York—Simcoe, ON]

Mr. Speaker, as I think the House is aware, some of our priorities this spring have included the budget, job creation, economic growth and long-term prosperity. They have been the core priority of the government throughout.

We have also dealt with the fair elections act, something we know Elections Canada wants us to have in place before the end of June so it is able to prepare for a 2015 election. We are seeking to meet that objective so it can be adequately prepared and ready.

As a result, we have not had as much time as we would have liked so far this spring to focus on our very important tackling crime agenda. The opportunity over the next several weeks, with extended hours, would allow us more opportunity to advance those bills and allow ample debate on them. We are happy to do that, because we know these bills are very important to Canadians.

We need to continue to find ways to send a clear message to criminals that the government will not tolerate crime, and that it is looking to rebalance the justice system to give greater rights to victims, as members can see with the victims bill of rights. We are looking to protect those who are vulnerable in our society.

The tackling crime aspects of the agenda are, in fact, a very significant part of what we hope to achieve over the next several weeks.

[Peter Van Loan, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

moved:

That, notwithstanding any Standing Order or usual practice of the House, commencing upon the adoption of this Order and concluding on Friday, June 20, 2014:

(a) on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, the ordinary hour of daily adjournment shall be 12 midnight, except that it shall be 10 p.m. on a day when a debate, pursuant to Standing Order 52 or 53.1, is to take place;

(b) subject to paragraph (d), when a recorded division is demanded in respect of a debatable motion, including any division arising as a consequence of the application of Standing Order 61(2), but not including any division in relation to the Business of Supply or arising as a consequence of an order made pursuant to Standing Order 57, (i) before 2 p.m. on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, it shall stand deferred until the conclusion of oral questions at that day’s sitting, or (ii) after 2 p.m. on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, or at any time on a Friday, it shall stand deferred until the conclusion of oral questions at the next sitting day that is not a Friday;

(c) the time provided for Government Orders shall not be extended pursuant to Standing Order 45(7.1);

(d) when a recorded division, which would have ordinarily been deemed deferred to immediately before the time provided for Private Members’ Business on a Wednesday governed by this Order, is demanded, the said division is deemed to have been deferred until the conclusion of oral questions on the same Wednesday;

(e) any recorded division which, at the time of the adoption of this Order, stands deferred to immediately before the time provided for Private Members’ Business on the Wednesday immediately following the adoption of this Order shall be deemed to stand deferred to the conclusion of oral questions on the same Wednesday;

(f) a recorded division demanded in respect of a motion to concur in a government bill at the report stage pursuant to Standing Order 76.1(9), where the bill has neither been amended nor debated at the report stage, shall be deferred in the manner prescribed by paragraph (b);

(g) for greater certainty, this Order shall not limit the application of Standing Order 45(7);

(h) no dilatory motion may be proposed, except by a Minister of the Crown, after 6:30 p.m.; and

(i) when debate on a motion for the concurrence in a report from a standing, standing joint or special committee is adjourned or interrupted, the debate shall again be considered on a day designated by the government, after consultation with the House Leaders of the other parties, but in any case not later than the twentieth sitting day after the interruption.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak to the government's motion proposing that we work a little bit of overtime over the next few weeks in the House.

I have the pleasure of serving in my fourth year as the government House leader during the 41st Parliament. That is, of course, on top of another 22 months during a previous Parliament, though some days it feels like I am just getting started since our government continues to implement an ambitious agenda that focuses on the priorities of Canadians. We still have much to do, and that is the basis for Motion No. 10, which we are debating today. Regardless of what other theories that folks might come up with, our objective is simple: to deliver results for Canadians, results on things Canadians want to see from their government.

As government House leader, I have worked to have the House operate in a productive, orderly, and hard-working fashion. Canadians expect their members of Parliament to work hard and get things done on their behalf. We agree, and that is exactly what has happened here in the House of Commons. However, do not take my word for it. Let us look at the facts.

In the previous session of the 41st Parliament, 61 government bills received royal assent and are now law. In 2013 alone, which was a shorter parliamentary year than normal, the government had a record-breaking year with 40 bills becoming law, more than any other calendar year since we took office, breaking our previous record of 37 new laws in 2007 when I also had the honour to be the leader of the House. That is the record of a hard-working, orderly, and productive Parliament. With more than a year left in this Parliament, the House has accomplished so much already, handing many bills over to the Senate for the final steps in the legislative process.

Just as we had a record year for legislative output, Canadian grain farmers experienced a bumper crop with a record yield in 2013. Understanding the real challenges faced by grain farmers, our government acted quickly on Bill C-30, the fair rail for grain farmers act, moving the bill through three readings and a committee study before handing it over to the Senate. This bill would support economic growth by ensuring that grain is able to get to market quickly and efficiently. The House also passed Bill C-23, the fair elections act, which would ensure that everyday citizens are in charge of democracy, ensuring the integrity of our electoral system and putting rule breakers out of business.

Two supply bills received royal assent, thereby ensuring that the government has the money it needs to continue providing services to the people.

When we passed Bill C-25, the Qalipu Mi'kmaq First Nation Act, we fulfilled our promise to protect the Qalipu Mi'kmaq First Nation's enrolment process, making it fair and equitable while ensuring that only eligible individuals will be granted membership.

Earlier this spring, royal assent was also given to Bill C-16, the Sioux Valley Dakota Nation Governance Act, making the Sioux Valley Dakota Nation the first self-governing nation on the prairies and the 34th aboriginal community in Canada to achieve self-governance.

Next on the agenda is Bill C-34, the Tla'amin Final Agreement Act, which will implement the agreement with the Tla'amin Nation. Bill C-34 will give the Tla'amin increased control over their own affairs. They will have ownership of their land and resources and will be able to create new investment opportunities and make decisions determining their economic future.

We considered and passed through all stages of Bill C-5, the Offshore Health and Safety Act, which will enhance safety standards for workers in Canada’s Atlantic offshore oil and gas industry to protect Canadians and the environment while supporting jobs and growth.

Bill C-14, the Not Criminally Responsible Reform Act, became law just a few weeks ago. This act will ensure that public safety should be the paramount consideration in the decision-making process involving high-risk accused found not criminally responsible on account of mental disorder.

Also, this spring, our government passed Bill C-15, the Northwest Territories Devolution Act, which honoured our government's commitment to giving northerners greater control over their resources and decision-making and completing devolution all before the agreed-upon implementation date of April 1, as well as Bill C-9, the First Nations Elections Act, which supports the Government of Canada's commitment to provide all Canadians with strong, accountable, and transparent government. Bill C-9 provides a robust election framework, improves the capacity of first nations to select leadership, build prosperous communities, and improve economic development in their communities.

However, despite these many accomplishments, there is more work to be done yet before we return to our constituencies for the summer, let alone before we seek the privilege of representing our constituents in the 42nd Parliament.

During this mandate, our government's top priority has been jobs, economic growth and long-term prosperity.

It is worth saying that again. During this mandate, our government's top priority has been jobs, economic growth, and long-term prosperity. That continues. Through three years and four budgets since the 2012 budget, we have passed initiatives that have helped create hundreds of thousands of jobs for Canadians, as part of the one million net new jobs since the global economic downturn. We have achieved this record while also ensuring that Canada's debt burden is the lowest in the G7 and we are on track to balance the budget in 2015.

As part of our efforts to build on this strong track record, our government has put forward this motion today. Motion No. 10 is simple. It is straightforward. It would extend the hours of the House to sit from Monday through Thursday. Instead of finishing the day around 6:30 p.m. or 7 p.m., the House would, instead, sit until midnight. This would give us an additional 20 hours each week to debate important bills. Of course, the hours on Friday would not change.

Extended sitting hours is something that happens practically every June. Our government just wants to roll up its sleeves and work a little harder a bit earlier this year.

Productivity is not just a function of time invested, but also of efficiency. To that end, our motion would allow most votes to be deferred, automatically, until the end of question period to allow for all hon. members' schedules to be a bit more orderly.

Last year, we saw the New Democrats profess to be willing to work hard. Then, mere hours later, after the sun would go down and people were not watching, what would the NDP do? It would suggest we pack it in early and move adjournment, without any accomplishment to show for it.

In order to keep our focus on delivering results and not gamesmanship, we are suggesting that we use our extra evening hours to get something done, not to play idle, unproductive games. We are interested in working hard and being productive, and doing so in an orderly fashion. That is the extent of what Motion No. 10 would do. Members on this side of the House are willing to work a few extra hours to deliver real results for Canadians. What results are we seeking? Bills on which we want to see progress, that are of great significance to Canadians, are worth spending a little extra time to see them considered and, ideally, passed.

Of course, we have the important matter of passing Bill C-31, Economic Action Plan 2014, No. 1. This bill implements our government’s budget—a low-tax plan for jobs, growth and a stronger Canadian economy. It is also an essential tool in placing the government on track to balanced budgets, starting in 2015.

We have a number of bills that continue to build on the work we have done in support of victims of crime. Bill C-13, the Protecting Canadians from Online Crime Act, is another essential piece of legislation that will crack down on cyberbullies and online threats by giving law enforcement officials the tools necessary to investigate and tackle these crimes. We are taking clear action to combat cyberbullying and I ask the opposition to join us in this pursuit.

Every day in Canada, our most vulnerable—our children—are the victims of sexual abuse. This is truly unacceptable and as a society we must do our part to better protect our youth. With Bill C-26, the Tougher Penalties for Child Predators Act, we are doing our part.

Our government's comprehensive legislation will better protect children from a range of sexual offences, including child pornography, while making our streets and communities safer by cracking down on the predators who hurt, abuse, and exploit our children.

Therefore, I ask the opposition to work with us, support this important piece of legislation by supporting this motion.

It is also important that we move forward with one of the most recent additions to our roster of other tackling crime legislation. Last month, we introduced Bill C-32, the victims bill of rights act, which will give victims of crime a more efficient and more effective voice in the criminal justice system. It seeks to create clear statutory rights at the federal level for victims of crime, for the first time in Canada's history. The legislation would establish rights to information, protection, participation, and restitution, and ensure a complaint process is in place for breaches of those rights on the part of victims. It would protect victims, and help to rebalance the justice system to give victims their rightful place. I hope we can debate this bill tomorrow night. By passing Motion No. 10, we will make that possible.

Our efforts to protect families and communities also extend to keeping contraband tobacco off our streets, so that the cheap baggies of illegal cigarettes do not lure children into the dangers of smoking. Bill C-10, the tackling contraband tobacco act, would combat this by establishing mandatory jail time for repeat offenders trafficking in contraband. Aside from protecting Canadian children from the health hazards of smoking, it will also address the more general problems with trafficking and contraband tobacco propelled by organized crime roots. With luck, I hope we can pass this bill on Friday.

Just before the constituency week, the Prime Minister announced Quanto's law. Bill C-35, the justice for animals in service act, would pose stiffer penalties on anyone who kills or injures a law enforcement, military, or service animal. I know that the hon. member for Richmond Hill, having previously introduced a private member's bill on the subject, will be keen to see the extra time used to debate and pass this bill at second reading before we head back to our constituencies.

Bill C-12, the drug-free prisons act, could also have a chance for some debate time if we pass Motion No. 10. This particular bill will tackle drug use and trade in the federal penitentiaries to make the correctional system a safer place, particularly for staff, but also for inmates, while also increasing the potential for success and rehabilitation of those inmates. As a former public safety minister, I can say that this is indeed an important initiative.

Delivering these results for Canadians is worth working a few extra hours each week. Our clear and steady focus on the strength of our Canadian economy does not simply apply to our budgets. We will also work hard next week to bring the Canada-Honduras free trade agreement into law. Bill C-20, the Canada-Honduras economic growth and prosperity act, would enhance provisions on cross-border trading services, investment, and government procurement between our two countries. It would also immediately benefit key sectors in the Canadian economy, by providing enhanced market access for beef, pork, potato products, vegetable oils, and grain products.

As a former trade minister, I can say first-hand that this government understands that trade and investment are the twin engines of the global economy that lead to more growth, the creation of good jobs, and greater prosperity. Trade is particularly important for a country like Canada, one that is relatively small yet stands tall in terms of its relationship and ability to export and trade with the rest of the world. If we are to enjoy that prosperity in the future, it is only through expanding free trade and seizing those opportunities that we can look forward to that kind of long-term prosperity.

Through Bill C-18, the agricultural growth act, we are providing further support to Canada's agriculture producers. This bill would modernize nine statues that regulate Canada's agriculture sector to bring them in line with modern science and technology, innovation, and international practices within the agriculture industry. The act will strengthen and safeguard Canada's agriculture sector by providing farmers with greater access to new crop varieties, enhancing both trade opportunities and the safety of agriculture products, and contributing to Canada's overall economic growth.

As the House knows, our government has made the interests of farmers a very important priority. We recognize that since Canada was born, our farmers in our agriculture sector have been key to Canada's economic success. As a result, Bill C-18 will be debated this afternoon. It would be nice to have the bill passed at second reading before the summer, so that the agriculture committee can harvest stakeholder opinion this autumn.

Over the next few weeks, with the co-operation and support of the opposition parties, we will hopefully work to make progress on other important initiatives.

My good friend, the President of the Treasury Board, will be happy to know that these extra hours would mean that I can find some time to debate Bill C-21, the red tape reduction act. This important bill should not be underestimated. It would enshrine into law our government's one-for-one rule, a successful system-wide control on regulatory red tape that affects Canadian employers. Treasury Board already takes seriously the practice of opining that rule, but we want to heighten its importance and ensure that it is binding on governments in the future. We want to ensure that Canadians do not face unreasonable red tape when they are simply trying to make a better living for themselves, and creating jobs and economic growth in their communities.

Another important government initiative sets out to strengthen the value of Canadian citizenship. For the first time in more than 35 years, our government is taking action to update the Citizenship Act. Through Bill C-24, the strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act, we are proposing stronger rules around access to Canadian citizenship to underline its true value and ensure that new Canadians are better prepared for full participation in Canadian life. This legislation will be called for debate on Wednesday.

The health and safety of Canadians is something that our government believes is worthy of some extra time and further hard work in the House of Commons.

Tomorrow evening, we will debate Bill C-17, the protecting Canadians from unsafe drugs act. Under Vanessa's law, as we have called it, we are proposing steps to protect Canadian families and children from unsafe medicines. Among other actions, the bill would enable the government to recall unsafe drugs, require stronger surveillance, provide the courts with discretion to impose stronger fines if violations were intentionally caused, and compel drug companies to do further testing on a product. In general, the bill would make sure that the interests of individual Canadians are looked out for and become a major priority when it comes to dealing with new medications and drugs.

Bill C-22, the energy safety and security act, would modernize safety and security for Canada's offshore and nuclear energy industries, thereby ensuring a world-class regulatory system, and strengthening safety and environmental protections. This legislation, at second reading, will be debated on Thursday.

Bill C-3, the safeguarding Canada's seas and skies act, could pass at third reading under the extended hours, so that we can secure these important updates and improvements to transportation law in Canada.

We could also pass the prohibiting cluster munitions act. As the Minister of Foreign Affairs explained at committee, the Government of Canada is committed to ridding the world of cluster munitions. Bill C-6 is an important step in that direction, but it is just the beginning of our work. Extending the relevant elements of the Oslo Convention into domestic law would allow Canada to join the growing list of countries that share that same goal. I hope members of all parties will support us in this worthy objective.

By supporting today's motion, the opposition would also be showing support for Canada's veterans. The extra hours would allow us to make progress on Bill C-27, the veterans hiring act. The measures included in this legislation would create new opportunities for men and women who have served their country to continue working for Canadians through the federal public service. As a nation, we have a responsibility to ensure that veterans have access to a broad range of programs and services to help them achieve new success after their time in uniform is complete. This initiative would do exactly that.

Of course, a quick reading of today's order paper would show that there are still more bills before the House of Commons for consideration and passage. I could go on and on, literally, since I have unlimited time to speak this afternoon, but I will not. Suffice it to say that we have a bold, ambitious, and important legislative agenda to implement. All of these measures are important, and they will improve the lives of Canadians. Each merits consideration and hard work on our part. Canadians expect each one of us to come to Ottawa to work hard, to vote on bills, to make decisions, and to get things done on their behalf.

I hope that opposition parties will be willing to support this reasonable plan and let it come to a vote. I am sure that members opposite would not be interested in going back to their constituents to say that they voted against working a little overtime before the House rises for the summer.

I commend this motion to the House and encourage all hon. members to vote for adding a few hours to our day to continue the work of our productive, orderly, and hard-working Parliament, and deliver real results for Canadians.

Veterans Hiring Act

[Philip Toone, NDP, Gaspésie—Îles-de-la-Madeleine, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to congratulate my colleague for his answers, which are very enlightening. It is obvious that he has given a great deal of thought to this matter.

Some elements of the bill before us were presented recently as Bill C-11. However, that bill was only debated for one day before it died on the order paper. It disappeared. Now it is being revived in part in the bill before us.

Could my colleague tell us what he thinks of the fact that Bill C-11 was abandoned and is being revived as Bill C-23? Is the government failing to take things seriously by introducing bills and then abandoning them almost immediately? Are we to take this bill seriously or not?

Democratic Reform

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, we know at this point that Bill C-23 has gone through the House, but I continue to receive petitions from people across Canada asking for the bill to be more substantially reworked in order to meet the purpose of a fair elections act.

I table these petitions today from the residents of Nepean.

Grouping of Amendments to Bill C-23

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am rising in the House today on a point of order arising out of the impending report stage votes on Bill C-23, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act and other acts and to make consequential amendments to certain acts.

In particular, I want to address the groupings of motions for debate at this stage. As you know, Mr. Speaker, the NDP has already raised points of order on this topic in the House, for example with respect to the report stage of Bill C-45 in November 2012.

In light of the Chair's decision then to group many amendments together for single votes, I feel obligated to rise today to speak on this subject once again. In part what I want to affirm today is the Chair's role to protect members' rights to exercise their duties as members of Parliament, including the right to vote freely on questions that are put to the House.

I would like to quote House of Commons Procedure and Practice, the second edition, O'Brien and Bosc, which states on page 307 that:

It is the responsibility of the Speaker to act as the guardian of the rights and privileges of Members and of the House as an institution.

On the same page it reads that:

Freedom of speech may be the most important of the privileges accorded to Members of Parliament....

O'Brien and Bosc, a bit later in the same chapter on page 316, note that voting in the House according to a member's conscience is a freedom that all members enjoy in this House, including the Speaker on rare occasions, as you know, Mr. Speaker.

I hope that when I finish speaking, you will agree to let members vote separately on all the motions in amendment at report stage of Bill C-23.

The principle of a free vote is a simple one, Mr. Speaker, one with which everyone in our democracy should be familiar. I am sure that the majority of Canadians who are watching us right now are surprised to see that I must rise today in the House to ask you to ensure that this right is respected when we vote on the motions in amendment at report stage of Bill C-23.

Because this particular bill is of foundational importance to our democracy, this question becomes all the more crucial. Bill C-23 would make significant changes to our electoral laws, and as they currently stand, in many cases these changes damage the letter and spirit of the Elections Act. As well, as we learned after weeks of scrutiny, a majority of Canadians and virtually all electoral experts are opposed to the bill.

With this much on the line, I believe that it is more important than ever to safeguard members' rights to vote separately on all of the motions in amendment that will affect the bill.

As you know, Mr. Speaker, Standing Order 76.1(5) states that:

The Speaker shall have the power to select or combine amendments or clauses to be proposed at the report stage...

The note following the Standing Order adds that:

...the Speaker will not select for debate a motion or series of motions of a repetitive, frivolous or vexatious nature or of a nature that would serve merely to prolong unnecessarily proceedings at the report stage...

It is therefore clear that when you select a motion for debate at report stage, this means that it is not of a repetitive, frivolous or vexatious nature, contrary to what the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons likes to say again and again.

However, nothing in the Standing Orders provides that the Speaker must group the motions at report stage for votes on very different issues. There is nothing about the Chair grouping amendments in an effort to spare the government from lengthy votes.

In the annotated Standing Orders of the House of Commons on page 264, the commentary on Standing Order 76(5) does note that the Speaker has a role in limiting duplication when it states:

When the Speaker selects and groups report stage motions for debate, he or she also decides on how they will be grouped for voting.

A further comment is made that this avoids the House having to vote twice on the same issue. The same explanation is given in House of Commons Procedure and Practice on page 784:

When the Speaker selects and groups motions in amendment, he or she also decides on how they will be grouped for voting....

I underscore that it is to avoid the House having to vote twice on the same issue.

It seems to me that these explanations are very clear. The selected scheme must ensure that the House does not vote twice on the same issue.

However, I would submit that the voting scheme that has been selected for report stage motions on Bill C-23 goes much further than this very clear instruction. While it is critical that the Speaker not allow the House's time to be wasted, the Speaker must also fulfill his duty to ensure that the right of members to free speech is protected and exercised to the fullest possible extent.

Specifically, when it comes to the report stage motions for Bill C-23, NDP MPs put 110 motions on the notice paper to delete the worst clauses of the bill, in our consideration, and to also delete the clauses that the committee did not have a chance to debate before the government's motion cut off committee proceedings during clause-by-clause consideration of the bill.

Of those 110 motions, the Liberal Party submitted motions to delete 46 of the same clauses of the bill as our MPs. However, with regard to 54 of the clauses that we moved to delete, Liberals did not. I think it is reasonable to assume that the Liberal MPs would want to vote in favour of the motions that they also submitted, but would likely want to vote against the motions that they chose not to submit. It is the groupings for voting that puts them in this dilemma of choosing a single vote for all 110 motions; those that they submitted and those that they may not be in favour of.

The same problem exists for the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands. She put 13 motions on notice, which were identical to our motions, but 97 of our motions that are grouped along with them were not submitted by the member. It seems logical to me that she too will be put in conflict by having to choose one vote for both parts of this enormous equation; those that she submitted and those that she did not.

What is essentially happening is that the Chair is taking clear, valid, individual questions, and putting them to the House as double-barrelled questions, or, in some cases, questions with many more barrels than two. Looking online, a quick Google search reminds us of what a double-barrelled question is, why it is a breach of the rules of logic, and what kind of absurd results it can yield.

The opening line of the Wikipedia entry for “double-barreled question”, and we could go to any other dictionary as well, tells us that, “A double-barreled question is an informal fallacy. It is committed when someone asks a question that touches upon more than one issue, yet allows only for one answer”. One asks two separate questions, but only allows for one answer. That sounds a lot like the situation we are facing here.

The next line tells us, “This may result in inaccuracies in the attitudes being measured for the question, as the respondent can answer only one of the two questions, and cannot indicate which one is being answered”. Again, for report stage on Bill C-23, this sounds very familiar.

These are very basic rules of logical reasoning that are being breached, rules that are necessary to avoid inaccuracies.

Mr. Speaker, on December 12, 2012, in your ruling on the point of order regarding the report stage of Bill C-45, you said that your decisions were not based exclusively on written rules, but also on the evolutionary nature of procedure and precedents.

At that point, you cited a ruling by Speaker Milliken, delivered on April 27, 2010:

...the Chair is always mindful of the established precedents, usages, traditions and practices of the House and of the role of the Chair in their ongoing evolution.

To this, you added:

This not only confirms that it is not just written rules from which the Speaker’s authority is legitimately derived, as suggested by the opposition House leader, but that the evolutionary nature of procedure must be taken into account. It was on this basis of the House’s longstanding acceptance, and in fact expectations, of the practices at report stage, in conjunction with the need for adaptation to the current context, that the amendments for Bill C-45 were grouped for debate and voting purposes in the manner that they were.

Mr. Speaker, I believe that this matter and your decision on it are of fundamental importance to our democracy and its cornerstone, this House of Commons. I look forward to your ruling.

Democratic Reform

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

Mr. Speaker, the second petition is a series of petitions, all together, from Canadians across the country, most on the west coast and the prairies.

The petitioners object to Bill C-23, the so-called fair elections act. They ask that this Parliament not pass the bill and that we start over again with a bill that ultimately would be fair.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I have two petitions to present to the House, signed by Albertans.

The first petition calls upon parliamentarians to stand up for Canadian democracy, reject Bill C-23, and bring forward genuine electoral reform that would stop fraud and would ensure every Canadian could exercise the right to vote.

Business of the House

[Peter Van Loan, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his question. I think it is appropriate that perhaps it shall be nominated for a fiction award, perhaps for the Governor General's award under the category of fantasy. It bore little relation to anything I have heard or seen anywhere around here in the past week.

However, I am prepared to provide some factual responses on what we will be doing in the week ahead.

This afternoon we will continue the third reading debate on Bill C-5, the Offshore Health and Safety Act. If we wrap that up before 6:30, we will resume this morning’s third reading debate on Bill C-3, the Safeguarding Canada's Seas and Skies Act.

Tomorrow, the House will not sit in order to accommodate the events of the National Day of honour. Hon. members will recognize those Canadians who served in Afghanistan and, particularly, those who made the ultimate sacrifice. Those ceremonies on Parliament Hill will be the cornerstone of the nation's commemorations. There will be significant events all across Canada, in which all Canadians are welcome to participate.

Next week, on Monday, we will conclude the report stage of Bill C-23, the Fair Elections Act. Tuesday will see third reading and final passage of the bill. Wednesday and Thursday shall be the sixth and seventh allotted days. On both occasions, we will debate New Democratic motions.

Friday, May 16 will see Bill C-27, the veterans hiring act, debated at second reading.

Finally, Wednesday, May 14 shall be the day appointed, pursuant to Standing Order 81(4)(a), for the consideration of the main estimates related to Finance for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2015.

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Speaker, unfortunately, last week and this week, we saw a host of unprecedented attacks by this government. It makes us wonder what is in store for next week.

The government and the Prime Minister attacked the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Before that there were attacks on Kevin Page, the Chief Electoral Officer and even Sheila Fraser. The Chief Justice has now joined the group of eminent Canadians who have been criticized by this government.

Now, as we saw earlier, the government is even attacking our democracy. It is limiting MPs' speaking time after 10 minutes of debate on the electoral “deform”, Bill C-23. After 10 minutes of debate, the Conservatives informed us that they would be reducing MPs' speaking time. Thus they have cut the speaking time of 290 MPs representing 290 ridings across the country.

After the attacks this week against the Chief Justice and the attacks we have seen in the past against Kevin Page and Marc Mayrand, and even Sheila Fraser, a Canadian hero; after the attacks on democracy that we saw this morning, with the government imposing, after 10 minutes of debate on Bill C-23, the unfair elections act, time allocation of closure and forcing that through this morning; after these deplorable attacks, the question is very simple. Will the Conservatives stop their attacks on eminent Canadians who happen to disagree with them and what will the government do in the next week to restore badly shattered public confidence in the government?

Bill C-23—Time Allocation Motion

[Alexandrine Latendresse, NDP, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I have many questions I would like to ask the minister because this bill is so problematic and contains so many elements that will undermine our democracy.

A little earlier on, the minister mentioned the number of hours we had to examine this bill in committee. The reality is that all of the witnesses who came to talk about Bill C-23 pointed out the various problems with it and spoke about how it would be a real problem for our Canada Elections Act. In their opinion, there are many provisions that will not have the intended effect.

I think it is terrible that the minister is quoting the Chief Electoral Officer to justify the fact that he is now limiting the debate, because the Chief Electoral Officer himself came to committee to talk about just how many problems this bill will cause if it is passed.

As a result, I would like the minister to explain how he plans to continue introducing this type of bill when Bill C-23 does not even make any improvements to the Canada Elections Act. None of the requests made by the Commissioner of Canada Elections and the Chief Electoral Officer regarding this bill were granted, and I do not understand why.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member is complaining that I am repeating my answers. I do not change them because the truth does not change. I keep repeating the truth.

The debate is on the issue of identification. Under the fair elections act, we will require people to show some ID in order to vote.

The NDP believes that people should be able to vote without showing any ID. None whatsoever. They think that people could simply vote by getting someone to vouch for them.

That does not make sense, and Canadians agree with us on that. Vouching will no longer be an option. People will have to show ID in order to vote, and Canadians overwhelmingly agree that this makes sense.

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Speaker, this is absolutely disgusting. This is the 63rd time they have used time allocation or closure to shut down debate. As we know, the government cannot seem to come up with bills that hold water.

In the past six weeks, the Supreme Court has rejected four government bills. I think that we are heading the same way with Bill C-23. I think the people will reject it, and so will the judicial system.

We are talking about 130 amendments that have been tabled to this bad bill, 130 amendments that were supposed to be considered by Parliament, and we got notice of time allocation after 10 minutes of debate for 130 amendments.

Mr. Speaker, as you know, the result of this closure, this steamroller that the government is putting in, because it realizes now just what the reaction has been from the public across the country, is that 290 members of Parliament will not be permitted to speak on the bill. For those who choose to vote for this motion, Conservative MPs are muzzling themselves. They are muzzling 290 ridings across this country.

My question is very simple. What kind of disdain comes from a government that invokes closure after 10 minutes of debate and why is the government muzzling 290 members of Parliament on this bill?

Report Stage Amendments—Speaker's Ruling

[The Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

Before addressing the selection and grouping of report stage motions for Bill C-23, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and other Acts, I would like to address the point of order raised on May 6, 2014, by the hon. member for Saanich—Gulf Islands.

I would like to thank the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands for raising this matter as well as the Government Leader in the House, the House leader of the official opposition, and the members for Toronto—Danforth, Bas-Richelieu—Nicolet—Bécancour, and Winnipeg North for their comments.

The member for Saanich—Gulf Islands raised concerns that the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs adopted a motion requiring all remaining questions necessary to dispose of its clause-by-clause consideration of the bill to be put by a specified time, effectively creating a deadline for the debate to end. She argued that this motion contradicts an earlier committee order adopted on October 29, 2013, which gives members from non-recognized parties the ability to speak to their suggested amendments to bills before they are voted on by the committee. Because of the imposed deadline, the member's opportunity to speak to her amendments was interfered with, pursuant to the committee order of October 29, 2013. As such, the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands suggested that substantive amendments, even if already voted on by the committee, should be selected for consideration at report stage. Several members rose in support of the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands' point of order.

The government House leader made two central points in response. First, he reminded the House that at report stage the Speaker's authority to select report stage amendments is limited to determining whether they were presented, or could have been presented at committee. Second, he pointed out that the deadline adopted by the committee affected all members the same way, so it is inaccurate to claim that members from unrecognized parties and independents were particularly penalized in this regard.

In examining the matter, it is useful to remind the House of the power of the Speaker to select amendments at report stage. To place the matter in its proper context, it is helpful to refer to the March 21, 2001, statement by Speaker Milliken, found at page 1991 of the Debates, which establishes the guidelines upon which I rely to discharge my responsibility to select amendments at report stage. Speaker Milliken was clear in his intent when he urged:

…all members and all parties to avail themselves fully of the opportunity to propose amendments during committee stage so that the report stage can return to the purpose for which it was created, namely for the House to consider the committee report and the work the committee has done…

These principles are also reflected in the interpretive notes attached to Standing Orders 76(5) and 76.1(5). House of Commons Procedure and Practice, second edition, further expands on these principles, explaining at pages 783 and 784 that:

…the Speaker will normally only select motions in amendment that could not have been presented in committee.

I would remind all members that the guidelines for selection specify whether amendments could have been presented in committee and whether they were defeated in committee. In the case of the committee's consideration of Bill C-23, all members of the committee, as well as any interested independent member, were given the opportunity to present their amendments at committee, and a certain number of these amendments were defeated. The hon. member is now asking the Chair, in exercising its powers of selection, to evaluate whether the consideration afforded such amendments in committee was sufficient.

It is evident that the committee chose to handle its consideration of Bill C-23 in a particular way. A motion setting out the process to be followed was proposed, debated, and ultimately agreed to. Just as the opportunity to present and speak to amendments was decided by way of a committee motion, the deadline by which debate would end likewise was decided by a committee motion. Such decisions are the exclusive responsibility of the committee. I do not believe that it is for the Chair to second-guess how committees choose to manage their business.

The hon. member has asked that I select motions for consideration at report stage because she was not able to debate them in committee. In doing so, she referred to a ruling I gave on December 12, 2012, whereby I noted that I would continue to select motions from independent members at report stage until such time as a satisfactory method was found for them to participate in the clause-by-clause consideration at committee. I understand that the hon. member found unsatisfactory the opportunities afforded to her at the procedure and House affairs committee in relation to Bill C-23. Other members of the committee echoed they too were not satisfied that certain amendments were not debated once the committee's self-imposed deadline was reached. That said, it remains clear to me that the committee considered and voted on all amendments she is asking me to select.

In 2006, Speaker Milliken dealt with a somewhat analogous situation in relation to Bill C-24, the Softwood Lumber Products Export Charge Act.

On November 6, 2006, the hon. member for Burnaby-New Westminster raised a point of order regarding the decision of the Standing Committee on International Trade to limit debate and set a strict deadline by which point debate would end.

Though the situation was different insofar as he was a member of the committee concerned, I believe Speaker Milliken's response, found on page 4756 of Debates, was instructive:

I do think that committees are masters of their own procedure. They are entitled to make provisions in adopting orders in the committee that govern the way they are going to conduct their business...The committee is allowed to make amendments to the bill. The committee has imposed rules on how those amendments will be dealt with in the committee and how members will be able to address the issues raised by the amendments. It seems to me that [it] is entirely within the jurisdiction of the committee and indeed [it] is [a] quite normal exercise of its powers.

When the bill was taken up at report stage, the member for Burnaby—New Westminster submitted a large number of the amendments that had been defeated in committee, and asked the Chair to select them on the basis that they had not been debated in committee.

In a ruling I gave as Acting Speaker on November 21, 2006, found on page 5125 of Debates, I declined to do so, reminding the House that:

...the Chair selects motions which further amend an amendment adopted by a committee, motions which make consequential changes based on an amendment adopted by a committee and motions which delete a clause.Aside from this, the Chair is loath to select motions unless a member makes a compelling argument for selection based on the exceptional significance of the amendment.

As far as the Chair is concerned, in keeping with past precedents, I cannot see how the imposition of a deadline for the end of the debate could constitute a justifiable argument for the selection of amendments at report stage that were already presented and defeated in committee.

Report Stage Amendments

[Peter Van Loan, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I want to respond to the point of order that has been raised.

I want to go back to the very start where the hon. member misapprehends the basis that existed previously, and still continues to exist, for the making of amendments at report stage.

The right to make an amendment at report stage exists using the test of whether it possible to make that amendment at committee. It is only possible to propose such an amendment if it were not possible to do so at committee. That is the test. For independent members, because they were not members of the committee, that was what gave them the right to make any amendment whatsoever at report stage previously, and that was what led us into these voteathons. It was not because there was some rule somewhere that said independent members had rights over and above those of all other members of the House. That was never the case. It was because of the application of the test of whether the amendment could be made at committee.

After a series of rulings and voteathons, Mr. Speaker, you essentially provided to the House, through your rulings, a road map on which committees have since acted to empower independent members to propose such amendments at committee itself. Committees do not have to, but they have in many cases chosen to create that ability in independent members to allow them to make amendments at committee, and that is the situation in which we are commencing.

It should be understood that this is not some right that independent members have that was taken away through a fake process. That is rather insulting to the realities of what occurred here. What occurred here is the application of the rules of the House and the positive encouragement of the Speaker for how those rules could facilitate the full participation of members.

In terms of the particular context of the proceedings at procedure and House affairs committee on Bill C-23, the member is making a request for rights at that committee that no other member of the House has, no other member of the committee would have, no other member of a political party that does not sit on the committee would have. She is saying essentially that she should have a right over and above all of them.

Many members made amendments. They spoke to those amendments at committee, the committee dealt with them, and the clause-by-clause consideration, as I understood it, went on over days. Not at one time in the committee in order to meet its deadlines and manage the bill to achieve the deadlines it had set for itself, did it set up a process wherein the committee would then proceed finally to votes on any remaining not considered clauses at that 5 p.m. deadline.

Before that deadline, I understand the member spoke to dozens of amendments that she had proposed. She was not denied an opportunity to do that at committee. She was afforded an opportunity to speak to literally dozens of amendments she had proposed, so were other members. However, when the period of time ran out, it applied equally to all members, members of the government who were proposing amendments, members of the opposition who were proposing amendments, members of any other political party who were proposing amendments, and to herself. She was treated on an equal basis, the same basis, fairly, as every other member.

What you are being asked to do, Mr. Speaker, is not defend the rights of the minority, but rather impose extra rights over top of those enjoyed by all other members of this place in favour of just that member or of independent members of the House to give them magical powers that nobody else should have. That, of course, is not the intent. That is not the role of the Speaker. That is not the effect of these rules. I put it to you that this is not something that you should accept in this case.

There is not an argument for treating and giving special additional rights. The approach as it has evolved and the process in which it has evolved has shown great wisdom in an iterative process. Obviously, you did not accede in some of my requests previously as to how this matter should be dealt with, Mr. Speaker, and we accepted those rulings and took the good advice and came up with a process that achieved those balanced objectives.

Now we are hearing a request to upset that balance, to say that everyone else, members of the government, members of the official opposition, by virtue of being members of a party will have to adhere to these rules that are established at a committee and that she, as an independent, member should have additional rights to speak to debate over and above those that everyone else has. That is simply not the case.

The fact is that there are many members in the House who do not sit on the committee and do not get to speak at all. Therefore, she already sits in a privileged position compared with them and now she seeks an even more privileged position with regard to the proceedings of the committee over and above every other member of the House. I simply do not think that is appropriate.

The committee is master of its own process, and it did that. She acknowledged herself that the chair did so in a very fair and even-handed manner, and that is how it should be seen. It should be respected. That is why I submit, Mr. Speaker, that you should not accept the proposition that has been put forward in the point of order by the member.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I rise at this time on a point of order to address and advance my rights at report stage under Bill C-23, the fair elections act.

Mr. Speaker, you will recall this is a narrative that has come up a few times in terms of the rights of members of Parliament in positions like mine, members of Parliament of a smaller party that does not yet have 12 members and has not yet become recognized in that sense, and the rights of independent members of Parliament. We know the principles here: that in theory all members of Parliament are equal and that we are here as members of Parliament, as many of your rulings have attested, Mr. Speaker, with the right and responsibility to turn our attention to every single piece of legislation that goes through this place and to have a meaningful opportunity to present amendments to improve legislation.

My intention with this point of order is not to draw it out. I will be as succinct as I possibly can be. I would like to review the factual situation in which I find myself and then distinguish for you the current situation from the normal situation within committees.

The situation in which I find myself is that owing to the rules of parliamentary procedure, members of Parliament in my position—either members of smaller parties or independents—on the face of it have a right to present substantive amendments at report stage because we are not allowed to be full members, or members at all, of parliamentary committees.

Mr. Speaker, since you will recall it, I will not drag out with precedents and reminders of citations the occasion on which the hon. government House leader attempted in November 2012 to suggest that persons such as me—and in fact he referred to the member of Parliament for Saanich—Gulf Islands as the impetus for his efforts—should not be allowed to present substantive amendments at report stage but should put forward a test amendment, and if that one failed, none of the rest of the amendments would be heard at all.

Mr. Speaker, you ruled in December 2012 that this would not be sufficient. You cited with approval the words of former Speaker John Fraser, who on October 10, 1989, said that “...we are a parliamentary democracy, not a so-called executive democracy, nor a so-called administrative democracy.”

You went on to say, Mr. Speaker, that since I did not have the right to present any amendments at committee, I must have the right to present them at report stage. Then your ruling went on to create something of a crack in the door that said that if a “satisfactory mechanism” can be found for a member in a position such as mine to have amendments considered at committee, then I would not have a double ability to come back at report stage.

Mr. Speaker, the Conservatives in the House used that crack in the door from your December 2012 ruling to great effect. They created identical motions that were presented by Conservative members of Parliament in every committee right after the Speech from the Throne in the fall of 2013, and I have been living under that new set of rules.

Since my point of order at the moment deals specifically with the House committee on procedure and House affairs, I can refer to its motion, although in point of fact all the motions passed by every committee were identical. This was a motion put forward and approved by the committee on October 29, 2013. I will not read all of it. I will just summarize it.

If I and other members in my position want to have amendments considered for legislation, we must present them to the committee 48 hours ahead of when the committee begins clause-by-clause study, and the committee process will deem that the motions were moved, because not being a member of the committee, I of course cannot move them. As well, I cannot debate them and I cannot participate fully before the committee during testimony of witnesses.

I do not believe that this process is satisfactory at all. Mr. Speaker, the intent of your decision in the fall of 2012 was clear: that the process should be satisfactory to both the committee and to members in my situation.

However, I have lived with this set of rules. I am doing my best to live with this set of rules. I have endeavoured to present amendments 48 hours ahead of clause by clause and to participate, even within the very tight strictures of the rules.

However, here is the key one. At paragraph (c):

(c) during the clause-by-clause consideration of a Bill, the Chair shall allow a Member who filed suggested amendments, pursuant to paragraph (a), an opportunity to make brief representations in support of them.

Forgive me for taking a moment to say the following. The chair of the procedure and House affairs committee dealing with Bill C-23 did an exemplary job. He was fair to a fault and did an extraordinary job in terms of his personal efforts to maintain an amicable atmosphere among all parties in a very controversial and highly charged bill. I do not for one moment blame the chair for the fact that he was prevented from fulfilling a condition, a condition precedent to anything that then occurred with my involvement in committee.

I presented my amendments. They were deemed to be put forward, but I was denied in the case of the surviving 11 amendments, which were past the point of 5:00 p.m. last Thursday. There was no debate allowed on my amendments, and I was prevented from making any representation, brief or otherwise, on my amendments.

I want to go back for a moment to the normal situation. I think that many in this place, particularly some who want to deny me my rights at this point, will go back to the default position that a committee is the master of its own affairs. A committee made the decision; the committee decided it had to finish its work by five o'clock by debate so that by midnight all the clause by clause could be through. It really does not matter that democracy in this place is diminished by such a rule. The idea is that the committee made the rule and the Speaker cannot interfere.

This condition, this situation, is remarkably different. It is completely distinguished from and different from the ruling that, for instance, you gave in relation to the member for Kings—Hants, who complained of a similar process. Your ruling of November 29, 2012, deals with that particular set of parameters, a committee process in which the Speaker is not engaged. The Speaker, as I know is the usual wisdom, has no business interfering with the business of committee, because the committees are the masters of their own affairs—except in this instance.

It is only owing to your ruling that my rights at report stage can be infringed, my rights at report stage can be reduced, my rights at report stage can be essentially eliminated if a process, pursuant to your ruling, is found to be satisfactory. Only due to your ruling was this new process invented. The new process states unequivocally that the chair shall allow a member with diminished rights, no ability to participate fully, no ability to vote, no ability to even move my own amendments, no ability to ask the witnesses questions. It is a very circumscribed, limited, and I think in some ways fraudulent opportunity.

However, there is a minimum thing that this motion passed in every committee insists upon for every amendment that I have put forward for clause-by-clause consideration as a member of Parliament, with rights equal to everyone in this place. The same applies for the other independents, whether Edmonton—St. Albert, Peterborough, the members who represent the Bloc Québécois, other members within the Green Party, or the member for Ahuntsic: we have the right to work on every bill in this place, whether we are members of committee or not.

This new construct has been created. We have put ourselves within it. Many of us, not just myself, have worked very hard to present amendments during clause by clause, knowing that we will have at a minimum 60 seconds per amendment to describe our amendments and argue for them.

In this instance, I submit to you that the Conservative majority is hoist by its own petard. It cannot shut down debate at five o'clock on a Thursday and gavel through everything, thus precluding independents and smaller parties from presenting their amendments later at report stage. It can have one or the other; it cannot have both.

It forced us into this process of running from committee to committee for clause-by-clause study. At a minimum we must be allowed to present our amendments in the committee. If that right is removed unilaterally, then I submit to you that there is no question but that we revert to the general rules of parliamentary procedure, those found in O'Brien and Bosc, which are very clear that members of Parliament in my position and others in smaller parties and independents have a right to present substantive amendments at report stage. That is what I intend to do tomorrow.

I urge and I hope that you will rule that because the committee failed to live up to its own motion, it is no longer a situation of the committee making its own rules.

The committee has constructed this fake opportunity and herded members of Parliament from smaller parties and independents. We are exhorted—not just encouraged and invited, but in a sense coerced—into a process not of our choosing.

Mr. Speaker, since it was owing to your ruling that this fake process was invented, at a minimum they have to live up to it. If they fail to, then it reverts to our normal rule that we have the right to present amendments at report stage in clause-by-clause consideration of Bill C-23.

Procedure and House Affairs

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the 11th report of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs in relation to Bill C-23, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to certain Acts.

The committee has studied the bill and has decided to report the bill back to the House with amendments. I might add that there was a great deal of work and we owe a great deal of thanks to our professional clerks and analysts for all the help the committee had. The committee members worked together on a tough issue with over 70 witnesses and many briefs. I thank them all.

Democratic Reform

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Minister of State (Democratic Reform)]

Mr. Speaker, the parties are already required to submit receipts following an election.

First of all, there is a mandatory audit, and the fair elections act provides for an additional audit that will require parties to submit their receipts to the auditor.

Second, the Chief Electoral Officer is not required to give the parties the money before he gets all the money he needs to audit their spending.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Minister of State (Democratic Reform)]

Mr. Speaker, we will review the ruling that was just rendered, but we will not support the NDP's proposals to allow people to vote without any identification.

The fair elections act will eliminate the use of vouching. Once this bill is passed, people will have to show ID, and Canadians agree with that.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Mr. Speaker, my final petition is from Albertans who are calling on the government to reject Bill C-23 and bring forward a bill that includes genuinely empowering Elections Canada to address fraud and to investigate robocalls.

[Alexandrine Latendresse, NDP, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the truth is that in committee, the Conservatives rejected any change that would have truly improved their botched bill. They voted against the amendments that would have forced call centres to hand over to the CRTC the telephone numbers contacted and the transcripts of the calls. They voted against the amendments to limit the influence of money on political parties and to give Elections Canada real investigative powers. It is ridiculous.

With Bill C-23, the Elections Act is going to be worse than it is now. Why is the government forcing legislation down our throats that will set us back many years?

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, last night the Conservatives delivered its Bill C-23 punchline in the mockery they have made of Parliament and of the committee process.

New Democrats listened to experts. We went out and heard from ordinary Canadians. We came to the table in good faith with over 100 common-sense amendments that would improve the bill. Last night the Conservatives shut down the committee without even hearing half of them. It is a farce.

Will the minister accept some reasonable amendments at report stage, or will he trample ahead with the same arrogance that got him into this mess in the first place?

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, it was not that long ago that I posed a question for the government regarding the manner in which it had verbally assaulted Canada's Chief Electoral Officer.

I find it most interesting. It was not that long ago, maybe an hour or so, that I was in the procedure and house affairs committee, where I was being forced to vote. I was being forced to vote because the government had put in time allocation at 5 o'clock. All debates and discussions related to Canada's election law had come to an end because the government did not want to hear any more. Clause by clause, every clause came to a vote.

I say that because we have gone through a terrible process in changing our election laws. The Conservative government has made the decision to change the way in which our elections will operate, and it took it upon itself to make those changes without any consultation. It did not work with opposition parties. It is the only political party that supported Bill C-23 coming into second reading, and it used its majority to change the election laws.

When I sat on the committee and listened to the many different presenters who came before the committee, one of the most compelling presenters we heard from was the Chief Electoral Officer. He is the individual who is responsible for conducting Canada's elections. Elections Canada is held in high esteem around the world because Canada, generally speaking, is perceived as a country that has assigned a great deal of value to democracy. That independent organization, which is responsible for the administration of our elections, made a presentation. The Chief Electoral Officer came to the committee and expressed the concerns he had regarding what the government wanted to do with our election laws.

He was very clear that the government had missed the boat in many different ways. The most significant way, which I would like to highlight, is that the government did not recognize the need to compel a witness. It was not prepared to allow Elections Canada or the Commissioner of Elections to be able to compel a witness when they believe an election law has been broken, in order to investigate a matter. This is something that other elections agencies at the provincial level in Canada already have. Many of them have it. Elections Canada wanted to be able to do likewise. Why? I believe it is because of the last federal election.

In the last federal election, there were tens of thousands of Canadians who made contact, directly or indirectly, with Elections Canada, talking about problems. They ranged from cheating, to overspending, to robocalls, to the in-and-out scandal. There was a lot. The government's official response, which came from the minister responsible, was a verbal assault on Elections Canada's Chief Electoral Officer.

My follow-up question for the minister is this. Can he explain the reasons for the verbal assault on the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada?

First Nations Control of First Nations Education Act

[Jonathan Genest-Jourdain, NDP, Manicouagan, QC]

Mr. Speaker, let us resume where we left off a few minutes ago.

Following consideration of Bill C-33, as well as the study I did with my colleagues and the meeting that took place two days ago with representatives from APTN and the Assembly of First Nations, in the office of the Leader of the Opposition, I have been telling my colleagues that we need to stand back when first nations take assertive action. They want to be heard and they will very likely mobilize in the upcoming months because of this draft bill on first nations education. By that, I mean let us not try to score political points.

In my last few years in the House, all too often I have noticed that some politicians, regardless of their party affiliation, usually try to score political points at public gatherings. Given the identity issue that is primarily at stake in this bill, namely first nations education, we must act judiciously. That is why first nations must be front and centre and their assertive action, their own arguments and their own points must take precedence.

It is also important to recognize that education is chronically underfunded, which naturally affects the quality of education offered in remote first nations communities. Unlike what has been claimed, it is the chronic under-funding that has affected the delivery of education services in most of the remote regions. This contradicts the claims we have heard here and what the bill is trying to imply in a roundabout way, namely that the first nations are responsible for overseeing and maintaining the quality of education and that they should shoulder the blame for their lax approach to integrating and applying the recognized education principles.

Statistics and interventions show that the chronic underfunding has been primarily responsible for the adversity in these communities. My chief said that communities can receive up to 35% less funding than the rest of the Canadian public might receive.

Therefore, the first nations members, teachers, principals, and staff who are responsible for education have had to make do with less funding and under less-than-ideal conditions. The very fact that I am here today and that there has been an increase in the level of education in these communities is evidence of the resilience of first nations members.

The government must also try to get the consent and support of community members when it enacts public policy, which has not been done or has not been done often enough. With this bill and with many others, the Conservatives have shown a rather narrow view of the concept of consultation, research and consent. I have witnessed this in my few years in the House.

That is why members of first nations, who are the primary stakeholders, were only somewhat involved. In fact, their degree of involvement remains unclear to this day. The AFNQL told us that it had not been consulted, and the vast majority of first nations members said the same. That is deeply deplorable considering the nature of the issue, the education of first nations people, which is closely linked to their identity and will ultimately lead to self-determination, a basic principle of our justice system and our parliamentary system. Self-determination of peoples can be achieved only by emancipation through education. That is why primary stakeholders must be involved in the drafting and enactment of this particular kind of bill.

It is important to keep in mind that the honour of the crown and the responsibility of the state are inextricably linked to the enactment of public policies that affect matters relating to the quiddity of being Indian. Identity and quiddity are synonyms, but there are differences. The term “quiddity” is used primarily in a legal and “aboriginal law” context.

The education of first nations is also covered by the fiduciary responsibility that must be observed between the crown and first nations. That is my understanding, and I think that many jurists in the country would agree. As such, attempting to attribute all of the blame for the questionable outcomes of education in these communities to teachers and first nations is quite inappropriate.

Canada is currently in an uncomfortable international spotlight. UN representatives, auditors and rapporteurs have come here over the past two years because our reputation has gone beyond our borders.

Europeans, who know a thing or two about this, decided to come take a look at what is going on with respect to education, housing and food.

I met two of those rapporteurs, so I know that Canada's human rights reputation is suffering worldwide. That is the subject of another debate.

Education is covered by this fiduciary relationship. The honour of the crown and the Government of Canada are involved every time that appalling situations come to light. Just six days ago, I was in an Innu community in Pakuashipi where members mentioned that educational adaptation is necessary, given the distance, remoteness and cultural subtleties of aboriginal communities. Teachers had to adapt out of necessity. Sometimes, children are simply brought into the forest because it is nearby. It is culturally relevant and part of the nomadic cycle and life cycle of these communities. Therefore, adjustments need to be made.

The Government of Canada must consider these specific characteristics when it drafts bills like this. Moreover, when this kind of reform is put forward, stakeholders in the community must truly be involved. Otherwise, it remains an empty shell. In this case, I would go so far as to say that authoritarianism is at play here. I will come back to that later.

The substance of the bill submitted for our consideration today shows this desire to control and interfere that is oftentimes selective. The Conservative government is trying to intervene selectively in the things that might cast an unfavourable light on the situation internationally and on education. Given that the government was exposed, it is trying to intervene in a draconian way, just as it did in many other areas in recent years. I was able to gauge this desire to intervene. The Conservatives are cherry picking, meaning that they intervene in matters that expose them and that are somewhat comfortable to them.

Therefore, the legislative instrument submitted for the consideration of the House was to outline the obligations and responsibilities of the federal government in the provision of education services on reserves, rather than to exonerate the government of its obligations by transferring the horrible consequences of the chronic underfunding of educational institutions to the institutions' local administration.

The narrative presented so far by stakeholders, who are most often Conservative stakeholders, is that the communities and stakeholders are responsible for the quality of education, even though the chronic underfunding has now been calculated. Indeed, the chronic underfunding has been calculated at a rate of 35%. My boss, the Leader of the Opposition, announced that.

I would point out in passing that, under subsection 91(24) of the Constitution Act, the Government of Canada is responsible for Indians and lands reserved for Indians. That is the first building block in our institution.

The government must provide education from kindergarten to grade 12 on reserve, and it must provide measures for post-secondary education. This must involve financial investments wherever they are needed. So far, this dynamic has received the most exposure.

There was tacit recognition in rather oblique language when the Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development announced recently, with a great deal of hype, that there would be a huge financial investment in either 2016 or 2017. Those funds are needed now, not in 2016, because there is a dire need.

Nevertheless, we must acknowledge that this is a step forward. There had been no such recognition up until now. The government therefore took a step forward and indicated that if $2.4 billion—if memory serves—needs to be invested in 2016, that means that this area is now drastically underfunded. Now the question is what other areas will it pilfer from to come up with that money, but that is not my problem.

The selective interventionism and punitive nature of the Conservative government's initiatives clearly illustrate the inadequacy of the “my way or the highway” approach to providing services to the public and meeting government obligations regarding basic rights. I am talking about the punitive nature and selective interventionism because I have seen them first-hand, since I travel around to communities that have asserted their rights and have taken a stand, and are now being punished for it.

This is punishment. The government is simply making cuts. The government finds that the number of students does not correspond to the list that dates back to who knows when, and for that reason it is cutting $460,000 from the budget. For a remote community, that is a lot of money. These are punitive measures. Make no mistake.

Now I will say a few words about the moves the Conservatives keep making to off-load their obligations and their responsibility for government inaction on education for first nations youth by shifting the blame onto local stakeholders who have to deal with difficult conditions and limited resources.

The current government is trying to off-load its obligations not only to Canada's aboriginal peoples, but also in terms of providing services. We saw that with Canada Post. It is trying to off-load its obligations. Service delivery is more or less favourable, more or less on this government's agenda. In any case, the government will have to change its position, what with the general election just around the corner. Soon we will likely see the government handing out goodies, if I may put it that way.

Let me read a subclause that was brought to my attention; it belongs to a different time. The last time I had to analyze a section of legislation that reads a contrario goes back at least 13 or 14 years, when I got into law school. That is certainly a different time, but here it is still: clause 41 of the bill before us today reads as follows:

41. (1) The director of education, the principal, the teachers and the other staff of a school must provide all reasonable assistance to enable the temporary administrator of the school to exercise their powers and perform their functions and must provide any information relevant to the administration of the school that the temporary administrator requires. They must also comply with any direction given by the temporary administrator relating to the administration of the school.

Subclause 2 is where the harm lies:

No proceedings lie against any person referred to in subsection (1) for having in good faith provided the temporary administrator with assistance or information or complied with their directions.

Strangely enough, the title of the subclause is “Immunity”. We know, of course, that the Conservatives often use a word to mean the opposite—they talk of transparency and the Fair Elections Act, even though there is actually nothing very fair about it—and this subclause is no exception. If you read it a contrario, it means that the director of education, the principal, the teachers, and the other staff members of a school can be sued if they do not provide the administrator with assistance in good faith.

It remains to be seen what good faith is and what level of co-operation is adequate in the eyes of the Conservatives and the minister. Ultimately, I very much doubt that the minister will be the one making the assessment. This kind of not-so-veiled threat is really disgraceful. Circumstances will make the Conservatives see that they are not the only ones able to make threats like that. They may have to put up with some heat this summer.

I submit this respectfully.

Business of the House

[Peter Van Loan, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, first, let me acknowledge my colleagues', and I say that in the plural, co-operation with respect to both Bill C-30, the fair rail for grain farmers act, and Bill C-25, the Qalipu Mi'kmaq first nation act, today. We appreciate that co-operation.

This afternoon, we will continue with the second reading debate on Bill C-33, the first nations control of first nations education act. That debate will conclude tomorrow and we will then proceed with a committee study of this important legislation this spring.

Monday shall be the fourth allotted day. We will debate a proposal from the New Democrats.

The Liberals will then get their turn on Tuesday, which shall be the fifth allotted day. I am still waiting to see a proposal from the Liberal leader on the economy. Maybe he is still finessing his newest definition of the middle class. I recommend to him the recent study from the U.S.A., the one that has been widely reported, which demonstrated that the Canadian middle class, according to his recent definition, that is the median income, is doing better than ever in history. For the first time, the Canadian middle class is doing better than its American counterpart. Perhaps we will see that on Tuesday as the subject of debate in the Liberal motion, since they claim that the middle class is their priority.

On Wednesday, we will start the report stage debate on Bill C-23, the fair elections act. I want to take this time to acknowledge the hard work of the members of the procedure and House affairs committee. My friend was just talking about the hard work they have been undertaking and the difficult pressure they are under. Largely, it should be said, it is a result of the lengthy filibuster, of which the New Democrats were so proud, at the start, whereby the committee lost many days, when it could have heard witnesses.

Notwithstanding that loss of work, those delay tactics, and the obstruction by the New Democrats, the committee has got on with its work. It heard from almost 70 witnesses. It had over 30 hours of meetings. Now it has gone on to complete about a dozen or so hours of detailed study of the clauses of the bill and the government's reasonable and common-sense amendments to the bill. I expect that it will complete that work shortly.

Despite the long hours the committee members are putting in, I know that they will be keenly anticipating the appearance, before the next constituency week, of the Leader of the Opposition at that same committee. That will, of course, be in compliance with the House order adopted on March 27 respecting the allegations of inappropriate spending and the use of House of Commons resources by the New Democratic Party. There the hon. member for Outremont will have the opportunity to answer many important questions of interest to all Canadians, including, I am sure, some questions from his own caucus members, who have been dragged into the scheme the NDP leader has put in place.

Finally, on Thursday morning, we will consider Bill C-3, the safeguarding Canada's seas and skies act, at report stage and third reading. After question period, we will resume the third reading debate on Bill C-8.

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Speaker, this was not a good month for this government: three of its bills were rejected by the courts because they were flawed.

Given that the government is routinely invoking time allocation and closure, the work on the bills has been sloppy.

This morning, another flawed bill, Bill C-30, was sent back to committee because this government did not do a good job in the first place. Mr. Speaker, you were obliged to reject the manner in which the government put in place this bill.

The government's process is not working. The courts and even the Speaker of the House have to call this government to order.

Now the government seems to be doing the same thing with Bill C-23, the unfair elections act. The committee was working to address many of the problems that exist in the bill. The NDP, as it always does, offered sound amendments to bring forward on this bill so that it would actually work for Canadians and Canadian democracy. However, we have the government now setting an artificial deadline. When the committee still has over 200 pages of the bill to scrutinize and still has hundreds of amendments to consider, the government is saying that the committee has to finish its work within just a few hours.

This is obviously going to be another bill that the government is going to screw up. How can the government expect bills to stand up to scrutiny if it will not allow proper scrutiny in committee and in the House?

My question is very simple. What will the Conservatives do next week to start restoring the confidence of Canadians that has been sorely lost by the amount of botched legislation we have seen coming from the government?

41st General Election

[Robert Chisholm, NDP, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I am happy to present a petition on behalf of members of my constituency and many Nova Scotians beyond, including South Shore—St. Margaret's, who call on the government to reject Bill C-23 and bring forward genuine electoral reform that will stop fraud, prevent big money from distorting elections, and ensure every Canadian can exercise their right to vote.

Democratic Reform

[Bruce Hyer, Green, Thunder Bay—Superior North, ON]

Mr. Speaker, unfortunately, the hon. member is in error about the position of the NDP on this issue. It has always been in favour of proportional representation and still is.

Bill C-23 will be back before the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs late tonight. The leader of the Green Party will be tabling substantial amendments to this very flawed bill and we all hope that Bill C-23 looks very different when it returns to the House.

My question this evening has not really been answered. I and hundreds of thousands of Canadians would like a proper response. Will the Conservatives fix the crisis in Canadian democracy resulting from the antiquated and anti-democratic electoral system that discards half the votes cast in every election?

There is no evidence of voter fraud in Canada, but there is lots of evidence of electoral unfairness in the way the government abuses an already flawed electoral system.

I will ask again. Will the Conservative government ensure equal and effective votes for all Canadians through a more proportional electoral system?

[Bruce Hyer, Green, Thunder Bay—Superior North, ON]

Mr. Speaker, on March 25, I asked during question period whether the minister would fix the real electoral problem and make our electoral system more proportional. The answer I received at the time was completely irrelevant to the question that I posed. I hope the parliamentary secretary will attempt to provide a more on-topic response this evening.

Unamended, Bill C-23 could have prevented thousands of Canadians from voting, and likely violated the charter in the process. I am pleased to see that the minister of state has finally agreed to amend at least some of the most anti-democratic aspects of this legislation, but only after thousands upon thousands of Canadians stood up against this bill.

However, the fact remains, that the real problem facing Canadian democracy is our first-past-the-post, antiquated, unfair, and undemocratic electoral system, which delivered 100% of the power to the party that received less than 40% of the vote in the last election. What is the primary symptom of that? Many Canadians believe their vote will not count, and increasingly they remain home on election day. Too few voters is our problem in Canada, not too many. As many voters stayed home during the last election as voted for the governing party. This appears to suit the Conservatives just fine.

What is the solution to this crisis in our democracy? The answer is to move to a more proportional voting system where every vote counts, and all Canadians have a genuine opportunity to have an equal say in selecting their government. First-past-the-post probably harms the electoral prospects of the Greens more than any other party. For example, in 2011, despite receiving almost 600,000 Canadian votes, the Green Party of Canada was only allowed one member in Parliament. In a proportional system where every vote counted, as in the vast majority of countries with real elections, these same 600,000 Canadians would have elected 12 Green members to Parliament.

However, our electoral system does not target only Greens; it disenfranchises voters from coast to coast to coast whose ballots, whether cast for Conservatives, New Democrats or Liberals, are not reflected at all in the make-up of the House of Commons today. This huge group of Canadians of all political stripes cheated out of their votes adds up to approximately half of all eligible voters. Can we really be surprised that 40% of Canadians could not be bothered to cast a ballot in 2011?

However, there may be hope. I see hope in the thousands of Canadians who spoke out against the Conservatives' unfair elections act, forcing them to accept amendments to Bill C-23. I also see hope in the widespread support that has greeted the important private member's bill, the reform act by the Conservative MP for Wellington—Halton Hills, which would allow MPs to return to working for their constituents.

After eight years under this administration, these questions are increasingly understood as central to the health of our democracy. Electoral reform and restraining the centralized power of the Prime Minister and other party leaders must be understood as central to fixing the crisis in Canadian democracy and restoring Canadians' faith in our government.

I ask this question again. Rather than attempting to invent some fake plague of voter fraud, are the Conservatives prepared to fix the real problem facing Canadian democracy? And what are they prepared to do to ensure that every vote actually counts?

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservatives failed to submit an amendment to Bill C-23 to give the Commissioner of Canada Elections the power to compel testimony. Well, I wonder why.

The Conservative Party knew that the commissioner did not have this power, and that is why it ordered other Conservatives not to co-operate in the investigation of election frauds.

Liberals have submitted the amendments.

Will the minister finally do the right thing and support this amendment, or will he continue to protect Conservatives from election fraud investigations?

[Alexandrine Latendresse, NDP, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, even with its amendments, the government still refuses to budge on giving more powers to elections investigators. The former commissioner of Canada elections, William Corbett, was very clear in committee. He said that there was nothing in Bill C-23 that will enhance the ability of the commissioner to investigate alleged cases of fraud.

Why is the minister content to have a commissioner of Canada Elections whose hands are tied behind his back? Why is he more concerned about protecting fraudsters than protecting the integrity of the election process?

[Alexandrine Latendresse, NDP, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, although the Conservatives have made some amendments, their election reform is full of holes. Bill C-23 still does not give investigators the powers they need to uncover fraud. Even with the Conservatives' election reform, perpetrators of the robocall scandal would remain unpunished, because Bill C-23 does not allow Elections Canada to compel testimony and to get hold of the documents it needs for its investigation, nor does the bill force call centres to retain telephone numbers and the scripts of their calls.

Will the minister stop protecting fraudsters and fix the holes in his bill?

[Alexandrine Latendresse, NDP, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am wondering if the member was proud when the court found that fraudulent calls were made with information from the Conservative Party database.

Four hundred and sixty academics, two Nobel Prize winners and 18 past presidents of the Canadian Political Science Association have all strongly criticized the Conservatives' electoral “deform”. Like us, they are calling for extensive consultation with Canadians and are particularly critical of the fact that Bill C-23 does not give Elections Canada the power to compel witnesses to testify or to compel the parties to produce documentation justifying their election expenses.

Will the Prime Minister acknowledge these comments and make more amendments to Bill C-23 or will he, as Tom Flanagan said, continue to show his vindictiveness toward Elections Canada, which has so often taken the Conservatives—

[Alexandrine Latendresse, NDP, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the Competition Bureau has this power, but the government does not want to give it to those who investigate electoral fraud. That is really problematic.

The Conservatives were found guilty of using an in-and-out scheme to cheat in the 2006 election.

They also cheated in the 2008 election and they are still awaiting trial.

In 2011, fraudulent calls were made with information from the Conservative Party database. The Conservatives tried to stack the deck for the next election before abandoning the move. It is therefore understandable that people are suspicious of the Conservatives' amendments to Bill C-23.

Why are the Conservatives refusing to give Elections Canada the power to compel witnesses to testify and to compel the parties to produce documents justifying their election expenses?

Opposition Motion—Time allocation and closure

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the intervention of the member for Burlington in explaining the process of allocating days with respect to debate and how that is used as a management tool for keeping the House efficient in terms of all the matters it has to consider at every stage of reading. Legislation can flow to committees to keep them focused on important matters and legislation and can move to the Senate, which can consider these matters as sober second thought.

In some countries, because of debate and other means, they do not pass a budget for year X until year Y or year Z. We had a situation in the U.S. Senate, when it did not pass a budget for four years. It debated budgetary matters, when matters have to be decided efficiently.

In the case of Bill C-23, I understand that there are aspects of the bill that have to be implemented in advance of the next election. To do that, it has to clear not only this House but the Senate in a specific amount of time. Can the member talk about how time allocation relates to meeting that standard?

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to speak today. Just so my colleague across the way understands, when we get back to this fine institution in a couple of weeks, as a backbench member of the government I will be voting against the motion that is in front of us.

I have done a bit of research and have thought about the motion here in front of us. I basically broke down my presentation into two or three different areas, and hopefully I can get to them all.

First, so the public understands, let me talk about what is happening today.

Today is a supply day. Supply days were a creation of the Liberal government in 1968. They have been around for a long time. Previous to that time, the estimates, the actual allocating of money, was all dealt with in the House. It took up a tremendous amount of time. There was no time, or very little time, for creating legislation. The Liberal government of the day, in conjunction with the opposition members, came to the conclusion that things could be done more efficiently and effectively by allocating 25 days of the year to supply.

This means that the opposition parties can bring forward any motion that they would like on any topic that they would like. I am just guessing, but I think the vision of the day was that opposition parties would be able to bring a non-confidence motion forward and either criticize the government's policies or programs or maybe even present an alternative. That was the fundamental reason for supply days to begin with, and that is what we are doing here today.

I find it a bit strange that the Liberals are using this valuable time in this way. Because the Liberal Party is now in third place, it gets fewer days. Because the days are allocated by the size of the opposition, obviously the official opposition would get more days than the Liberal Party, and today the Liberals are using one of their two spring supply days to talk about process. I thought that was very strange, but I am happy to talk about process if that is what they want to talk about.

I thought maybe they wanted to define “middle class”. In part of my research, I was looking up “middle class”. The leader of the third party has been talking about the middle class quite a bit, so he must know a lot about it. His father was the prime minister of Canada and his upbringing was not really in the middle class, but I thought maybe it was his grandfather who instilled the middle class piece in him.

I looked in The Canadian Encyclopedia. I know my family and the vast majority of Canadian families are not mentioned in the The Canadian Encyclopedia, but the Trudeau family is. I found out that the former prime minister's father, the grandfather of the present leader of the Liberal Party, was listed there as being a wealthy businessman from Quebec and part of the elite even back in that generation.

I find it very strange that the Liberals are using today to talk about process. Maybe it is because they would have a difficult time talking about what they would like to accomplish, because they really have not indicated a whole lot to Canadians about what they want to do.

This brings to me to the actual motion, which is about time allocation.

The Liberals have chosen two specific areas to talk about in relation to time allocation. I want to make clear that what they are talking about is time allocation. Let me go through the three ways that it can happen.

There is a difference between closure and time allocation. Time allocation is allocating the amount of time in this House to deal with whatever the item happens to be. It makes it much easier and more convenient for us to determine how many speakers we have, when we will do it, and what days we will allocate to speaking on whatever item. It is purely organizational.

There are three ways that I know of that time allocation can happen.

First of all, the public should know that the House leaders from each party meet. They discuss the agenda, or the orders of the day as we call it here, such as, what is going to happen in the House, when things are coming forward, and how much time will be put to them.

It is my understanding that in the past the number one way of allocating time was by agreement between House leaders. For example, a House leader would agree to put up 20 speakers and another House leader would agree to 5 speakers. There would be an agreement on how much time is spent on a particular item. That is how it has happened in the past and it can happen in the future.

Then, when there is agreement, members would come back to the House. The House leaders go back to their whips and organizations, in our case the parliamentary secretary in charge of that area, and they would organize the speakers from our side who would speak to a particular item. The same thing happens with other parties and their critics.

A second way of allocating time is to have an agreement with the majority of the parties in the House. There are three recognized parties in the House, and two of the three can come together to figure out what we want to do. Technically they can allocate the time for whatever the discussion will be on a particular area.

The third way to allocate time is unfortunately what we have had to come to, but it is completely legal and fair. It is that the government of the day can allocate the time. That is not closure; it is not saying that we are not debating something.

I spoke earlier this week when we were debating our budget implementation bill. I was the 69th speaker, and there was going to be a speaker after me. There were 70 speakers at second reading, and five days were allocated to the debate in second reading.

The bill then goes to committee. If there are amendments at committee, it comes back here to report stage, which I did not know about until I got here. That was not mentioned much in the political science books that I read in university. However, there is a report stage. Again, there is an allocation, which may be done through the House leader on the government side or through a negotiation and discussion at the House leaders meeting. However, there is an allocation of time to debate the item, based on the amendments.

As members know, there could be a lot of amendments. The Speaker could group amendments together and we could then have debate on single sets of amendments. It is not just amendments in total, but on single sets. That could go on for a lengthy period of time. The bill then comes back for third reading. Third reading in this House has another time allocation piece to it.

Unfortunately, what is happening is that we are not able to get agreement from the other side on allocations, so the House leader on our side has to tell the House how much time will be allocated. There is always a 30-minute discussion on the government's allocation of time.

On the budget implementation bill, for example, we allocated five days to it. People can say that five days is not a lot. However, I did a little research on this, and I want people to understand the agenda in terms of the length of time that we are here.

In this calendar year, we will be sitting for 27 weeks in Ottawa, doing Canada's work. We all do plenty of work in our ridings, of course, but this is work on legislation that comes to the House. I then took all of the days that we have in a week and broke it down.

I do not know if people understand this, but there are 20-minute time slots for the speech and 10 minutes for questions and answer. Technically, one could split one's time. Today we have 20-minute slots, but to maximize the amount, it could be 10-minute speeches with a 5-minute question and answer period.

For example, on Monday, we are in the House from 11:00 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. We have to remove an hour for private members' business and an hour for question period. There are a lot of other things that eat into the time, but I am being judicious in saying that those two things automatically happen. There is also routine procedures and so on, which is another 15 minutes or so. In actual fact, we have about five hours and fifteen minutes on Monday, which is about 21 slots, if we split the time slots.

On Tuesdays there are six hours and fifteen minutes for discussion. That is 25 slots. On Wednesdays it is only a couple of hours, at two hours and fifteen minutes of actual time, which is nine slots. That time gets eaten up with trading over. On Thursdays we are back to the same as Tuesday, with 25 slots. On Fridays we have two hours and fifteen minutes, the same as Wednesday, with another nine slots.

If everything went absolutely smoothly and there were no interruptions or points of order and we went right to the minute and moved along, that is maybe 89 or 87 spots in a week.

I heard a few minutes ago that members of Parliament get elected here to talk about the items. Can members imagine if all members, all 308 of us, were required to speak to every item? We have about 88 spots a week. We are here about 27 weeks of the year. We then have supply days thrown in. We have other items. We have voting. If everything was as smooth as glass, based on my math, we would get maybe two pieces of legislation through every year.

That is not including the budget and the budget implementation bills, because in a sense those are automatics. We have a budget presented by the finance minister. There is debate and discussion on it. Then there are also two budget implementation bills, one in the fall and one in the spring, and time is allocated for debating those bills as well.

My estimate is that if we followed the rule or the expectation that all 308 of us would get a chance to speak to every item, we would get through a maximum of two pieces of legislation in the House.

That is not including committees. The public should know that. As I was saying this week, I was the 69th speaker at second reading. The bill then goes to committee. At committee, members of Parliament hear witnesses and get involved in debate and discussion about the legislation in front of us. The bill then comes back here for the report stage and third reading.

In my view, if there was no such thing as time allocation, as members of Parliament we would get virtually nothing done. I am not sure that the public of Canada is sending us to Ottawa to do absolutely nothing. The public expects some legislation to be passed.

The public expects discussion to take place, and there is discussion. There are speeches from both sides, from one side or the other, and there are often areas of concern or interest. On our side, normally we promoting. On the opposition side, members are often taking exception. Those discussions will happen.

People will notice that comments are often repeated over and over again. We do the same thing on our side. I am not saying that it is a one-sided thing. We repeat the same thing, or something very close to it. I know that the rules of this place are that we cannot say the exact same thing as somebody else. I do not really use speeches, as members can tell by my standing here. I have some notes, but I do not have actual speeches.

What I am saying is that time allocation does not stop debate. It assists debate. It allows fair discussion on the issues, and the limited time that the House has to deal with legislation requires time allocation.

We are being criticized, partially in this motion, over time allocation as if it had never existed before and as if it were something new that we had come up with. As far as I know, time allocation has been part of the process here forever, because it would not make sense to do otherwise.

Stanley Knowles, a New Democrat member of Parliament many decades ago, has been quoted as saying that it is important to have time allocation, that it is important that we have an understanding of how much time we are going to spend on a particular item and move forward to make decisions on whether we are going to support or oppose something.

The Liberal motion today tries to focus on two specific types of bills. In my view, they have done that because they know very well that time allocation is an important process around here, and they are using these two items for political reasons, not for practical reasons of improving how this place operates. We have a reform bill by one of my colleagues here before us. But in my view, if we really want reform of this place, and we know how little time we have to debate different issues, and given the scheduling that we have to arrange between committees, and so on, I think there are better ways to operate the House of Commons. I have made some suggestions on the number of committees, the timing of committees, and how much time we allocate for House time. We could be much more efficient than we are, strictly from a business perspective.

My concern is that when we hear the opposition say they did not have time to debate it, if we look at the actual speeches they make, they are repetitive and clearly not supporting the actual legislation in front of the House. That is fair. That is their job, to be in opposition. However, they should be able to make their points and then move on. That is not what is happening.

Time allocation and closure are two different things. Closure is a motion invoked when a piece of legislation is required by a certain time, whether it is in other statutes, or a Supreme Court decision has been granted on a certain item and the House has to report back by a certain date. If we check the records, closure is rarely used.

Another item I have heard about recently, aside from the debate on the fair elections act, is omnibus bills. The opposition are concerned about the size of bills, and they will quote big numbers. This week they were quoting it as 489 pages long. I agree that the particular piece we were dealing with this week is 489 pages long, but it is in both English and French, so it is actually about 250 pages. The fair elections act is not even that long, but it is in two languages.

If, say, we have to read a couple hundred pages, I am pretty sure that most Canadians believe that members of Parliament can read a couple of hundred pages. Additionally, what is also great about the way the system works here is that despite the fact legislation arrives before us in legalese, there are summary pages at the front of every piece of legislation highlighting what is important and what each section does.

What happens is that I, as a member of Parliament, read through the summaries and look through the parts of the legislation that are of concern or interest. If there is something I do not understand, I read it in more detail. Then I have an opportunity to talk to the minister. That opportunity is open to every member of Parliament. They normally have a session with a briefing that anyone can attend, including staff. They are briefed at the bureaucratic level on what is in a bill so they will have an understanding of it.

With the amount of time we have, which I am running out of now, I do not think we should support the motion. Time allocation is getting a bad name because people do not understand what it is used for and how it works. It is something that makes the House operate. If we were to ask people on my street, they would believe we are way too slow in getting legislation through the House.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Mr. Speaker, I really did just answer that question, and members will note that the Liberal Party, in introducing this debate, wants to try to do what is achievable.

We know Conservative members on the other side could not support not limiting debate on everything. They could not do that for various reasons; but we wanted to do what was possible, what was achievable.

These two pieces of legislation are fundamental to our democracy. All Canadians know, with Bill C-23, how the regime over there would undermine our democracy, would actually take away the right to vote from some. Experts after experts have talked about their concerns on the bill, so Canadians know this is a bad bill.

This is the opportunity to put a motion that deals with two pieces of legislation, the foundation of our democracy, that any members in this House should be able to stand and support, whether they are government or opposition.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Mr. Speaker, yes, indeed, perhaps the NDP members could bring it up at their next opposition day. They could do quite a large motion if they so desire. That is the beauty of having these opposition days. We can debate certain motions.

My question for my colleague and friend is this. I want to talk specifically about Bill C-23 here. What I find most egregious here--and I understand there are certain circumstances where time allocation would be used for dilatory movements within the House--is that we have a party and a government, as a result, abusing the system that is supposed to help out the daily functions of Parliament.

The government has decided, after only three speakers, to impose time allocation to cut the number of speakers down.

I agree with the member wholeheartedly that, when we vote for this in a few weeks, we need to say to the backbenchers here that they have the chance, a golden opportunity not given to the vast majority of people in this country, to speak in this House. They should exercise that by ensuring that the laws allowing us to speak in this House are as open and flexible as they can be.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Mr. Speaker, I am most pleased to support my colleague, the member for Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, on the Liberal opposition day motion.

I will not read the actual motion, which is rather technical. The motion speaks to a very serious flaw in Canada's democracy. That flaw was especially revealed in the way that the Conservative government has operated with respect to Bill C-23, the fair or unfair elections act, whatever members want to call it, depending on their perspective, and how the regime would impose its will to the exclusion of all other views. That is a part of what is forcing this motion today.

I listened closely to the member for York Centre earlier, going back through a lot of history and where closure, time limitation, and debate have been used. There is no question that sometimes it is necessary in regular business as a government, in terms of doing the business of a nation.

However, let us understand what has been happening in recent years. There have been omnibus bills, 400 pages in length, dealing with sometimes as many as 40 different pieces of legislation that have nothing to with the budget. In previous times, most of those pieces of legislation would be broken out so that they could go to the appropriate committee. They would be debated here and would have a full hearing.

It has to be noted that in terms of this motion today that we are only dealing with the Canada Elections Act and the Parliament of Canada Act. What more important business could Parliament have than with those particular acts, which are the underpinnings of our democracy?

We need to ensure, at least on those particular pieces of legislation, that a slight majority government in Canada cannot impose its will in this place. It is one of the flaws in our democracy. The government needs to get things done, but it does not have the majority of the votes in the country.

The Conservative government, in particular, fails to operate for all Canadians; it tends to operate for a certain ideological base. As a result, these laws are not debated and analyzed in a proper, open, and transparent fashion, with the necessary witnesses. As I said, the government is imposing its will on the people and without proper debate.

The rationale behind this motion is that changes to legislation that are fundamental to our democracy should only be made through a consensus-based process. The Conservatives are treating Bill C-23 as another piece of partisan legislation to be rammed through Parliament at their convenience. This needs to be prevented from happening, now and in the future. That is what this particular motion would do. It would ensure that there is the proper debate.

Again, I listened to the member for York Centre, when he said that if we had the opportunity to debate every bill over the course of a term, members would only get to speak on eight bills in the whole term. Nobody is talking about every bill. We are talking about the way that government members continue to operate. They try to misrepresent and mislead the facts by saying something that is spinning it a little, that is a bit close to what the motion is talking about but is not the real thing.

How many hours would it take up in the House of Commons if the committee studying Bill C-23 travelled to every region of the country to hear what Canadians have to say on the bill? Would that not be the proper thing to happen in a democracy, that a committee goes out there to the country with the bill in hand, with all the parties present, and allows witnesses to have their say directly in their own areas, rather than either transporting them to Ottawa or doing a video conference? It should get out in the country where people can be heard, where people from the countryside can come into the meeting, rather than in the kind of bubble that is Ottawa.

Changes to legislation like the Elections Act and the Parliament of Canada Act, which are fundamental to our democracy, must be achieved by broad consensus and be backed by solid evidence. That is what the proposal by my colleague, and this motion, is all about, that there be proper debate, in a proper forum, with the proper amount of time on these two pieces of legislation. That is why we, as a party, have introduced the motion today that will change the Standing Orders of the House of Commons to prevent any government from using time allocation and closure to shut down debate on changes to the Elections Act and the Parliament of Canada Act.

As a member of the Liberal Party, I would point out that if the government continues to run roughshod over Canadians by forcing through its bill, our leader has committed that a Liberal government will repeal the Conservatives' undemocratic changes to our country's Elections Act. That is a sure thing.

How serious is this particular bill? There was an article in iPolitics this morning that fairly aggressively states where Canada will be left if this bill is passed. The article in iPolitics is entitled “The Fair Elections Act is a global disgrace”. It is written by Anita Vandenbeld.

Ms. Vandenbeld worked for a number of years internationally, on democratic development with the United Nations Development Programme, the National Democratic Institute, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and the Parliamentary Centre. She has considerable experience on viewing democracies around the world.

I will not go through all of our arguments; I will go to some of the witnesses before committee. However, I would encourage people, and especially the Conservative backbenchers, that rather than just accepting the speaking points from the PMO, to read this article. She spells out the serious flaws and how Canada is becoming an embarrassment around the world with the way the current government is operating and how it is trying to seriously undermine the main foundation of our democracy.

The key point she makes, which in stark reality shows what her view is on this particular bill and the way that the government is handling it, is this. She states:

The last time I worked in a country where a government used its majority in Parliament to ram through changes to an election law without public input was in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2011. I never would have expected this in Canada.

That tells us how the people with the experience in looking at democracies around the world are looking at the actions of the government.

I have to say this because I hear some chirping from the backbench over there.

People who are on the back bench have to understand that they are not members of the government. The cabinet is the government. They are members of the governing party. They have the right, if they so desire, to stand up in their own right and represent their constituents and Canadians. They do not need to follow the whipped moves from the PMO.

They can stand up and express their own opinion, and on something as fundamental as Canada's election laws and the Parliament of Canada, I would love to see them tonight, or whenever the vote is held, standing up in support of this motion. We would applaud them for showing that, under this regime, democracy could even work in this place. That would be quite startling, and I would love to see it.

Legislation affecting our democratic institutions is too important to be rammed through in a partisan manner by any government. Such legislation should be able to get support from at least one other party in this place. We are all here representing constituents. We cannot be that far apart on issues such as democracy.

One would think that the government would be able to get at least one party on side in support of its legislation. As a result, though, of its not gaining that support, we are seeing an abuse of processes in this place in situations like those with Bill C-23, which is horrible legislation in my view. It seems there is no support from anyone other than the Conservative Party, but it intends to ram it through Parliament.

As such, I maintain that this is an affront to our democracy. Canada was previously seen as a model for other developing democracies, with Elections Canada, government representatives, and spokesmen being asked to profile how we operate in Parliament, how we run elections in this country.

That is all going to be gone, because we are now seen, such as at the United Nations, very differently from we used to be. We are no longer seen as a global leader in terms of peace and democracy around the world. It is because of the way the government operates.

The member opposite says it is because of Bill C-23. No, it is because of the attitude and the way the government has operated in the last eight years. This is a government that came in talking about accountability and transparency, and we have not seen it be accountable for anything.

The minister certainly does not stand up, apologize, and be accountable for what he said to the Chief Electoral Officer. There is no such thing. The minister was responsible, and if the Prime Minister would show some leadership, he would force that minister to apologize for the way he is treating parliamentary officers in this country.

It is an attitude that has pervaded that whole Conservative Party since it came to government, which is making us disrespected around the world.

We are now witnessing in Canada the undermining of debate on bills. I have heard others say this and I think it may in fact be necessary for us in the next election to ask for United Nations observers to come in to observe the election.

The members are laughing over there. However, when we look at this bill, we can see that we may need United Nations observers in this country of Canada because the government is undermining democracy so much. Moreover, as we will see when the vote comes up, not one of those backbenchers will be willing to stand up for Canadians. They are only willing to stand up for their Prime Minister.

Bill C-23, the so-called fair elections act, is quite literally nothing less than the most comprehensive voter suppression effort in Canadian history.

The bill was designed to exclude, to manipulate, and to undermine the democratic process in Canada, which is the bedrock of our democracy: our election process. The Minister of State for Democratic Reform has performed his task well. He has delivered for his leader the kind of legislation that would only serve to increase the cynicism among Canadians as to the political process, with the result, the Conservatives hope, of driving more voters out of the system, young people in particular.

All one has to do is listen to some of the witnesses who were before committee and listen to what some people are saying in the press. This is a government that views the manner in which Canada conducts federal elections not as something that all parties in the House have an equal share in ensuring works properly but as a system it manipulates to its advantage. That, to the Conservatives, is acceptable.

There are only two kinds of Canadians according to the government party opposite: good Conservatives or bad Canadians. Those who oppose the government are less Canadian, unCanadian, the enemy, subversives. That is the kind of government this legislation is revealing to Canadians that we have in Canada at the moment. There is something suspicious about a government that is attempting to manipulate the democratic system to ensure the disenfranchisement of Canadians, while fearing to allow thorough, open, cross-country public hearings to hear the voices of Canadians. A government with any integrity would have worked with all parties in the House on this legislation and, if not that, would have had the integrity to take the legislation into the country and road test it. It can still do that, if it really wanted to. It could go out and hear from Canadians.

As I said earlier, backbench members over there have the opportunity to stand up and be counted to ensure that there is proper debate, long-term debate, cross-country hearings where everyone can be heard on the Parliament of Canada Act and the Canada Elections Act.

This legislation, Bill C-23, to which the motion today relates, has to be placed in the wider context. That is the fact that the former auditor general, Sheila Fraser, stated that the government would undermine the credibility of virtually every arm's length agency of the government that performs any kind of oversight. Ms. Fraser said, according to The Globe and Mail of April 9, that the attack on Mr. Mayrand “disturbed” her greatly, was “totally inappropriate”, and that such comments “undermine the credibility of these institutions”. She also warned that the bill would unduly limit the Chief Electoral Officer, threaten Elections Canada's independence, and block people, including her own daughter, from voting with the tightened ID requirements. We all respect Sheila Fraser. She is a former auditor general. When she makes those kinds of serious comments, it is time we listen.

Let me list the bill's critics so far. They include Mr. Mayrand; Commissioner of Canada Elections, Yves Côté; two of their predecessors; Ms. Fraser; former Reform Party leader Preston Manning; provincial chief electoral officers; Harry Neufeld, the author of an authoritative Elections Canada report; law school deans. There was a list on March 11 of well over 100 university professors saying this bill should not go through as is.

I will conclude by saying that this motion would lay down criteria where proper debate has to be held on the Canada Elections Act and the Parliament of Canada Act. I encourage backbench members to stand in their own right to support it.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Mr. Speaker, notwithstanding what happened 120 years ago, I was wondering if the hon. member could talk specifically about Bill C-23, in this particular case. He talked about the enfranchisement of voters, or really the disenfranchisement. Obviously, the way this bill has been handled, there is no consensus whatsoever.

I want the member to rely upon a third person, outside of this House and outside the structure of party politics, and to quote from that person as to why Bill C-23 is so good.

[Ted Hsu, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Mr. Speaker, during this debate today, we have heard from the members for Western Arctic and Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor. They are from far-flung regions of the country. That is why we have debate and why we should allow all members of Parliament to speak when we are discussing issues related to the foundations of our democracy, as in how to run elections.

The last two questioners are excellent examples of why it is important to hear members of Parliament from all parts of Canada.

When we ask questions about Bill C-23 in question period, we hear pretty much uniquely from the Minister of State for Democratic Reform, who represents a suburb of Ottawa. We keep hearing from him over and over again. That is not as good as hearing from members who represent all parts of Canada.

[Ted Hsu, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I will give the House another fine example of what the member for Western Arctic is talking about.

The health card belonging to the sponsor of this motion, the member for Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, does not have his address. His driver's licence has a P.O. box. If when he went to vote the officials were to follow the rules, they would say, “Sorry, you do not have something that proves where you live”. There would be 20 people there saying, “This is my member of Parliament. I know that person lives here and is my member of Parliament. You have got to let him vote”. This is the sort of thing that Bill C-23 overlooks. It is a fine example of how even a member of Parliament does not have the identification to officially prove his residence. Therefore, there has to be some sort of allowance for vouching.

[Ted Hsu, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Mr. Speaker, one thing we discovered in talking to people in the last election is that it is hard for students to prove where they live. It is easy for people to prove their identity. Lots of people have pieces of ID with their picture and their name. It is quite a bit harder to prove where one lives. We discovered that a lot of students and young people do not have easy access to that identification. That example is an excellent one.

The member may or may not know that when it comes to the commissioner of elections, I have mentioned it a number of times and it has been mentioned in the press as well, we know that one of the problems with Bill C-23 is that the commissioner does not have the ability to compel witnesses. For example, when we found out that somebody impersonated my campaign manager in my riding, even with those pieces of information we had it was hard for the commissioner to force somebody to testify. We know that voters were misled and told to go to a different poll very far away from where they lived. The commissioner does not have the power to compel witnesses to figure out who did that.

[Ted Hsu, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by making a point about the importance of the legitimacy of government. We trust government with our security, our rights, our tax dollars, and many of our important interests. Even the Conservatives would agree with this point.

Let me give an example. On April 3, when we were debating the last omnibus budget implementation bill, I stood up and asked the Conservative speaker why the omnibus bill had corrections to the previous omnibus bill, which had corrections to the previous omnibus bill, which had corrections to the previous omnibus bill. I said that perhaps we should not be limiting debate but instead taking our time and getting it right for once.

The answer the parliamentary secretary provided was simply that they were right because they won the elections in 2006, 2008, and 2011. That is what the Conservative member said. They are relying on the legitimacy of their own election when they are cornered and do not have a good argument in debate. Therefore, even the Conservatives must believe in the importance of the legitimacy of the people's government, and as far as we know, fair and democratic elections are the most legitimate way of choosing a government.

If we want to have fair, legitimate elections, we have to have a consensus among MPs from different parties if we want to change the rules or the laws surrounding how elections work or how Parliament works under the statutes. Elections and elections law serve the people of our country, not the parties. Parliament serves the people of our country, not political parties.

If we really believe this, then we must accept that all Canadians must have a voice through their members of Parliament when changes are considered in the structure of elections or in the structure of the people's Parliament. These are two of the fundamental institutions of our democracy. During debate, there have to be real answers. There has to be solid evidence that is presented, poked, tested, and confronted. Through debate, questions have to be answered. We have to have real questions, and real debate has to occur.

For example, under Bill C-23, 120,000 Canadians who relied on vouching to vote in the last federal election would no longer have that ability. Why get rid of vouching and risk disenfranchising them or other Canadians who want to vote?

It is not good enough for me to just ask that question here in the chamber on behalf of Canadians. It is necessary for me to demand and insist on a real answer to that question for Canadians over and over again, because so far all I have heard are deflections on that point. We need time to insist over and over again on real answers from the government. At some point, even the Conservatives will become embarrassed by how they are not answering the real, tough questions that are being posed by MPs.

Time is needed for all MPs from all over the diverse parts of our country to be heard. Every Canadian, through their MP, needs to be heard on questions involving the fundamental parts of our democracy. Elections and Parliament are too important to be changed by a partisan bill that a majority pushes through.

Canadians perhaps want to be governed by a majority. Sometimes they will say they want to give another party a chance to govern. What they really mean is they want to hand the ball to the other team, not change the rules of the game. If we try to change the rules of the game, as Bill C-23 proposes to do, we cannot just have one team deciding, especially when Parliament and the clash between political parties is not just a game. It is an adversarial system, and in order to make the best laws and to spend money in the wisest way for Canadians, it ensures that no stone is left unturned.

With Bill C-23, it certainly appears that the Conservatives are changing the rules for elections to help themselves. They would make it harder for students and seniors and aboriginals to vote. Wealthy donors would be able to donate more. Central poll supervisors would come from a list provided by the incumbent party, which in most ridings is the Conservative Party, instead of through the simple option of letting all recognized parties in the House of Commons provide a list from which Elections Canada could choose central poll supervisors.

We have also seen the government try to intimidate the Chief Electoral Officer with some procedural manoeuvres, such as trying to cause votes in order to break up his testimony at committee. Not only do the Conservatives want to change the rules; the Minister of State for Democratic Reform also personally attacked the Chief Electoral Officer and was even publicly reprimanded by former auditor general Sheila Fraser for doing that. To put it in simpler language and draw a picture, the Conservatives want to change the rules of the game to favour themselves, and if the referee protests, they punch out the referee.

In changing the law around elections or Parliament, it is important to do it right, and it is more important to do it right than to do it quickly. There is a case for expediency when managing a fast-moving economy; for example, we have a bill to encourage rail companies to move grain to ports, so there are certain advantages for our country when it is governed by a majority government and majority powers are used judicially. However, when amending the Canada Elections Act and the Parliament of Canada Act, we should be acting as representatives of all of our constituents, not just the ones who voted for us or our parties. Every constituency should get to speak, but with time allocation, not all MPs get a chance to speak. Every MP should get a chance to speak if he or she wants to, and that is why we should pass this motion today.

To conclude, I want to call on all Canadians. I understand that the vote on this motion will take place in a couple of weeks, on Monday, April 28, after Easter. MPs will return to their constituencies and will be interacting with the people who live in their ridings. I am calling on all Canadians to contact their MPs and tell them that they want all Canadians to have a say on laws that change how elections are run. Election law is not made to serve parties that are fighting each other; it is made to serve the people, by ensuring that the vote is as fair as possible and the government that is elected is as legitimate as possible.

To all Canadians I say that if they believe that MPs work in Ottawa to represent the people back home, then their MPs must support this motion. If Conservative and NDP members believe when they go home that they are only the representatives for the Conservative Party or the NDP, then they should go ahead and vote against this motion. I think a lot of Conservative MPs do not believe that, and I encourage them to follow their beliefs and to vote for this motion.

I believe I represent Kingston and the Islands in the Parliament of Canada and I chose to be in the Liberal Party not because I want to represent the Liberal Party but because I believe the Liberal Party is best for Canada. I represent the people of Kingston and the Islands in Ottawa and I challenge the member for Calgary Southwest, who is the Prime Minister, to stand on guard for Canadian democracy and to forswear closure when debating changes to the Canada Elections Act or the Parliament of Canada Act.

Finally, I repeat, I ask all Canadians to contact their MPs over the next two weeks and tell them that they want all Canadians to speak through their MPs if laws about elections or Parliament are being changed.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am happy to be splitting my time today with the opposition House leader, the member for Burnaby—New Westminster. He has done an incredible job of standing up to the government in the short time he has been in the position, holding them to account and pushing back on what has been a continual and constant abuse of Parliament and our democratic and fundamental principles which we all share as Canadians. I believe that Conservatives share them as well, when they are able to unleash themselves for that split second and realize what their jobs are meant to be here.

We see a motion today that we welcome from the Liberal Party, although we find it passing strange, on two fronts. We welcome the opportunity to talk about free and fair debate in Canada's Parliament, to talk about the abuses that the Conservatives have unleashed more than 55 times on Canada's Parliament.

There are two considerations and concerns that we have with what the Liberals have put forward. I am sure my hon. colleague the opposition House leader will elaborate on these, so I will pass over them briefly. The first issue is that the motion as it is presented today is too limited. It only seeks to curtail the government's power to use time allocation and the extraordinary power of shutting down debate in too narrow a way. We would seek to perhaps expand it, and my friend from Burnaby—New Westminster will elaborate on that.

The second piece is that this may be a new-found love for accountability and transparency from the Liberal Party. As we have seen, when it held the same position as the Conservatives currently do, it too used this same extraordinary power.

Canadians can tolerate a lot from their political representatives, and we know that we ask them to do that. They tolerate the various assortment of scandals and unfortunate choices, and the bad choices, made by the current government. However, they will not tolerate hypocrisy. They do not appreciate hypocrisy from any party, in this case, the Liberals, who used time allocation on certain bills that it should never have been used on.

In fact, Mr. Speaker, it was you, in 2011, who moved a motion to limit the powers of shutting down debate by the government, which was rejected. It was the NDP who also sought most recently to give increased powers to the Speaker. That was to discern between when the government was using time allocation as it was designed, for when a debate has gone extensively beyond what would be considered a normal parameter for discussion, and limiting it to that instance rather than what we see from the government.

As my colleague from Burnaby—New Westminster said, it was on a massive omnibus bill, or ominous bill as some people call them now. They are Trojan Horse bills. We have seen Bills C-38 and C-45, and the most recent budget implementation act, Bill C-31, that are incredibly expansive in their nature. They are hundreds of pages long, and in this case affects more than 40 Canadian laws. It would change 40 Canadian laws in this one case.

The extent of these massive bills would be enough that most people would consider a full and extensive debate to be proper. However, after a short 25 minutes, the Conservatives said that is enough. They said that we need to shut down the debate on this most recent ominous bill; we need to shut off any conversation about all of these laws that are being affected.

When we look through the debates of the past when the Liberals used the same tactics that the Conservatives are using, it is passing strange that it was the Conservatives, who were then in opposition, who had so many problems with that abuse of power.

Let me read one quote. This is one of my favourites. It is good. It is someone being prescient and intelligent, and doing their job as a parliamentarian. Let me quote the following from a debate on November 26, 1996, which took place right here:

In my view, the procedure of using time allocation for electoral law, doing it quickly and without the consent of the other political parties, is the kind of dangerous application of electoral practices that we are more likely to find in third world countries.

Who would say something like that? Who would say that the abuse of power that the Liberal government of the day was using to shut down debate on changing our electoral laws was representative of something “that we are more likely to find in third world countries”? It was the current Prime Minister who said that. It is true.

The current Prime Minister, when he was in opposition, was faced with a Liberal majority that was unilaterally changing electoral laws—not nearly as extensively as the Conservatives are now doing, by the way—and sought to shut down debate in the House of Commons, having achieved no consensus or agreement from the other opposition parties. It was the current Prime Minister who said that this was an abuse of power; this was wrong.

Lo and behold, we now have Bill C-23, the unfair elections act, which the Conservatives have designed in its very DNA to be unfair, to be undemocratic, and to allow an advantage to Conservative candidates in the next election rather than winning fairly. They have put that into their election bill with no agreement from any other political party.

Then, to add insult to that abuse, to that injury, they have shut down debate prematurely and rushed it to committee. They are now in the Senate doing the same thing—the unaccountable, unelected Senate that this same Prime Minister appointed. The hypocrisies and irony in this instance are so rich that they approach the level of appalling.

To my Liberal friends, I hope this new found love of democratic principles is sincere and will be sustained, regardless of which side of the House they are sitting on. New Democrats have a long and proud record of standing up against the abuses of time allocation, of shutting down debate, of allowing members to freely express themselves on behalf of constituents. That is what we are here for. It is not to advance one political party or the other. The very structure of the House of Commons is simple, yet beautiful in its nature: to hold the government of the day to account.

As I said to my Conservative colleague across the way, that is a responsibility, not only of the opposition parties but of those who sit in the so-called government backbenches. That is their job. Unchecked power eventually becomes corrupted, as we saw from the Conservatives as soon as they gained their majority.

It was a very slight majority. If we look at the design and the build of the seats in the House of Commons, it is what we call the rump, the little section of extra flow over the Conservative seats in the corner that we see during voting time. It is called the rump, by all parties; I do not mean to pass any judgment on the quality of those members. However, it is that tiny group over there who represent the majority that the government has, having achieved just 38% of the vote in the last election. When we break it down, it was only 25% of all eligible voters in the country, and they ended up with 100% of the power.

What do the Conservatives do with that power? Do they act responsibly? Heavens, no. They introduce these massive omnibus bills and then slap on time allocation, shutting down debate on legislation that is so incredibly complex that nobody on the government benches actually understands what they are voting for. That is a shame.

This motion is about a democratic principle that is essential for Parliament to work properly for Canadians. I fully understand that Canadians are quite cynical about the current state of our politics, and for good reason. It is only natural, what with this corrupt, anti-democratic, and by all accounts very weak government. What is more, this government is short on ideas. The budget implementation bill is short on tools for rebuilding our economy.

There is a shortfall of some 300,000 jobs in the industrial sector and for young Canadians who are still trying to find work. They are coping with an unemployment rate that is twice that of the rest of Canada. What are we seeing in the government? We are seeing an extremely corrupt system, a shortage of ideas, and a problem, namely that of disliking democracy.

What is that terrible expression that I have seen in a comic strip somewhere: “that the beatings will continue until morale improves”. The Conservatives heap abuse upon abuse on Parliament and ask why it is that the opposition parties are so resistant to their mandate and to their practices?

Well, with what we have seen, time and time again, whether it is the unfair elections act, these massive omnibus bills, the way it approaches trade negotiations with other countries, or the general approach that the government has to democracy, I look back, almost fondly, to those days of the Reform Party. It seemed to at least have stood for something. I did not agree with it, but it seemed to have stood for something. Now we see what these guys have become. Power seems to have corrupted them and left them without those principles. It is a shame.

We will be supporting the motion. I look forward to the continued debate.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Mr. Speaker, in light of the situation of Bill C-23, they have spent a lot of time discussing this bill. We should focus. Maybe the member would like to look at the motion itself and focus on these particular acts and what is happening here today. The key here today is to focus.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

moved:

That Standing Order 78 be amended by adding the following:

“(4) No motion, pursuant to any paragraph of this Standing Order, may be used to allocate a specified number of days or hours for the consideration and disposal of any bill that seeks to amend the Canada Elections Act or the Parliament of Canada Act.”;

and that Standing Order 57 be amended by adding the following:

“, provided that the resolution or resolutions, clause or clauses, section or sections, preamble or preambles, title or titles, being considered do not pertain to any bill that seeks to amend the Canada Elections Act or the Parliament of Canada Act.”.

Mr. Speaker, in light of what just took place, I have never seen a larger, more concentrated effort to keep me silent since I last spoke to my own lawyer.

I appreciate the efforts from all members to encourage us to debate and to have a robust discussion on what we consider to be the changing of some of the Standing Orders that we have here today. Essentially, that is what we are doing here today.

In light of the debate that has taken place over Bill C-23, we have proceeded with second reading, we have voted, and it is now with the committee on procedure and House affairs. The substance of that debate, of course, was about the ability of Elections Canada to do its job. It was also about the ability of the average Canadian citizen surpassing the three elements of being over the age of 18, being a Canadian citizen, and residing in a certain riding in which they are entitled to vote.

I say “entitled”, because that goes to the very core of many of our values, such as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. We are talking about section 3, which is the ability to vote.

What brings us here today in this motion is talking about changing the Standing Orders, because there are two elements of the Standing Orders that must be addressed. We feel, in light of the debate we have had about Bill C-23, basically changing the Canada Elections Act and the Parliament of Canada Act, that there are two elements of the Standing Orders being used quite often that should not be.

I will discuss those two elements right now. This is from House of Commons Procedure and Practice, second edition, 2009, edited by O'Brien and Bosc. The two elements are time allocation and closure. One is used more often than the other, which of course would be time allocation. I will get to that in just a moment.

Let us talk about closure and how it is addressed in this publication. It says:

Closure is a procedural device used to bring debate on a question to a conclusion by “a majority decision of the House, even though all Members wishing to speak have not done so”. The closure rule provides the government with a procedure to prevent the further adjournment of debate on any matter and to require that the question be put at the end of the sitting in which a motion of closure is adopted. Apart from technical changes as to the hour at which debate is to conclude, the rule has remained virtually unchanged since its adoption in 1913.

I assume one of the reasons it has not been changed that much is that we do not use it as much as it was used before. It is time allocation that is used a lot more often. The text goes on:

Closure may be applied to any debatable matter, including bills and motions. The rule was conceived for use in a Committee of the Whole as much as in the House, but it cannot be applied to the business of its standing, special, legislative or joint committees.

That is closure. Let me get to what is more frequently used, which is time allocation. It seems to be used on every piece of legislation that we see fit to bring into the House these days. Certainly, from the standpoint of government legislation, time allocation is used quite frequently. In O'Brien and Bosc, it says:

The time allocation rule allows for specific lengths of time to be set aside for the consideration of one or more stages of a public bill. The term “time allocation” suggests primarily the idea of time management, but the government may use a motion to allocate time as a guillotine.

I like how O'Brien and Bosc use the word “guillotine”. In other words, it is just cut off at a certain point after so many speakers.

Usually, it is a form of limiting debate within the House. The original concept was to use it for timely matters and certain legislation that had to be passed very quickly. However, it is used so often now that it more for political expediency, dare I say it. It seems to be more toward that than anything else.

The text continues:

In fact, although the rule permits the government to negotiate with opposition parties on the adoption of a timetable for the consideration of a bill at one or more stages (including the consideration of Senate amendments), it also allows the government to impose strict limits on the time for debate. This is why time allocation is often confused with closure.

This is what I mentioned before. It continues:

While it has become the most frequently used mechanism for curtailing debate, time allocation remains a means of bringing the parties together to negotiate an acceptable distribution of the time of the House.

Notice here that this book refers to participation of all parties within this House. We do not see a lot of that these days. We see time allocation. We see some smaller discussions. I wish time allocation were used in a more responsible manner, but I do believe that unfortunately it has become an issue mostly of time allocation for political expediency.

The Standing Orders of the House of Commons and the Conflict of Interest Code do address this. Today we propose amending Standing Order 78 and Standing Order 57. We are considering, “Closure. Notice required. Time limit on speeches. All questions put...”. Following Standing Order 57, we are proposing that the wording be:

, provided that the resolution of resolutions, clause or clauses, section or sections, preamble or preambles, title or titles, being considered do not pertain to any bill that seeks to amend the Canada Elections Act or the Parliament of Canada Act.

We are also calling for the same under Standing Order 78. We are calling for a new subsection (4) saying:

(4) No motion, pursuant to any paragraph of this Standing Order, may be used to allocate a specified number of days or hours for the consideration and disposal of any bill that seeks to amend the Canada Elections Act or the Parliament of Canada Act.

This is time allocation “that seeks to amend the Canada Elections Act or the Parliament of Canada Act”.

Let me go back to Bill C-23 for just a moment. We are making major amendments to the Elections Act for people voting in this country, which of course is enshrined within our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. We want to talk about the fact that people have the inalienable right to vote and participate in our democracy. These are fundamental concepts.

In practice, since the conception of this House back in the 1800s, we have always looked and striven toward a consensus among all members of differing parties, of differing opinions, whether they be Conservative, Progressive Conservative, Liberal, NDP, CCF, Green Party, and so on. We have always looked for consensus in dealing with something as fundamental as this. Therefore, before the bill was tabled, there were always public consultations, yes, but also House consultations with the different constituents here or the different parties.

It has always been by convention, meaning that it has been a tradition to do that. Nothing has been codified to make sure the governing party of the day, whenever it has introduced legislation of this magnitude, would always seek out consultation with other parties. However, that did not happen this time.

That is why, on this particular day, the Liberal Party is proposing that, if we make amendments to something this consequential, some of this needs to be codified. If we are actually debating on second reading, third reading, or reports stage any changes to the Elections Act or the Parliament of Canada Act, time allocation and closure need not apply. It basically codifies a convention in this House, a tradition we should respect, which is to say that if we are making changes to the way Canadians express their opinions by the fundamental right of democracy, then it should be codified. I hope every member of this House will agree with us that closure and, specifically, time allocation would be set aside because of something of this importance.

I want to focus more on Bill C-23 because the pattern has been such that this has to be codified. It is unfortunate that we have to do this, really, if we think about it. There have been traditions in the past where the government, putting forward a motion regarding something as important as this, would get the leader of the official opposition to second the motion.

It seems as though more and more of these traditions of consensus within the House are going by the wayside. They are certainly disappearing. If we let more of this happen, the congenial way that this House deals with issues of such magnitude, those conventions and those traditions, will slowly disappear. There we find a degradation of debate in this House.

There are many things happening in this House that require focus to make sure that the sanctity of the debate is respected. I do not like the fact that when a bill is introduced in this House, someone stands up and says right away that our party or our group will disagree with it. I do not think that is respectful, because a full and robust debate was not allowed to happen, but we are observing this more and more.

I want to touch on Bill C-23, which is of course the bill that we are dealing with in the procedure and House affairs committee right now. Making changes to legislation such as the Elections Act and the Parliament of Canada Act, which is what is happening in Bill C-23, requires measures such as this. Unfortunately, time allocation was used after only the third speaker, and I was number three.

That was an unfortunate passage. There was not even an indication that debate was going to be prolonged or that it was going on far too long and that salient points were being repeated, which members have the right to do. The points were not being repeated to the point where the government was exacerbated and therefore had to use time allocation.

We had only three speakers. That was it. That was all. We had the mover, who was the Minister of State for Democratic Reform, and the critic from the official opposition, and me. Then, all of a sudden, down came the guillotine. The guillotine came down and debate was cut off, literally.

As we look at the background of Bill C-23, we see that there would be fundamental changes in the way Canadians exercise their vote. There are couple of these issues, and one is in regard to vouching. Vouching has been a tradition not only of this democracy but of other democracies as well. It is enshrined within the Elections Act. It is enshrined in how Elections Canada deals with people who do not have the appropriate identification on hand.

Here is the problem. People are eligible for that identification, but they do not have it on their person. They could be transient. They could have moved.

They can prove that they are above 18. They can prove that they are Canadian citizens. I can do that with my health card. I can produce it right now, or perhaps not. Nonetheless, it is here somewhere. My health card can prove that I am a Canadian citizen. I can produce ID that proves I am above the age of 18.

Here is the crux of the matter: proving residency has become problematic for a wide swath of our population. Half a million people use the system of vouching in order to vote. They may have had ID, but just did not have it on them, as in the case right now. I mean that literally.

As of right now, according to this legislation, I cannot vote. My driver's licence shows a post office box on as the address. I cannot use my voter information card anymore. That is what a lot of seniors use, incidentally, if I could pick out one sector of the population. I cannot use that anymore. My utility bills come electronically, so now I have to call my local power supplier and tell them to send me a paper bill. I think I have to pay $4 for that.

There we see a fundamental change in the elections act. We have shortened debate because we want to ram this through very quickly, and that is unfortunate. That is why today I am hoping that all members, especially the Conservative backbenchers, will say this is the way to go. They should use their conscience here. If they are going to fundamentally change the system by eliminating vouching and disenfranchising up to half a million voters, I would suspect that many people here on the Conservative backbench would say we need debate.

Let us remember that time allocation took place after only three speakers. Therefore, the Conservative backbenchers were told they could not talk. They may have been brimming over with joy as they anticipated talking about how wonderful the government is, which many of them do on occasion. Such is their right. However, because of time allocation, they did not have the right to speak. That is unfortunate. I would hope that they would see that this particular motion today would satisfy them.

A member from southern Ontario had a bill about changing the way we function in the House. He tabled a private member's bill for democratic reform. He then faced a barrage of questions from all members of Parliament. What did he do? He took it back, changed it, and brought it back to the House.

There is a reason he did that. It was because there were fundamental changes that went beyond the scope and the principles of the bill that was tabled. If we vote yes at second reading, we have to accept the principles of the bill. One cannot go beyond the scope of the bill if one is looking for amendments within committee. That is called responsible law-making. That is called responsible debate. Unfortunately, we are in a position now where we have gone past second reading vote.

Let me get back to Bill C-23 once more. I talked about vouching and the fact that the office of the election commissioner, the investigative arm of Elections Canada, has now been moved from Elections Canada into the public prosecutions office.

The Conservatives keep talking about the independence of the elections commissioner and how fundamental it is. There is nothing wrong with achieving independence for an elections commissioner in order to do due diligence and do the job. However, here is the problem. They said they want to put the referee's jersey back on the elections commissioner by putting him in the prosecution office. That way he would get to be the referee that he was meant to be. They may have put the referee's jersey on the commissioner, but they took away his whistle. He does not have a whistle to blow in case of serious infractions.

That is a key investigative tool. Many elections commissioners in certain provinces across the country have this tool. Many other departments federally, such as the Competition Bureau, have this power, and they move it frequently. They told us in committee that they use it quite often. It is obvious, without saying, that it is an essential tool. The tool can compel testimony.

In the case of the robocalls, thousands of names were just introduced to the House to talk about robocalls and how bad it was. There are not enough answers regarding this situation. That is unfortunate. Having the right tools to investigate is the way to go, but unfortunately the government did not see fit to do that. Now what we have was not an exercise in independence for the commissioner but an exercise in isolation to isolate the investigative arm of Elections Canada.

Finally, I hope through the course of the day and in the vote that will follow in a fortnight, we will say that debate on fundamental changes to the Canada Elections Act and the Parliament of Canada Act should not be limited.

Remarks by Minister of State for Democratic Reform

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I will be very brief. I just wish to support the official opposition in concern. The debate in this place on Bill C-23 could very well lead to not just it misleading Parliament, but my concern is that it would mislead the Canadian electorate.

We have had the repeated reference to 39 pieces of ID as though any one of them would allow a Canadian to vote. I know that slips are made when people are in debate, but it is very clear that one could go to the polls with six or seven pieces of ID off that list and still be denied one's right to vote, without recourse to vouching. Therefore, we need to be very careful. This is one of the reasons why bills that deal with the fairness of Canadian elections should never be dealt with in circumstances of limiting debate and pushing things through without full political consensus to support something so fundamental.

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I must say I am rising today with great exasperation and frustration on a question of privilege pursuant to section 48(1) of the Standing Orders, regarding misleading information that the Minister of State for Democratic Reform has provided to the House. I say I am exasperated because members know as well as I do that in the past few months, my colleagues and I from the NDP official opposition caucus have had to stand up many times in the House to denounce misleading comments by members of the opposite side.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to read from a statement you made yesterday in the House: “As has been suggested, the information shared in this House does hold extraordinary value as it forms the basis upon which decisions are made in the House”.

Mr. Speaker, you will recall that we raised a similar question of privilege in March 2012 with regard to the comments made by the then minister of Human Resources and Social Development, who said that there was no quota system for recovering EI payments when in fact there was.

We also raised a similar question of privilege in October 2013, when we brought to the House's attention the Prime Minister's misleading statements concerning his office's involvement in the Wright-Duffy scandal.

We raised a question on the 100% fabricated evidence from the member for Mississauga—Streetsville, who said in this House he had witnessed cases of voter fraud when, in fact, he simply had not.

Finally, just two weeks ago we raised a similar question regarding misleading comments from the minister of state for finance, who manipulated numbers to justify his party's opposition to the NDP's CPP expansion plan.

My colleagues and I do not just raise these questions of privilege for fun, far from it. I would rather not have to rise in the House and waste the precious little time that we are given for debates—which is often cut short by this government—to ask the House to look into misleading comments once again made by a minister.

However, as the opposition House leader, it is my duty to raise these questions and to hold the government responsible for what it tells the House and Canadians.

Therefore, it is with some irritation that I want to present to you today the facts concerning the specific case at hand: the comments made by the Minister of State for Democratic Reform.

During question period in this House on Wednesday, April 2, the Minister of State for Democratic Reform was asked why he was ready to disenfranchise thousands of Canadians by removing voter ID cards as possible forms of identification for voters. This is what the member replied on April 2:

There are regular reports of people receiving multiple cards and using them to vote multiple times. That, too, can be found on the Elections Canada website.

If this were true, it would indeed be concerning. As we all know, voting multiple times is a serious legal offence. That is why the NDP followed up on his statement. We searched Elections Canada's website and we asked witnesses at the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, currently studying Bill C-23, if there were, in fact, cases of people using multiple cards to vote multiple times.

The answer we found is unambiguous. There is only one documented case of this, as we well know, which was a gag by the Quebec TV show Infoman. Therefore, the Minister of State for Democratic Reform is blatantly misleading the House when he said there are “regular reports” of voters voting multiple times.

We tried to give the minister of state a chance to correct the record during question period on April 3, the following day, when the leader of the official opposition, the NDP leader, asked him to give us examples of these “regular reports of people receiving multiple cards and using them to vote multiple times”. At that time, the minister of state actually changed his story.

On April 3, he replied:

In fact, there are documented cases where people received multiple voter information cards. I gave the example, which was documented by the French CBC, where two Montrealers each received two voter information cards and therefore each voted twice.

In his reply, the minister of state could only resort to citing, again, one single example that exists of voters voting multiple times, but he changed his story from “regular reports of people receiving multiple cards and using them to vote multiple times” to “cases where people received multiple voter information cards”.

In his answer on April 2, the Minister of State for Democratic Reform was referring to the reports showing that there are cases of people receiving more than one voter card. However, none of these reports say that the people in question actually used these to vote more than once. The minister of state knew this, and therefore misled the House when he manipulated the information to add, from his own fertile imagination, that people had used their voter cards to vote multiple times.

Mr. Speaker, if you are still not convinced, allow me to tell you about the many witnesses who appeared before the committee and who all told us that there was no evidence of systemic or organized voter fraud.

Harry Neufeld, the former chief electoral officer of British Columbia, said:

“There was no evidence of fraud whatsoever”, in the cases he reviewed, and that he has “only been privy to a handful of cases of voter fraud” in his entire career.

Marc Mayrand, Chief Electoral Officer of Elections Canada, also said that there was no systemic or organized voter fraud.

How, then, can the Minister of State for Democratic Reform claim that Elections Canada has documented multiple cases of voter fraud?

I will not take the time here today to mention all the precedents where it was found that prima facie contempt had occurred when members misled the House. I will spare members in the House from that today, since we have talked about those cases before when other similar incidents occurred, incidents which are unfortunately far too frequent.

Let me simply remind the House that, according to the House of Commons Procedure and Practice, second edition, on page 115, “...Misleading a Minister or a Member has also been considered a form of obstruction and thus a prima facie breach of privilege”.

Moreover, and this is the essence of the matter, the Parliamentary Practice, 22nd edition, by Erskine May states the following on page 63 that “...it is of paramount importance that ministers give accurate and truthful information to Parliament, correcting any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity”.

Mr. Speaker, I see that you are getting tired of this, as are New Democrats, and so are Canadians. Canadians are tired of the misleading comments from the other side. We are tired of the Conservative government’s misleading the House in order to justify its wrong-headed policies.

The opposition to the unfair elections act is mounting and virtually unanimous. Conservatives stand to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters who, by many assessments, are coincidentally not usually Conservative voters. To justify this, the Minister of State for Democratic Reform had to resort to making up stories in the House because he simply could not find real evidence to bring forward. All he has is one single gag by Infoman.

The Minister of State for Democratic Reform has, one, offered misleading statements to the House; two, did so knowingly; and, three, he did so with the deliberate intent to mislead parliamentarians. Therefore, Mr. Speaker, I ask you to find that a prima facie contempt of the House exists in this case.

More than that, Mr. Speaker, since the problem of ministers knowingly misleading the House seems to be becoming endemic in the Conservative government, I would appreciate receiving guidance from you as to how we can put an end to the practice of government benches providing misleading information to parliamentarians and to the Canadian public.

41st General Election

[Wayne Marston, NDP, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

Mr. Speaker, in my nine years in this House, I have never before had a petition of this nature with this volume of signatures. Thousands upon thousands of people are concerned with the 41st general election campaign and the accusations of fraud. As well, they are concerned about Bill C-23 and they are petitioning this House to put in electoral reform that takes into account the recommendations of Elections Canada to establish enforceable standards. In my time here, I have not before seen anything like this.

Democratic Reform

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

Mr. Speaker, if my friend from Kingston and the Islands knew me better, he would know I have an answer for just about anything.

Let me again say that there is absolutely nothing unusual in the provisions contained in Bill C-23. It has been common practice for the party that finishes first in a particular riding to be able to appoint, or at least recommend, appointees to do election service on election day.

This is just a continuation of a practice that has been carried on for many decades. I think if my colleague went back in time, he would find out that this practice started when there was a Liberal government in place. Liberals were the ones that first determined or recommended and put provisions in their own Elections Act that the first place party should be the one with the ability to recommend candidates for election official positions.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Kingston and the Islands for his kind comments, inviting me to participate in the debate without talking points.

I noticed with interest, however, that the member opposite who was asking me to try to participate in a lively debate without any prepared talking points from the government was himself speaking from prepared notes. If he, at any time, wants to engage in a lively debate on an extemporaneous basis, I would be more than willing to accommodate him.

In fact, members in this place know, if they have been here any length of time, that I have never made a speech from a prepared text in my 10 years in this place, nor will I ever. I am a firm believer that if one cannot make a speech without prepared notes, whether it be 4 minutes, as in this case, or 20 minutes or even 30 minutes, one is probably in the wrong business.

That aside, let us deal with the issue at hand. The member opposite was saying that there is really no need to have a central poll supervisor recommended by any particular party. It has been a long-standing practice in elections over the last number of years that officials, whether they be deputy returning officers or poll clerks, are appointed from a recommended list of candidates from respective political parties.

The member opposite is quite right, the deputy returning officer is usually appointed from a recommended list from the party that finished first in that particular riding. The poll clerk in that riding is usually appointed from a recommended list from the second place party, and so forth.

Making another appointment of the central poll supervisor really does nothing more than extend the practice we have seen for literally decades in Canada.

I would also point out that, even though the member opposite feels this would be perhaps open to abuse, there are many checks and balances that we already have in place during elections. Not only do the poll clerk and the deputy returning officer tend to balance one another, but each party and each candidate has scrutineers throughout all polls. If there are any disputes, obviously the scrutineers would be the first ones on site to be able to challenge the ruling of any official on site.

I would also point out, with respect to both deputy returning officers and poll clerks, that even though they are normally appointed from a recommended list from various political parties, the returning officer has the ability to remove those officials if the returning officer feels there is just cause. The returning officer, as we all know, is appointed by Elections Canada.

The ultimate check and balance is the fact that Elections Canada and its appointee can remove even the central poll supervisor if they feel there is just cause. What would just cause be? Well, perhaps it would be if the central poll supervisor was trying to influence the outcome in any way, shape, or form.

That is why I suggest that there is simply no need to change the provisions we have contained in Bill C-23.

Finally, I point out that I am sure the situation is the same in Kingston and the Islands as it is in my riding back in Saskatchewan. Almost every single candidate I know of and every single riding I am aware of is usually contacted by Elections Canada towards the latter part of the election to see if there are additional names that could be supplied. Quite frankly, over the last 20 or 30 years, Elections Canada has had great difficulty in filling all of the positions, so it asks for additional names to come from parties.

That is the status of Bill C-23. That is why it makes sense. I ask my hon. colleague from Kingston and the Islands to please consider that in his response.

[Ted Hsu, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to be able to revisit my question on Bill C-23, the so-called fair elections act. I want to thank the parliamentary secretary for being here tonight to answer the question. I invite him to deviate from the prepared script and we will have a nice debate here this evening.

My question is about the fact that under this bill, the central poll supervisor would be chosen from a list provided by the candidate or the party that won the previous election in that riding. The problem is that there is no particular reason for making the central poll supervisor another partisan person. I know that there are already officers at each poll who are selected from lists provided by the party that finished first and the party that finished second. They are the deputy returning officers and the poll clerks. The idea is to make sure that at each poll there is someone representing each side of the fight so that at least there is someone from each side to make sure that things are fair. However, we do not need to make the situation more partisan.

Let me explain a little bit about what the central poll supervisor does. In my riding of Kingston and the Islands, there are a couple of places I can mention, Portsmouth Olympic Harbour and Winston Churchill Public School. They have a large room with a number of poll stations. When that is the case, there is a central poll supervisor, who is selected by Elections Canada at the moment. That supervisor's job is to interpret rules, to make calls, and to adjudicate. In short, the supervisor is something like an umpire. If the umpire is partisan or is perceived to be partisan, I think that can hurt public faith in the elections process. It can erode trust and reduce the legitimacy of the government.

I know that the current government likes to talk about how it won the last election, so I think it should be interested in the legitimacy of its own election. If people are feeling that the political system is going to become more stacked against them, people who are already under stress economically, who are wondering if the economy is stacked against them, if the systems and the institutions we have in this country that make it a strong country are stacked against them, I think that is not good for the country. It is not good for the economy and the long-term health of this country.

Let me close with another analogy. Imagine a hockey playoff series, and the team that wins one game in the match gets to appoint the referee for the next game. This is kind of like what is happening.

What is even worse in this case is that the referee has no whistle. The reason for that, of course, in this analogy, is that under Bill C-23, another reason it is a bad bill, Elections Canada and the people who work to make sure elections are fair do not have the power to compel witnesses to testify. For example, in Kingston and the Islands, when someone impersonated my campaign manager, something that was documented, Elections Canada could not compel a witness to testify. When someone told a voter to go from one part of the city to a totally different part of the city to vote, we got some documentation, but Elections Canada could not compel people to testify.

This is like a referee with no whistle. That is why I think Bill C-23 is a bad bill.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Minister of State (Democratic Reform)]

Mr. Speaker, we think it is reasonable to expect Canadians to bring ID when they vote. Now, it is not necessary to bring photo ID. Canadians can choose from 39 options. The fair elections act will require Elections Canada to inform voters of these options so that they can all vote.

[Niki Ashton, NDP, Churchill, MB]

Mr. Speaker, too many Conservative ministers have a casual relationship with the truth on Bill C-23. The Minister of the Environment is claiming that she was in the provincial cabinet in 2001 and helped to solve a crisis with identification following the September 11th attacks. Yet, she was not even elected until 2004.

The minister claims that every hamlet has photo ID, yet the MLA for South Baffin said that his constituents have to fly to Iqaluit.

Will the Minister of the Environment come clean on voter ID cards for northerners and agree to stop reinventing history?

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Minister of State (Democratic Reform)]

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister is doing no such thing. He is simply requiring, through the fair elections act, that people present ID when they cast their ballot.

It is not necessary to bring government-issued photo ID, though that is an option. There are 39 different forms of ID that are accepted when people show up to vote. We think that is reasonable, and Canadians agree with us.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Minister of State (Democratic Reform)]

Mr. Speaker, the fact that the leader of the NDP thinks it is indefensible to ask people to bring ID when they vote just shows how out of touch with reality he has become.

There are 39 different forms of acceptable ID that Canadians can use when they cast their ballot. We think it is reasonable in a democratic society for people to bring ID when they vote. That is all that the fair elections act requests.

Employees' Voting Rights Act

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am very happy to be able to speak briefly to Bill C-525.

I have to say that if the mover of the private member's bill believes that this is so important and is worthwhile, then why does the government not introduce legislation to do what is clearly trying to be done through the backdoor? It is because the government does not have the courage to take its own action and clearly stand up to introduce legislation if it wants to see changes.

Previously we had Bill C-377. Now we have Bill C-525. If government members have some concerns and think that changes need to happen, they should do it the proper way and introduce legislation as a government.

I am happy to have a chance to speak to a bill that according to the government's sponsors is to help empower workers.

Specifically, Bill C-525 would amend the Canada Labour Code, the Parliamentary Employment and Staff Relations Act, and the Public Service Labour Relations Act to provide that the certification and decertification of a bargaining agent under these acts must be achieved by a vote-based majority through a secret ballot.

Members will forgive my apprehension, but as this bill does come on the heels of the government's last union-busting bill, Bill C-377, I have to wonder again about the real motivations behind it.

Bill C-525 would affect more than 1.2 million employees working as public servants or for an employer under federal jurisdiction. This would include everyone from my own staff to their own staff to the local postmaster to the teller at my local bank or credit union. This means we need to ensure that we get this right, because the bill would impact on real people every day.

The Conservatives have made it clear from the beginning of their term that they are prepared to smash unions at all costs, even when the cost would hurt middle-class workers. Liberals see this as unacceptable. We will be casting our votes in favour of middle-class workers and their families and in favour of fairness and full consultation. If the Conservatives want to change the Labour Code or anything in it, then they should sit down with the partners and discuss those things and make the changes.

My first concern with Bill C-525 is that it proposes to fundamentally change how a union can be formed and dissolved in the federal jurisdiction, yet the evidence shows there is no need, and the major stakeholders have neither asked for this change nor even agreed with it.

Despite the fact that the federal labour relations system is respected and supported by both labour and employers as a result of a genuine and proven consultative and consensus process that has been followed for decades for amending the Labour Code, the bill clearly ignores all the good work that has been done over the years through discussions between labour and the employer as to what changes need to be made. It seems Bill C-525 is again rooted in ideology rather than in sound policy based upon need.

There has been no proven need for the legislation. Those supporting the bill suggest that the rationale for Bill C-525 was a mountain of complaints regarding union coercion of workers. However, according to the Canada Industrial Relations Board, there have only been two founded complaints against unions out of 4,000 decisions in 10 years, so all of this is about just two serious complaints. Even the chairperson of CIRB stated in committee testimony, “It's not a huge problem”.

For labour relations legislation to be effective, it must be developed and implemented by the stakeholders through pre-legislative consultation based upon evidence, not by backdoor government manoeuvring of private members' bills that are, again, based solely upon ideology. This is not the first time we have seen bills that are clearly based upon the ideology of the Conservatives rather than upon substance or science.

Bill C-525 ignores long-established processes and like its sister legislation, Bill C-377, would impose radical changes that are not supported by the stakeholders or by the facts. The result of the legislation would not be labour harmony or efficiency; it would be an upsetting of the balance and stability in labour relations in Canada. This may be what the government is attempting to spark, but it is not in the best interests of employers, workers, or the Canadian economy in the long term.

However, I am not here just to poke holes today. In fact, as someone who has a strong union base in my own constituency, I have seen the positive contributions made to my communities by organized labour over many years. Indeed, this kind of social benevolence is something that has long underscored the labour movement in Canada, and those of us in the Liberal caucus continue to support these middle-class workers and their families very proudly.

Kicking labour around is tantamount to an attack on our communities, and the government should be ashamed of the approach it is taking. Bill C-377 was bad enough, and now Bill C-525 has appeared on the scene. When will it stop?

The bill is neither about union democracy, nor balanced labour relations. Bill C-525 fundamentally changes the way that workers can unionize, without any consultation or support of the stakeholders, and based on zero evidence for its need.

Rather than this kind of knee-jerk approach, the Liberal Party has called for a certification process that, one, allows workers to make free and informed decisions about whether they want to join a union or not, and, two, that has been created through a fair and balanced consensus tripartite process that is based on fact, whereby the changes to be made come from the stakeholders themselves.

Bill C-525 is yet another example of the Conservative government abusing the private members' bill process as backdoor government legislation to promote its ideology, not the views and wishes of the stakeholders or their constituents that would be affected or when the facts at hand show it is not needed.

What are the Conservatives so afraid of? When they tried this very same thing with Bill C-377, their own senators admonished them for doing it. They stymie debate, curtail committee study, and act like their fingerprints are not all over the document.

For example, the human resources committee only studied this for two and a half hours, and almost every witness, including government witnesses, spoke out against the bill. Somehow it sounds a bit like Bill C-23. Specifically, the witnesses that were heard expressed concern over the bill.

George Smith, a labour relations expert, said:

...we are dealing with a private member's bill to amend a significant section of the Canada Labour Code without any view of how this change will impact overall labour relations policy in the federal sector, without any of the necessary due process and public consultation to examine the intended and unintended consequences to such amendments.

Dick Heinen, executive director, Christian Labour Association of Canada, a union that is often viewed as employer friendly, said this about the current card-check system, “It has worked, and I don't know what the problem is. I don't know why we need to change that”.

Elizabeth MacPherson, chair of the Canada Industrial Relations Board, with respect to the effectiveness of the current card-check system, said, “In our opinion, it is working well. With the board having the discretion to decide when a vote must be held, it works”. Why do we need to change it? Why is the government refusing to listen? Is it anything else but clear ideology?

Conservative abuse of this process has been so terrible in the past that the Conservative member for Edmonton—St. Albert resigned from the caucus in disgust. I see that they have learned nothing from the past.

It has already been said that power over a person's wallet is power over their will. That is what Bill C-525 is really all about. As just one example, research has clearly shown that moving from a card-check-based system to a mandatory vote system reduces unionization rates. This is the true motivation behind the bill. Bill C-525 proposes to abolish the card-check model in favour of a mandatory representation vote in all certification applications. It is no more complex than that.

Labour unions have been defenders of employee rights, and they have a long-standing track record of helping our communities in many ways. Of course, unions are not perfect, and there have been many occasions when I have differed with them. However, I do believe in due process. Bill C-525, like its sister bill, Bill C-377, is a partisan attack on middle-class workers and their families. It is wrong, and as the Liberal industry critic, I will be voting for workers and against this sneaky backdoor legislation.

Democratic Reform

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, Bill C-23 is an absolute failure. In fact, it is anti-democratic, and, quite frankly, the Prime Minister should be ashamed of himself for the manner in which he is forcing this bill through the House of Commons today.

Today we witnessed the Prime Minister's democratic reform minister verbally assault the Chief Electoral Officer. How shameful it was. We are looking to the minister to do the responsible thing and to recognize that verbally assaulting the Chief Electoral Officer is wrong. He should apologize to all Canadians. When can we—

[Lysane Blanchette-Lamothe, NDP, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Mr. Speaker, Sheila Fraser believes that the electoral reform bill would limit the powers of the Chief Electoral Officer to hire the staff needed to hold elections.

Under Bill C-23, the government will have to give its approval before election staff are hired. This is another impediment to Elections Canada's independence that the Conservatives have slyly imposed.

Does the minister feel that the former auditor general's criticism is valid or will he continue to reject constructive criticism?

Economic Action Plan 2014 Act, No. 1

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

Mr. Speaker, I wonder if my hon. colleague has any comments on the rationale that was used by the minister of state just now.

I think that in a sort of free of context way, it makes sense to say that all of the consultations that went in to the intellectual property section help to validate why they should move forward as legislation, although not necessarily in the middle of a huge omnibus bill.

The question for my colleague is that if we use that standard, how much of the rest of this omnibus bill would be on solid ground? I am thinking of the FATCA provisions. It seems very clear there has been absolutely no consultation with Canadians who are both American and Canadian citizens.

I also wonder whether or not the minister of state might want to talk to her colleague, the Minister of State for Democratic Reform, to suggest that standard of consultation might well have prevented him from getting into trouble, as he is now on Bill C-23.

Election of the Speaker

[Kennedy Stewart, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak on Motion No. 489 which requests that the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs study the possibility of adapting a first past the post preferential ballot for the election of the Speaker of the House.

I would like to congratulate the member for Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington for this motion, which I am supporting.

I would also like to thank the member for Gaspésie—Îles-de-la-Madeleine for all his hard work, on this and other issues. He is an outstanding member of Parliament, and I am very proud to call him my colleague.

I am glad to say that I support this motion, and I support it for two reasons. First, the motion itself has considerable merit. Second, it adds to the spirit of reform that is about this place these days. There are a number of discussions, as the previous speaker mentioned, that are being considered in the House and at the procedure and House affairs committee, and this motion adds to that debate in a positive way.

It is an exciting time in the House of Commons. I am a first-term MP, proudly representing Burnaby—Douglas. It has been a great pleasure to be part of the debates about reforming or abolishing the Senate, changing our electoral system to perhaps proportional representation, establishing electronic petitions, changing our committee system in how we choose committee chairs, and giving members more power over their leaders.

It has been a great pleasure to be part of these debates. However, I must say that my excitement does not extend to Bill C-23, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act. It is an abomination by my count, roundly denounced by all election experts and democratic protectors right across the country.

However, I will not dwell on Bill C-23, but will focus more on the positive efforts that are before us today. As mentioned by the previous speaker, Motion No. 489 proposes that the PROC committee study the possibility of adapting a first past the post preferential ballot for the election of the Speaker. This would change us from our current practice of having members vote several times, with each round having members with the least of votes being eliminated, and one member receiving the majority of vote eventually elected.

This motion proposes a preferential balloting system in which members would only have to vote once, except in the event of a tie. They would do so by voting for the candidates of their choice in order of preference. This is a common system that is used around the world, and there are plenty of examples for us to draw upon, whether it is through an electoral system or through a selection of speakers.

This morning I was reading the hon. member's speech from the first hour of debate, and was very interested to note that between 1867 and the 1980s, Speakers were elected by an open show of hands, with the Speaker being chosen by the prime minister of the day. It was only in the mid-1980s that the Speaker was elected by a secret ballot vote by members of Parliament.

When we think about how large a change that was, from the prime minister of a majority government essentially hand-picking a Speaker, until now, where we have lessened the power of the prime minister and broadened it to all members of Parliament electing a Speaker by a secret ballot, that is a much better way to go.

That spirit of what was happening in the mid-1980s, to where we lessened the power of the prime minister and put more power in the hands of regular members, is what is creeping into the discussions we have been having in the House during the weeks and months that we have been debating various motions and bills coming before Parliament. Members are proposing adjustments to our parliamentary procedures in an attempt to improve the process, and in some cases lessen the concentration of power in the hands of a prime minister.

I think there is a range of bills and motions that are being discussed here. Some are more on the housekeeping side, making sure that we tidy up our procedural matters, and some are much more radical in nature. I will get to those in a second.

I noted from the speech by the member for Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington in the first hour that he feels these changes are necessary because the current process takes too long, there is no mechanism currently on the Standing Orders for resolving ties, and he thinks it is important to destroy ballots to preserve the dignity of contestants who do not happen to win the contest.

These are all very good reasons for why we should support this bill. It is a tidying sort of measure, and of course procedure and House affairs committee will go through it to make sure that we get the details right. However, from first glance, it does look like a good thing to do. It is something that would tidy our procedures here, save time for the members, make sure that we have written down the procedures for resolving a tie, and make sure that we preserve the dignity of all people who put their names forward to stand for leader.

However, also in his speech, the member mentioned Motion No. 431, the motion that was put forward by the member for Saskatoon—Humboldt. He does not say that he supports the motion outright. Rather, he said that if both motions survive a vote in the House, which Motion No. 431 did, that they would not only draw upon the same pool of experts to discuss the preferential ballot proposals before us today, but also as to how we might select committee chairs. The member suggested that we should study efficiency, which is what is on his mind here, because he suggests that this pool of experts could be used to look at both motions to inform the procedure and House affairs committee as to whether they should go ahead. It is a good suggestion that we draw upon the expertise that we develop for one motion to look at the other and perhaps save some time.

I would like to make a larger point. The motion before us is not only similar in nature to the member for Saskatoon—Humboldt's efforts to reform how committee chairs are elected, but it is also similar in spirit to my motion, Motion No. 849, with respect to electronic petitions, and perhaps Bill C-559, the reform act, put forward by the member for Wellington—Halton Hills. I look at these as a kind of range in terms of how much they would change the structure of how we do business in the House of Commons.

The motion before us, Motion No. 489, is probably the most modest change that we could make. My idea for electronic petitions, which is currently in front of the procedure and House affairs committee, would adjust our processes a little more radically. Then, when we move to Motion No. 431, with respect to selecting committee chairs from Parliament, that again changes things a little more radically. Finally, Bill C-559, the reform act, would make the most change. Therefore, I would put my motion, Motion No. 489, more in the category of what the member is suggesting here today, a minor change to modernize our processes and make them more efficient.

One of the questions is on why we do these things. Why do we take the time? I only have one motion or bill that would come forward for a vote in the House, as does the member who is putting this motion forward today, as do the other members I have just mentioned. What we are trying to do is to think of ways to make this place better, how we can improve our processes, and how we can make our democracy better for Canadians. Then we look at what is feasible in the House.

The member for Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington has hit the nail on the head. He has suggested a change that would be palatable to all members of the House, providing it has proper study. I think it is wise of him to do so. What I tried to do with Motion No. 489 with respect to electronic petitioning is to pick something that would perhaps please many members of the House. Hopefully, the procedure and House affairs committee will see that through.

As we move to the other motions and bills that I have mentioned, they are more radical. We will require considerable debate on those motions in order for them to pass.

What it shows is that there is a genuine spirit of reform in this place. We are trying to figure out how we can debate these things and come to a consensus, more or less, on what changes are appropriate. I support this motion because the member has correctly calculated that his changes would more than likely be adopted. He would succeed in reforming this place, maybe not quite in the current form that his motion suggests, but after a discussion at the procedure and House affairs committee there is something that would happen.

Again, I feel positive vibes in this place from various speeches. I am hoping that the member will assist the rest of us who are interested in reform in this place, just as we are assisting him. It is only through this co-operation that we can move the democracy of Canada forward. I think we are all interested in making Canada a more democratic place.

I thank you for the time, Mr. Speaker. It is a pleasure to speak to this motion.

Democratic Reform

[Jonathan Genest-Jourdain, NDP, Manicouagan, QC]

Mr. Speaker, across the country, first nations communities run into serious problems when it comes time to vote. As we heard in committee, it is hard for many members of these communities to obtain the type of ID card that will be required under Bill C-23.

Why is the minister refusing to amend his bill to prevent thousands of Canadians from losing their right to vote?

[Alexandrine Latendresse, NDP, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, does the Minister of State for Democratic Reform know Sheila Fraser? If so, has he read her position on Bill C-23? If so, what does he think about the former auditor general's criticism of the electoral reform?

[Nycole Turmel, NDP, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the Native Women's Association of Canada provided an eloquent reminder of the significant barriers to the electoral participation of aboriginal women.

By eliminating Elections Canada's education and awareness initiatives, Bill C-23 will exclude even more aboriginal women who are already wary of our electoral system and a government that does not care about their needs.

The government should withdraw its bill and come up with a totally new approach to reform. Will it?

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Speaker, Canada's former auditor general, Sheila Fraser, who exposed the Liberal sponsorship scandal, feels that Bill C-23 is an attack on Canadian democracy.

When it came time to go after the Liberals, with good reason, the current Minister of State for Democratic Reform mentioned the former auditor general's name 65 times in the House. Today, he is acting as though she does not even exist.

Will the minister listen to Sheila Fraser and withdraw his bill?

Economic Action Plan 2014 Act, No. 1

[Robert Chisholm, NDP, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Mr. Speaker, let me indicate at the beginning that I will be sharing my time. Unfortunately, I do not have much of it, but being a team player, I am sharing my time with the member for Gatineau.

Let me say how disappointed I am that once again debate on this important measure has been limited. We may get 10 hours altogether in debate at second reading on the bill, which means that the vast majority, two-thirds of the members in the House, will not have an opportunity to stand and represent their constituencies. It is shameful.

We are talking about a budget implementation bill of 350 pages, almost 500 clauses, and it amends dozens of bills. The budget for the department that I am the shadow critic for, Fisheries and Oceans, has a budget of $1.6 billion, and I am being given 10 minutes in the House.

The other day we had the opportunity to talk to the minister at committee on the main estimates, and I had 10 minutes that I had to divide among my colleagues in our caucus. The level of accountability by the government is absolutely shocking, frankly. We continue to see it.

One of the things that the Conservatives are changing is something that affects the region I am from, the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency. Not only are they getting rid of the Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation altogether, which is losing that voice, that on the ground voice, but they are getting rid of the board of ACOA. They are taking away the requirement that the CEO of ACOA is to report on the progress of that organization in contributing to economic development in the region every five years.

Talk about removing accountability at every step along the way. It seems interesting that ECBC, for example, is being disbanded, at a time when there is an investigation under way by the Auditor General into wrongdoings in the ECBC's decision to provide $4 million in new funding for a new marina at Ben Eoin. One might say that sounds familiar; it sounds a lot like what is happening under Bill C-23, the unfair elections act. Conservatives are getting rid of the provisions that would allow Elections Canada to press forward with charges against some of the Conservative members who have been under investigation for flouting the rules in the way they have prosecuted their own elections.

Again, it is a pattern by the government. It does not seem to give a hoot about democracy and things like fair elections, or about accountability. As I said, for a $1.6 billion budget at Department of Fisheries and Oceans, we get an hour altogether, and most of that is taken up by government in discussion with the minister. It is not good enough, as far as I am concerned, and as far as the constituents that I represent from Dartmouth—Cole Harbour.

I have very few minutes, but I want to talk about some of the things that the government could have done. There are a lot of things that it did that I do not agree with. Some things I do agree with. However, there is a lot that the government did not take the opportunity to do. These are things like investing in innovation, economic development, and high-quality middle-class jobs. We had hoped that Conservatives would continue to build on an existing job creation tax credit for small and medium-size businesses. They decided not to do that.

We wanted them to develop a comprehensive strategy to deal with persistent structural youth unemployment and under-employment throughout this country, to create and help businesses create jobs for young Canadians, and to crack down on the abuse of unpaid internships to ensure young people are paid for the work that they perform.

There is a serious problem occurring in this country, where young people, whether getting out of high school or out of university, are having a terrible time trying to find jobs to match their skills. They are having a terrible time finding jobs to develop experience and pay their own way forward, whether it be supporting a family or going on to post-secondary education. The jobs are not there, and the Conservatives have not come up with a plan to help deal with that, other than the Canada jobs plan which does not help students. It was announced last year, and it is only now being agreed to by some of the provinces. It attacks labour market agreements that provide funding for the most vulnerable Canadians, literacy training and job-readiness training in my province of Nova Scotia and throughout the country.

Provinces were forced, frankly at gunpoint, to sign this deal, knowing they were going to be losing funding that they had already committed for these labour market agreements, supporting organizations like the Dartmouth Learning Network and others throughout my province, and programs throughout the country. It is extraordinarily short-sighted, and an example of the lack of appreciation that the Conservatives have for the complexities of job training in this country.

We had hoped that the government would provide explicit transparent criteria for the net benefit to Canada test in the Investment Canada Act, with an emphasis on assessing the impact of foreign investment on communities, jobs, pensions, and new capital investments. I have heard a lot of employers in my constituency asking me why the Americans can protect jobs in their country but Canada does not seem to care what happens to jobs in this country. People are extraordinarily frustrated that companies that compete in the United States are prohibited from doing that, while at the same time American companies come up and displace Canadian companies.

Finally, we had hoped there would be a study conducted into the methods to encourage value-added domestic production in the energy sector.

There is a long list of things, but one of the things I am particularly concerned about is the fact that the Conservatives failed to restore the ecoENERGY home retrofit program. It was an initiative that worked well and was an investment into the renewable energy sector. It was an investment in Canadians actually taking control of the amount of energy they use and it was a good way forward. In their lack of judgment, the Conservatives have decided not to move in that direction again.

Let me finish by saying how disappointed I am as a member of this House of Commons, the representative from Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, that I participate in debate after debate where the current government is shutting down our democracy. It is taking away my rights as a member of Parliament to examine legislation, to examine budgets, to give voice to the concerns of my constituents on these issues every single day. The Conservatives have been doing it repeatedly.

I am hearing from the people in Dartmouth—Cole Harbour that it is not good enough. They want to ensure that every time I have the opportunity I send that message because they are going to be sending their own message in 2015.

Business of the House

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is fair to say that it has been a tough week for the government.

Ms. Sheila Fraser, who is a personal hero to many Canadians for standing up and speaking the truth, has condemned the unfair elections act as an attack on democracy. Her voice is joined with those of current and former chief electoral officers, current and former elections commissioners, many witnesses, and Canadians who are speaking internationally as well. These individuals are all speaking out against this attack on democracy, Bill C-23.

The government's reaction is to try to impose the bill on the House. They have done this about 60 times. It is a sad track record, if not the worst track record in the entire history of all the governments in the country.

Unfortunately, as members know, the government's legislative agenda has been unravelling in the last two weeks. Two bills have been rejected by the Supreme Court of Canada because they simply were not drafted correctly.

In light of the government's unravelling legislative agenda, on behalf of the NDP official opposition caucus I would like to ask the government House leader what he will put forward next week to start to restore the confidence that Canadians have lost in the Conservative government.

Democratic Reform

[Alexandrine Latendresse, NDP, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday, the so-called minister of so-called democratic reform claimed that the experts who are against his electoral reform are so-called experts.

The only problem is that the current and former Chief Electoral Officers, the current and former Commissioners of Canada Elections, and provincial elections officials are against this reform. Today, it was Sheila Fraser who talked about Bill C-23 as an attack on our democracy.

Is Sheila Fraser going to be treated like all the other officers of Parliament and experts who have criticized this reform?

[Alexandrine Latendresse, NDP, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, Sheila Fraser, Canada's former auditor general, who exposed the Liberals' schemes in the sponsorship scandal, says that Bill C-23 is an attack on Canada's democracy.

Ms. Fraser, who currently co-chairs an advisory board on the electoral system, laments the fact that Bill C-23 would disenfranchise thousands of voters, undercut the independence of the Commissioner of Canada Elections, and impede investigations into wrongdoing.

Will the government listen to Sheila Fraser, withdraw its bill and go back to the drawing board?

41st General Election

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to present two petitions.

The first has to do with electoral fraud during the last election, specifically regarding robocalls. The petitioners are calling on the government to launch a serious investigation into this crime.

If Bill C-23 goes ahead as unamended, we will have the investigation into the robocall fraud of the last election dropped and not completed. These petitioners want a full inquiry.

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

[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.

Democratic Reform

[Alexandrine Latendresse, NDP, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, perhaps the minister should tell that to the experts in the United States and throughout the world who are opposed to his reform.

Another American elections expert, Élisabeth Vallet, says that the Conservative movement likes to focus on cases of fraud and is feeding conspiracy theories in order to disenfranchise society's most vulnerable people and thereby serve its own partisan interests. Bill C-23 follows squarely in the Conservative's pattern of prejudice and partisan interests.

Will the minister withdraw his bill and agree to reopen discussions and start over?

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Minister of State (Democratic Reform)]

Mr. Speaker, the member is indeed wrong, and very wrong again.

There are three types of calls. There are automated calls, which must be registered under the fair elections act.

There are telemarketing calls, which are probably the largest number, and they involve hiring professional firms that make tens of thousands, in fact, hundreds of thousands of calls. Those calls must be registered, and the scripts must be retained.

Then, there are calls that are done by parties themselves, almost exclusively by volunteers. They do include the volunteer calls, the types of which I just described, and no, we are not going to bury these people in red tape.

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

Mr. Speaker, on another unfair elections act front, today in committee my questioning of CRTC lawyers confirmed my suspicions of a huge loophole in Bill C-23's voter contact registry scheme, which was supposed to prevent fraudulent calling to voters. Live calls by a party's internal services are not covered, so Conservative Party phone banks can live-call Canadians during elections with no oversight.

My question is to the minister. Is this massive omission deliberate?

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Minister of State (Democratic Reform)]

Mr. Speaker, the Fair Elections Act is very reasonable. It creates a new registry to oversee the robocalls and telemarketing calls that many Canadians receive, as well as to protect the legitimacy of those calls. The bill creates new penalties to punish those who mislead voters with fraudulent calls. It also guarantees that the legislation limiting donations will be obeyed. Yes, the Fair Elections Act will require people to present a piece of ID when they vote.

[Alexandrine Latendresse, NDP, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I do not know which world the Minister of State for Democratic Reform is living in, but it is clearly not the same one as most Canadians.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to hear professor Paul Thomas express his views on Bill C-23. He emphasized the fact that other countries that conduct free elections recognize that election laws must not be changed unilaterally, without consultation. As well as being dangerous for our democracy, the Conservatives' electoral deform bill will undermine the legitimacy of the electoral process. It will not help the Conservative government earn the trust of voters.

Will the minister listen to the experts at last?

Opposition Motion—Government Aircraft

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak in support of today's opposition motion by the member for Timmins—James Bay, because it identifies an abuse of the public trust, which, unfortunately, is part of a much larger pattern by the Conservative government. In this case, we are talking about the use of government planes to transport Conservative Party fundraisers around the country.

Let me be clear. I am not disputing the use of government jets to transport the Prime Minister, his family, his security detail, or even public servants assisting the Prime Minister with government business. To me, the line is crossed when party fundraisers are flying on government jets. As we have now learned, that was a regular practice for the Conservatives. In particular, the flight logs reveal that Mark Kihn, who lists his job as a fundraising projects manager for the Conservative Party, has been a regular passenger, travelling with the Prime Minister on government jets every year from 2007 to 2012.

While this may seem to some a narrow issue for an opposition day motion, it tries to shine a light on a failure by the Conservatives to recognize the importance of respecting the line between the public interest and party interest. On those grounds, it is clearly wrong to use government jets to transport Conservative Party fundraisers.

As I said at the beginning of my remarks, this example illustrates a larger pattern by the Conservatives, which is to seek every partisan advantage for themselves, whether by using their majority to change the rules or by running as close to the line as possible when it comes to the existing rules. We have certainly seen this in Bill C-23, where the Conservatives have included a provision exempting fundraising expenses from election spending limits. Spending limits, as many will know, were introduced in Canada in the 1974 Election Expenses Act in an attempt to level the playing field for elections, so that those with the most resources would not automatically win elections.

Public support for spending limits as an essential part of electoral fairness has always been and still remains very high. The comprehensive Canadian election study conducted in 2000 specifically asked about this and found that 93% of Canadians supported spending limits for candidates and political parties, but what this motion points to is an attempt to get around those kinds of spending limits by using government resources for partisan purposes. Both the transport of Conservative Party fundraisers on government jets and the attempt to undermine spending limits in Bill C-23 violate the fundamental sense of electoral fairness that is an essential part of our Canadian democracy.

These attempts to skirt the rules on election spending limits are not new for the Conservatives. In fact, they began with the first omnibus budget bill. In that bill, the Conservatives used their majority to eliminate public funding for political parties. Normally, in seeking to change fundamental rules in our democracy, we would expect the governing party to consult widely and seek the broadest support for changes to the rules. We would expect this in Bill C-23, and we have not seen it. We would certainly expect them to hold those kinds of consultation and not to sneak in changes through what should have been a technical budget bill.

As in the case of Bill C-23—

Democratic Reform

[Ted Hsu, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservative Bill C-23, the unfair elections act, says that the party who wins one election will get to choose the central poll supervisor for the next election.

Do Canadians want more partisans running elections? Before the Conservatives unfair elections act came along, the central poll supervisor was non-partisan, appointed by Elections Canada.

Why do honest, hard-working Canadians trying to take care of their families need one more thing stacked against them by the Conservative government?

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Minister of State (Democratic Reform)]

Mr. Speaker, the fair elections act would keep everyday Canadians in charge of democracy by pushing special interest groups to the sidelines and rule breakers out of business. It would close loopholes to big money. It would protect against the risks of fraudulent voting. It would crack down on rogue callers who impersonate either parties or Elections Canada. It would give the commissioner, the law enforcement watchdog, sharper teeth, a longer reach, and a freer hand.

It is a good bill.

Government Policies

[Tyrone Benskin, NDP, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to talk about what I have been hearing from the people of Jeanne-Le Ber.

People talk to me about how they are struggling to make ends meet and about the need to make life more affordable. They have pointed out the importance of social housing, and I received several hundred responses about maintaining door-to-door mail delivery.

The government talks about its mandate and having consulted with Canadians, but who are the Canadians that the government is consulting with? Is it Canadians who were asked to consult on bill C-23? I think not. Maybe it is the Canadians who demand rail safety, or maybe it is Canadians who will no longer be receiving home delivery. No, I think not.

From train derailments to the insipid attacks on the Canadian elections process, the citizens of Jeanne-Le Ber know that their representative and the NDP are there to listen and to hold the government to account when they cannot—until 2015.

Democratic Reform

[Alexandrine Latendresse, NDP, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, once again, between Harry Neufeld's credibility and that of the Minister of State for Democratic Reform, there is no comparison whatsoever.

Harry Neufeld said that Bill C-23 will compromise voter turnout for the sake of the minister's obsession with a problem that exists primarily in his overactive imagination. Mr. Neufeld said repeatedly that there is no link between the vouching system and voter fraud. To quote Mr. Neufeld, “...voters were not the problem”.

Many experts oppose the minister's bill. When will he listen to them?

[Alexandrine Latendresse, NDP, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, this morning we had the opportunity to hear from Harry Neufeld on Bill C-23. He oversaw elections in Canada and around the world for over 33 years.

The Minister of State for Democratic Reform has distorted Mr. Neufeld's report to justify much of this bill. However, Mr. Neufeld confirmed unequivocally that the Minister of State for Democratic Reform has misinterpreted his report. He gave several examples of how his conclusions have been used maliciously.

How many other reports has the minister misinterpreted?

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

Mr. Speaker, Harry Neufeld's report is misused constantly by the democratic reform minister to justify Bill C-23's flawed measures.

Mr. Neufeld testified today that none of the remedies his report proposed have ever been mentioned by the minister, let alone included in the bill. He also said that his report is being wrongly interpreted and unfairly invoked by the minister. He said, “At no point in the report do I link vouching with fraudulent voting”.

When will the minister stop distorting the Neufeld report?

Statements by the Member for Edmonton Centre

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I, too, rise this morning because I am concerned about the statements made by the member for Edmonton Centre on March 24, earlier this week.

That day we were debating Bill C-23, the fair elections act, which is the government's term, when the member for Edmonton Centre, I believe, deliberately intended to mislead the House. I do not say that lightly, because that is a form of contempt of the House.

I would like to refer to a ruling you recently made, Mr. Speaker, dealing with another statement, made by the member for Mississauga—Streetsville.

I will first go to what the member for Mississauga—Streetsville stated and then to your comments, Mr. Speaker, as to why it is important that we be very careful in what we say.

I am going to refer to your ruling from just the other day, if I may, Mr. Speaker. You will recall that on February 6, the member for Mississauga—Streetsville stated:

I have actually witnessed other people picking up the voter cards, going to 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.

Mr. Speaker, you articulated a ruling that many of us in the chamber actually supported, because we believe that you were right in your assessment. This is, in essence, what you stated, Mr. Speaker:

This incident highlights the...importance of accuracy and truthfulness in our deliberations. All members bear a responsibility, individually and collectively, to select the words they use very carefully and to be ever mindful of the serious consequences that can result when this responsibility is forgotten. In calling on the Chair to arrive at the finding of prime facie in this case, the hon. House Leader of the Official Opposition cited my ruling of May 7, 2012, where at page 7650 of the Debates, I reminded the House that, before finding that a member had deliberately misled the House, three conditions had to be met:

Then you stated those three conditions, Mr. Speaker:

...one, it must be proven that the statement was misleading; two, it must be established that the member making the statement knew at the time that the statement was incorrect; and three, that making the statement, the member intended to mislead the House.

I really want to emphasize what we were debating at the time. It was, once again, much like your ruling, on Bill C-23. It is an extremely important piece of legislation, and as you know, Mr. Speaker, it is exceptionally controversial. We have had emotional debates on both sides of the House. However, it is expected that when members participate in a debate, they are not going to try, in any way, to intentionally or deliberately mislead. This is what I believe has happened here.

Let me quote what the member for Edmonton Centre actually stated. Please keep in mind that the debate on that day was all about vouching. The government's position on vouching is that we should not allow vouching. That is what the Conservatives were trying to espouse throughout that day.

Here is what the member stated, and this can be found on page 3778, March 24:

In the 2006 election, I was called personally and offered hundreds of voter cards that had been left in apartment buildings and so on. Like an idiot, I said, “No, we don't do that sort of thing”. I should have said, “Yes, come on down”, and had the police waiting.

It is obvious that the member for Edmonton Centre instantly recognized that something was wrong with that phone call. In hindsight, he felt that it was illegal, because he believed that the police should have been contacted on the matter. To the best of my knowledge, I do not believe that the police were contacted. I hope that the member will address that issue.

More importantly, since this statement, we have found out that the voter cards we are debating today were not being used back in 2006. This comes from Elections Canada. The reason the member was focused on the voter cards was that he was trying to discredit the idea of Canadians being able to be vouched for. That is of critical importance.

On page 65 of Erskine May's Parliamentary Practice, “parliamentary privilege” is defined as:

...the sum of the peculiar rights enjoyed by each House collectively [...] and by Members of each House individually, without which they could not discharge their functions...

I was here on Monday when I heard the member make the statement. There is no doubt in my mind that in making that statement, his intent was to try to give the House the impression that illegal activities were taking place and that vouching was wrong.

If we review some of the statements put forward by the member at the time, they were contradicted by media reports by, for example, the CBC, The Hill Times, and others. They seem to contradict what the member for Edmonton Centre was trying to lead members of the House to believe on March 25. I would suggest that such a review would be appropriate.

I look forward to the member for Edmonton Centre's contribution on this issue. Having said that, Mr. Speaker, I would ask that you find that there are grounds that this is a prima facie contempt of Parliament, at which point I would be prepared to move a motion to have the matter referred to the appropriate committee for further study.

Democratic Reform

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

Mr. Speaker, some time ago, the Chief Electoral Officer formed an advisory board of notable Canadians like Michael Wilson, Preston Manning, and Sheila Fraser.

Given the government's attacks on the CEO, will the Minister of State for Democratic Reform assure Canadians that the Treasury Board would never deny requests under Bill C-23's proposed subsection 20(1) to cover costs associated with engaging these advisors on a temporary basis?

Will the government agree to amend this deeply flawed bill to make that change?

[Alexandrine Latendresse, NDP, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, one of the things that the government's Bill C-23 will do is increase the annual political contribution limit by 25%, bringing it to $1,500 per person. The other major impact of Bill C-23 will be to exempt from campaign expenses the amounts spent to solicit donations from people who have made contributions in the past.

Can the minister explain where he got those ideas? Can he quote even one independent expert who believes that these measures will strengthen our democracy and reduce the influence of money in politics?

[Bruce Hyer, Green, Thunder Bay—Superior North, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservatives' fair elections act is anything but fair. Bill C-23 would turn voters away from the polls. Too few voters is our problem, not too many.

Bill C-23 would do nothing to fix our undemocratic system. It would grant 100% of the power to a party with less than 40% of the vote.

Will the minister fix the real electoral problem and make our electoral system more proportional?

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

Mr. Speaker, as Jean-Pierre Kingsley testified today, the unfair elections act only requires data about potential voter fraud to be retained for one year, one short year. This is made worse by the fact that without the power to compel testimony, witnesses can refuse to co-operate, just as we know that so many Conservatives have done during the 2011 robocall investigation.

Will the government now commit to change this part of Bill C-23?

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Minister of State (Democratic Reform)]

Mr. Speaker, the former chief electoral officer has previously made very positive comments about the fair elections act. Today, he repeated a number of those comments.

In terms of Elections Canada's advertising, two things motivate voters: first, information and, second, inspiration. The information about where, when and how to vote should come from Elections Canada. However, the inspiration should come from the candidates and political parties. That is how we will proceed with the fair elections act.

[Alexandrine Latendresse, NDP, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the Minister of State for Democratic Reform is trying to prevent Elections Canada from informing and educating young people and the general public. However, this morning, former chief electoral officer Jean-Pierre Kingsley pointed out that the changes in the Conservatives' electoral “deform” to part 18 of the Elections Act should be completely removed from Bill C-23. His remarks echo those made by the current Chief Electoral Officer, Marc Mayrand.

Does the minister promise to take the advice of experts and delete the proposed changes to part 18 from Bill C-23?

Opposition Motion—Proposed Changes to the Elections Act

[Kennedy Stewart, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is a great pleasure to rise here this evening and support the motion the member for Toronto—Danforth has put forward, and I would like to thank him for his work on this file. He has done a tremendous job not just on this issue but on all the issues he is handling regarding democracy in this country.

I would just remind you, Mr. Speaker, that I will be splitting my time with the member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine.

Democratic reform and protecting democracy in Canada are issues that are very close to my heart. I have studied and worked on this topic for 20 years, both as a student and as a professor. There are many concerns we have with the so-called fair elections act that has been put forward by the government, and this motion directly calls for its rejection. It is really worth reading the motion in detail, because it sums up our problems. It says:

That, in the opinion of the House, proposed changes to the Elections Act that would prohibit vouching, voter education programming by Elections Canada, and the use of voter cards as identification could disenfranchise many Canadians, particularly first-time voters like youth and new Canadians, Aboriginal Canadians and seniors living in residence, and should be abandoned.

This really sums up what will be the crux of my speech and the concerns many Canadians have, regular Canadians but also those who have, as I have, spent their lives studying this issue. In fact, I hope to show in this short speech that the Conservative proposals are not in the best interests of Canadians and that our motion should be passed.

Canada has long been seen as one of the most democratic countries in the world. Indeed, Elections Canada is consulted internationally so that other countries can learn how we do things here. The way we conduct our elections is the gold standard of how elections are conducted around the world and is something we should be proud of. However, I look now at how our democracy is performing overall, and I wonder if we have not hit a bit of a peak or have even passed our peak.

Voter turnout has been on a slow decline since the 1980s, and what is worse, we are creating cycles of non-voting. Citizens, for example, no longer join political parties. Less than two per cent of the citizenry is active in political parties. Once held in high regard, politicians are now loathed by the public, and in fact, both provincial and federal legislatures do not reflect the populations they represent. We could go on and on about where things used to be better and are declining.

I want to focus my remarks on voter turnout and use this to show why the Conservatives' proposed act is not only wrong in detail but is wrong in spirit and in the process by which it would be implemented.

In the 1960s, almost 80% of those eligible to cast votes did so. In the 2011 election, voter turnout dropped to just over 60%, a decline of 20 percentage points. This is not a one-off decline. It is not a dip in voter turnout. This is really a pattern. Turnout has not been higher than 65% in this country any time in this century. It has declined, and we are entering a period of further decline. That is why I am saying again that I think democracy has perhaps peaked in Canada.

The reasons for the decline in turnout are many, but some have to do with declining government investment in efforts to help get people to the polls. The Conservative proposals not only would take money away, for example, for door-to-door registration but would actually add additional barriers to participation. Why I say that this violates the spirit of what we try to do here in Canada is that it is going to make our low turnout problem even worse.

This is a very serious situation from two perspectives. First, many would agree that high voter turnout is in itself a good thing, and low voter turnout, in turn, is a bad thing. Second, and perhaps more serious, is that disengagement can undermine the legitimacy of the government, and in the extreme case, lead to instability. The low levels of turnout we now have will only get worse, especially if the Conservatives force this bill through Parliament.

It is worth noting the kind of cycle we are having of low voter turnout. Of those eligible to vote for the first time in 1965, almost 70% voted. By 2008, the turnout of voters who were first eligible to vote in 1965 had increased to 75%.

If we look at first-time voters in the year 2000, of those eligible to vote in 2004, only 34% voted. By the 2008 election, this group was still stuck at 34%.

What we are getting is a cycle of non-voting. Of those born in the sixties, 70% voted and have continued to vote in those numbers as we moved forward through elections. Of those born in the 20th century, one-third are voting, and they are stuck with one-third voting.

This is the cycle of non-voting of which political scientists speak. It is something we have to work to fix rather than what this Conservative bill proposes to do, which will make things worse.

Turnouts are low and dropping, non-voters are continuing to be non-voters, and there are more groups that are permanently disenfranchised from our voting system.

It is important not to take my word for it. Recently, over 150 political scientists wrote an open letter to the government on this matter. It is worth repeating what they had to say. These 150 professors are the cream of the crop as far as political scientists go in Canada. They are mostly chairs and full professors as well as people who all parties in the House have called upon to serve on boundary review committees, to head up royal commissions, and to advise on any matters to do with democracy. It is a multi-partisan group, one that some parties would favour and others would not favour. It is the grand collection of political scientists.

In their open letter to the Prime Minister and the Parliament of Canada, they said that if Bill C-23 was passed, it “would damage the institution at the heart of the country's democracy: voting in federal elections”.

Further, these 150 political scientists urged the government to heed the call for wider consultation in vetting the bill.

This is another problem with what is happening here in terms of the spirit of democratic reform. In the past, any changes to elections would be done in a non-partisan or multi-partisan way. Not only would we consult Elections Canada and experts around the country and perhaps outside the country, we would definitely be consulting the Canadian public. This has been abandoned with Bill C-23. We have had closure on debate, and this bill is being rammed through without any real discussion and without discussion with Elections Canada, which seems absurd, since that is the institution at the centre of this legislation.

These 150 political scientists are urging the government to consult more widely. While they agree, and we have heard today, that there are some things that could be looked at with our electoral system, they are worried about the serious damage that will occur with the passing of Bill C-23.

It is worth noting who these folks are, the drafters of this open letter, which can be seen in many publications, such as the National Post or The Globe and Mail. Professors Deveaux, Williams, Cameron, Dawood, Lenard, and Fuji Johnson are the main drafters. However, this letter has also been signed by 16 past-presidents of the Canadian Political Science Association: Caroline Andrew, Michael Atkinson, Keith Banting, Sylvia Bashevkin, André Blais, Kenneth Carty, John Courtney, Elisabeth Gidengil, Richard Johnston, Peter Russell, Grace Skogstad, David Smith, Miriam Smith, Reeta Tremblay, Graham White, and Robert Young.

If we put all of these signatories together in a room, I would hazard a guess that we could solve any political science problem we have in this country. Of course, none of these people have been consulted on this bill. It is outrageous that these changes are going ahead and are being forced through Parliament without any consultation at all and without any expert advice. It has been drafted in a back room. It is something that would advantage one party over other parties, and it violates the spirit of what we have done here in the past. That is why I support the opposition day motion that has been put forward today.

I call upon the government to drop Bill C-23. Let us go back to the drawing board and consult with experts and regular Canadians to figure out how to make democracy better and how to improve our falling voter turnout.

[Kennedy Stewart, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I was very interested in my colleague's speech. By the sound of things, maybe the whole 2011 election should have been null and void, if that kind of fraud or potential mistakes were happening all across the country.

Of course, we know that is not the case. We know that Elections Canada does great work and that we are the gold standard of conducting elections in Canada and around the world.

Instead of looking at anecdotal information, perhaps we should look at what 150 political science professors across Canada have been saying about the Conservatives' proposed act and why we should be voting yes to the motion we have put forward today. These professors are saying, and many of them have been on boundaries commissions or royal commissions, that, if passed, Bill C-23 would damage the institution at the heart of our country's democracy: voting in federal elections.

Instead of drilling down to minutia on a couple of cards that were problematic, perhaps my colleague could say why he disagrees with the top political science minds in the country.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Mr. Speaker, this motion is all about the struggle for the vote.

I think it is important for this place to be reminded that it was not until 1918 that women could finally vote in a federal election. I would like to credit Alberta's own Nellie McClung for her strong efforts across the country to ensure that women could exercise their suffrage at the provincial, local, and federal level.

It was not until 1960 that Canada's first nation peoples were allowed to vote with no strings attached and without giving up their aboriginal rights.

However, as many in this place have mentioned, there has been broad concern across Canada over the decrease in voter turnout. Therefore, the last thing we would expect the government of the day to do is to put measures in place that would put further barriers in place, making it difficult for people to exercise their franchise.

An open, fair, and inclusive electoral system is the foundation of a modern democracy. The right to vote is now enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which is not a minor matter. Jean-Pierre Kingsley has been quoted as saying, “Canada's electoral system is often mentioned as an international model for both its fairness and effectiveness”.

Because of our reputation for having a credible electoral system, Canadians have been invited to serve as election monitors in elections around the world, recently, in Ukraine. I had the privilege, in 2012, of attending in Ukraine to help monitor its election. Other members attended again last December, and we are going to be welcoming those invitations again.

I had the privilege in the last week to travel with colleagues from this place to two African countries, Mozambique and Madagascar. These are lesser developed nations that have gone through war and suffered extreme poverty. Yet, they have established electoral commissions and are bending over backwards to educate the populace and get them enumerated to enable them to vote. However, here we are moving in reverse.

We should perhaps be shamefaced going overseas, professing to have expertise in the democratic electoral process, when the current Conservative government is moving to a more regressive version. We might have to have election monitors here, to engage and encourage us on how we can make our process more democratic.

Today we have a motion put forward by the member for Toronto—Danforth, which says, in part:

That, in the opinion of the House, proposed changes to the Elections Act that would prohibit vouching, voter education programming by Elections Canada, and the use of voter cards as identification...

The concern is that first-time voters would be disenfranchised, including youth and new Canadians, aboriginal Canadians, and our seniors living in residence.

I wish to speak to the process deployed in the passage of these proposed election laws.

Reforms have been long awaited. Many times, the ministers of the government of the time stood in their places and said that any day they were going to table an election law, but then they would withdraw it. We have been waiting for quite some time. Everyone agrees in this place that we do need some reform to the law going forward to the next election, which will be within a year or year and a half. It is important that we have enough time to get these laws in place and that Elections Canada be ready for them.

The question is, why now the rush, having waited so long to bring forward changes?

The Conservatives have brought the bill forward with no consultation with Elections Canada, which is in breach of past protocols. It is also a breach of the past protocol to not consult all the parties. Again, in my visit to these developing African nations, those governments have reached out to their opposition members. What kind of example is the Conservative government setting? Why the need to fast-track Bill C-23?

A reasonable request was made to have the bill immediately go to committee so that more substantial amendments could be made. We had the public calling for more time to consult, and there have been calls by our party to take this bill across Canada to hear from Canadians, all of which has been denied.

Despite the significant issues identified, we are rushing the bill through. We plea once again with the government to apply some common sense, dignity, and democratic process to the reform of the most critical law in our nation, the right to exercise one's franchise.

I would like to speak to a couple of issues under the bill that are raised in the motion. One issue is the proposed prohibition of vouching and any reliance on voter ID cards.

As has been mentioned by many of my colleagues, in the past there has been some level of reliance on vouching. Why is that? It is because there are some members of our society who simply do not have readily available identification. In my riding of Edmonton—Strathcona, within the city of Edmonton and province of Alberta, it is well known across the country and by the government of the day who brag regularly about the work that has been created in Alberta. It suggests that people should move to Alberta. There are jobs, and it welcomes people from other countries to work in Alberta, in many cases in the oil sands.

As a result, we have an incredibly mobile population. In going door to door in three successive elections, I can attest to the fact that many people had just moved in. They had moved across the city, relocated, had no mail with their address, no licence with their new address, and so on. At household after household, we were giving out information on how people could be enumerated. It would be a very serious problem if we took away the voter ID cards, and particularly if we also took away the vouching.

I can also attest to the serious concerns expressed by university students in my riding. I am privileged to have three university campuses in my riding, and there is an additional campus across the river in another riding. I have received letters, from the students' unions from MacEwan University, University of Alberta, and King's University. Those students' unions were all voicing deep concern about the removal of the opportunity for vouching. Why? In many circumstances, as many have attested, students share a residence and only one name will be on the lease or on the bills that come to the house. They have no way of proving their place of residence.

I can attest that I personally have seen young students coming to vote in my riding who have been turned away. Parents have arrived with them, and they are still turned away. In other cases, students have been misinformed and told they must vote in the town they come from, that they cannot vote where they go to university. We need to move in the direction of enabling our youth to vote, not discouraging them.

Second is the category of first nation peoples. In my city, there are many first nation people who, sadly, are displaced, homeless, even though the city is trying to address that. There are wonderful services, including the Boyle Street society, which at the time of an election come forward to assist homeless people. They vouch for them to enable them to vote. They have personally expressed deep sadness to me, that by banning vouching for the people who are trying to exercise their rights, they are going to be banned from that opportunity.

Additionally, as I am sure is the case for all members of this place, there are many seniors residences and long-term care institutions in my riding. We were told by the operators of these institutes that on many occasions they have had to vouch for the residents so that they could vote.

The obvious question is, why is the government moving to disenfranchise these voters? We have not heard one credible or rational argument for this. We should be encouraging people to vote. We heard the government trying to defend that this practice has to be undone because Mr. Neufeld, who was commissioned by Elections Canada to advise on reviewing the act, said there was fraud and that vouching needed to be removed. He has since clearly stated that at no time did he suggest that ineligible voters have deliberately tried to cast illegal ballots. The only other information provided by the minister to the House was information that misled the House and has since been withdrawn. We still await the rationale for disenfranchising over 100,000 voters.

Finally, on voter education, the public, many experts, and certainly my colleagues, are stunned that the government is choosing to diminish the powers and mandate of the Chief Electoral Officer and his officers to educate and encourage the public to vote.

My final point is that I am absolutely dismayed at the decision to deny the strongest recommendation from Mr. Mayrand, which was to give him the powers of investigation to compel evidence. There can only be two reasons for this, both of which are reprehensible.

One is that the government is intentionally blocking the ability of Elections Canada to enforce the act. The second is that it simply does not understand the enforcement system.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, at the outset I say that I will be sharing my time with the member for Edmonton—Strathcona.

Bill C-23 has been criticized as undemocratic by academics, elections officials, and, more importantly, by many Canadian citizens. Just this morning, on my trip to Ottawa, I had a chance to read The Globe and Mail. It has been editorializing on Bill C-23 for over six days now, sharing more information on this unfair elections act than the government is with Canadians.

I thank The Globe and Mail. In today's piece, it decried the bill, saying to kill this bill for the good of the country. I could not agree more with what the The Globe and Mail's editorial said.

I would like to share some more of what I read today:

The government has touted the bill’s changes to voting rules as needed to prevent voter fraud. That’s a red herring. There is no evidence that vouching, a process the bill eliminates, led to widespread fraud. The government has resorted to defending itself with out of context citations from experts, whose conclusions are the opposite of what the government pretends. Tightening the rules will prevent many eligible Canadians from voting; those affected are mostly not Conservative voters.

Other changes create a giant, partisan loophole in campaign spending laws, to the advantage of the Conservatives. Why? The bill gives incumbent parties in each riding the power to name key election officials, instead of leaving the job to an impartial Elections Canada. Why? Bill C-23 also takes direct aim at Elections Canada in other ways – neutering its ability to conduct public outreach campaigns and encourage voting. Why? It also meddles with Elections Canada’s ability to investigate wrongdoing or communicate the results of investigations. Why?

It is not just me or The Globe and Mail; many Canadians are asking the same questions. Why are the Conservatives trying to stop voters, stop Canadians, from actually participating in our general elections? Time and time again, experts have been saying that Bill C-23 aims to fix problems that are not really there.

The bill is actually exacerbating the real problem with Canada's electoral system, which is low voter engagement. Voter participation is low, and engaging new voters in a time when Canadians are cynical about government is an uphill battle. Why are the Conservatives trying to make voting harder, when we should be making it easier and as accessible as possible? The answer is simple, and very discouraging: it is because the unfair elections bill makes it easier for the Conservatives to win. They want to make it harder for people who do not vote Conservative to vote at all.

Hundreds of thousands of Canadians rely on vouching and voter identification cards to prove that they have the right to vote. This is especially true for young people, new Canadians, aboriginal people, and seniors living in residence. Bill C-23 would put an end to vouching practices. Vouching has long been an accepted practice; not everyone has the financial means to secure an ID, and not everyone in Canada is wealthy.

Aboriginal people, university students living away from home, the homeless, and seniors in residence are all groups that are less likely to have eligible ID or mail on hand, thus requiring someone to vouch for them. In the last election, approximately 100,000 people used vouching to exercise their right to vote.

In addition, voter cards will no longer be accepted to confirm identification. The use of voter ID cards, the notice of registration on the electoral list that is sent to voters, benefits those who face challenges in establishing their address when it is time to vote. Examples are youth on campus, seniors, and aboriginal people. Many aboriginal people wait months to get their treaty cards. They may not have access to alternative forms of ID. Elderly couples may need to have a spouse vouch for them, because only one of their names was on the registered mail.

The rate of error is very small when using voter ID cards, and the allowance worked to enfranchise many, so why get rid of it? The only reason I can see is to disenfranchise voters.

My riding of Scarborough—Rouge River is large and diverse. We have a high population of new Canadians who may face some difficulties when they go to the polls next election. For some, the 2015 election will be their first opportunity to vote federally. What a warm welcome to their new home to be told they cannot vote.

We also have the highest youth-to-population ratio in the greater Toronto area in Scarborough—Rouge River. There are approximately 32,000 people between the ages of 18 and 34. The national youth survey conducted by Elections Canada after the 2011 election found that among Canadians aged 18 to 34 who did not vote, 15% said that their decision was influenced by their inability to provide proof of identification, while another 16% indicated that they were influenced by their inability to provide proof of address.

However, members need not take my word for it. Although the Conservatives did not feel the need to consult the Chief Electoral Officer, Marc Mayrand, he had more than enough to say about vouching in testimony that he provided at the procedure and House affairs committee that we know the Conservatives wish they could forget. Luckily for us and for all of Canada, it is on the public record.

The Chief Electoral Officer, when he spoke at the committee, had this to say on vouching:

It has been pointed out that vouching is a complex procedure and that numerous procedural irregularities were found to have been committed at the last general election in connection with vouching. It is critical to understand that, as recognized by the Supreme Court of Canada, the vast majority of these were strictly record-keeping errors by poll workers documenting the vouching process, and not fraud or even irregularities that could compromise an election. There is no evidence tying these errors to ineligible electors being allowed to vote.

That is a fairly clear demonstration that vouching is not leading to election fraud.

When asked publicly about why they would ban vouching and the use of voter information cards, Conservatives say that it is because they are trying to cut down on fraud. However, that does not make sense. We know they are not cracking down on fraud. Elections Canada has been clear that there is no evidence to suggest that vouching or the use of voter information cards has actually led to fraud. There is no evidence to suggest vouching or voter information cards are connected to electoral fraud. There is no evidence to show that this legislation would be justified in ending vouching and ending the use of voter information cards.

The only example of voter fraud using voter ID cards that the Conservatives could give us was, of course, the statement by the member for Mississauga—Streetsville that he had witnessed with his own two eyes that voter fraud was happening using voter ID cards. Of course, as the House knows now, this was not the case, which invites the question of why the member for Mississauga—Streetsville brought it up if he knew it was not true.

Unfortunately, this unfair elections act is not just an attack on voter access but also on education. Bill C-23 would strip the Chief Electoral Officer's power to engage in public education. Under the unfair elections act, the Chief Electoral Officer would be limited to discussing only certain aspects of the electoral process: when, where, and how to vote. That is literally the least amount of information that the Chief Electoral Officer and Elections Canada could give to Canadians. That is all they would be allowed to say. This is absolutely not a way to increase voter participation. This is very much a departure from many western democracies.

Traditionally, bodies that oversee elections have the mandate to educate the public on how to vote. If Elections Canada is not allowed to do the job, then who will? The Conservatives are counting on the probability that nobody will. The Conservatives would rather change the rules of the game than play by the rules. We know that with their majority government, the Conservatives have been writing their own rules, making them up as they go along.

Unfortunately, the Conservatives have a track record of breaking election laws with their in-and-out scheme, robocalls designed to suppress opposition votes, and rule-breaking overspending by Conservatives ministers, not to mention charges against the Prime Minister's former ethics spokesperson, the MP for Peterborough.

The Conservatives had a chance with Bill C-23 to do the right thing and introduce a bill to crack down on real electoral fraud, but they could not stop themselves from tacking on cynical measures designed to tilt the playing field in their favour and make it harder for some groups of Canadians to vote. As I said before, those include young people, seniors, aboriginal people, and homeless people.

I want to say one last thing. As The Globe and Mail's editorial said this morning, for the good of this country, let us kill this bill.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in the House today to express my views regarding the New Democratic Party's opposition day motion concerning various reforms the fair elections act would bring to voter identification procedures under the Canada Elections Act.

The motion before the House also deals with the effects of these important reforms for specific groups in Canadian society. My remarks today will focus on this dimension of the issue and will demonstrate why the fair elections act would have beneficial effects on the voting rights of the groups listed in the motion.

I welcome this debate today, because it gives me an opportunity not only to contribute my perspective on what the real impacts of the voter identification reforms and the fair election act would be for the groups specified in the motion before us today but also because it will be an opportunity to provide colleagues with some of my thoughts on the multiple and significant advantages the fair elections act would bring to Canada's electoral system. In particular, I would like to highlight the importance of upholding the integrity of our elections and of protecting Canadians' right to vote.

I would like to make it clear to the House from the outset, however, that I disagree with the motion put forward by the New Democratic Party today regarding the bill.

The motion would have the House pronounce an opinion against the needed reforms the fair election act would bring to the current voter identification procedures set out in the Canada Elections Act. Furthermore, the motion would have Canadians believe that the fair elections act would have negative effects on the voting rights of the groups specified in today's motion, but I am pleased to say that nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the fair elections act would have just the opposite purpose, that of protecting all Canadians' electoral rights from the risks of fraudulent voting and high rates of administrative errors, factors that can undermine confidence in the integrity of elections.

I would like to begin my remarks today with a few preliminary observations regarding the important enhancements the fair elections act would bring to our electoral system. The fair elections act proposes comprehensive changes to the Canada Elections Act. It is unquestionably important legislation that will reinforce the integrity of Canada's elections and will revitalize our democracy.

An element of particular relevance in today's debate is that the fair elections act would provide better customer service for voters by focusing Elections Canada's advertising on the basics of voting: where and when and what identification to bring. This measure will benefit all Canadians, including by facilitating the voting processes for all the specific groups referenced in today's motion.

For example, Elections Canada concluded in its evaluation report on the 41st general election that a top priority to increase youth turnout would be, and I quote, “increasing awareness about when, where and how to vote, by providing information in formats suitable for youth”. The fair elections act would ensure that Elections Canada would focus its communications messages on this crucial information for our electors.

I would like to add that the act would also establish an extra day of advance polling. The proposed change would give Canadians access to four advance polling days: the 10th, 9th, 8th, and the 7th days before election day. This important measure would also benefit all Canadians, including, again, those specific groups in society that are the subject of our debate today.

This would be an appropriate point to note that among the most important initiatives included in the act are measures to combat voter fraud and increase the confidence of Canadians in the electoral process. I think all members can agree that the prevention of electoral fraud is a very worthwhile goal and that every fraudulent vote not only undermines confidence in our elections but also, in effect, cancels out the legitimate vote of a Canadian.

In light of the fact that the motion before the House today refers specifically to the prohibitions in the fair elections act on the use of the vouching procedure and the voter information cards as replacements for acceptable identification, I would at this point like to take a few additional minutes to outline for the House precisely why it is imperative that those practices be prohibited.

I will first provide a little background information to explain precisely how the use of the vouching mechanism and the voter information cards for identification purposes relate to the current voter identification procedures under the Canada Elections Act.

With the passage of Bill C-31 in 2007, a mechanism was introduced for verifying the identity of electors and their residence upon registration at the polls and for voting. This was a significant advancement that our government brought to voter identification for federal elections in Canada. It helped bring us closer to restoring the confidence of Canadians in the electoral process.

As a result of those legislative changes, an elector voting in a federal election at an ordinary polling station must prove his or her identity in one of three ways. The first is by presenting one piece of identification issued by a government that includes a photograph of the elector and his or her name and address. The second is by presenting two pieces of identification, each of which establishes the elector's name and one of which establishes the elector's address. The third is by taking an oath, if accompanied by another elector whose name appears on the list of electors and who, after providing the piece or pieces of identification referred to, vouches for the elector on an oath. That is what is known as the vouching process.

There are certain safeguards in place that are intended to make the vouching process more reliable and accurate. For example, the voucher must have the required pieces of identification. He or she cannot previously have been vouched for. The voucher must reside in the same polling division as the elector. The voucher can only vouch for one elector; multiple vouching is prohibited. Most importantly, there is also supposed to be a record of who the voucher is and who he or she vouched for. This ought to create an effective deterrent to anybody who gives thought to vouching for an unqualified elector. However, in practice, those safeguards are undermined by the fact that there are high levels of irregularities being reported at the polls regarding the use of vouching.

Studies commissioned by Elections Canada demonstrate mass irregularities in the use of vouching. According to the Neufeld report relating to administrative deficiencies at the polls in the 2011 election, vouching procedures are complex, and there were irregularities in 42% of cases where vouching was used.The report indicates that even with increased quality assurance, the problem would not be remedied. The report found that in 38% of the cases where vouching was required, there was no record in the poll book that clearly indicated both who the voters and the vouchers were. This clearly does not mean that all of these cases were instances of voter fraud. However, it does mean that polling day irregularities by elections officers regularly undermine an essential safeguard in the vouching mechanism, which is to have a record of who vouched for whom.

While Elections Canada has estimated that as many as 120,000 voters chose to use the vouching procedure on election day, those voters could have proven their identity and their residence by other means. The fair elections act will require in law that Elections Canada communicate what forms of identification would be acceptable at polling locations. This important measure would provide voters with the basic information they need about what identification to bring to the polls before they go to the polls.

I would also add a few words about the measures in the fair elections act regarding voter information cards, which play an important role in informing Canadians about where and when they need to vote. It is important to recognize that voter information cards are not currently authorized forms of identification and cannot be used as proof of identification and residency. Since the voter identification requirements were established in 2007, we have had one general election when voter information cards were permitted to be used on an exceptional basis and one general election when they were not authorized forms of identification at all.

Potentially serious problems could arise if those cards were used as replacements for acceptable identification, since there is evidence that the use of voter information cards as identification presents the risk of voter fraud. For instance, studies commissioned by Elections Canada showed a one-in-six error rate on voter information cards. Such inaccuracies could allow those attempting to subvert election laws to use them to vote more than once or to vote in the wrong riding.

I would like to take a few moments to outline the current situation regarding the various forms of identification available to voters and to address the question of whether the reforms in the fair elections act would have any effect on their availability. This will illustrate quite clearly that the important voter identification measures contained in the fair elections act would not in any way disenfranchise the groups mentioned in today's motion: first-time voters, such as young people and new Canadians; aboriginal Canadians; and seniors living in residences.

I would also like to emphasize that the flexibility of the Canada Elections Act would not change. Rather, the goal of the fair elections act is, as I mentioned earlier, to prohibit only those specific administrative procedures that are risky and counterproductive, in particular the use of vouching and voter information cards as replacements for acceptable identification. In this way, it would minimize the risks of fraud and error in the voting process.

Nevertheless, even with the new protections introduced by the fair elections act, voters would still be able to choose from among 39 forms of authorized identification to prove their identity and residence, including a lease, bank statements, library cards, hunting licenses, Canadian Forces identity cards, and many more. In fact, the current authorized list includes not only about two dozen different kinds of identity cards but also a wide variety of original documents that contain a name and an address.

I would like to emphasize that this latter point is of particular importance with respect to certain groups in society that for various reasons may face challenges in proving their identity and residence. I would like to take a moment to elaborate on this point.

The kinds of original documents with a name and address that are among the 39 forms of authorized identification include a statement of government benefits, which would be employment insurance, old age security, social assistance, disability support, or a child tax benefit. It is unquestionable that this option would facilitate the identification process, for example, for seniors who live in a residence. They would be able to use their old age security statements to provide identification at the polls.

Moreover, the list of original documents considered to be suitable identification for the purposes of voting would also include letters from a public curator, a public guardian, or a public trustee. It could be documentation, such as a letter of stay or an admission form, issued by the responsible authority of a shelter, a soup kitchen, a students residence, a seniors residence, or a long-term care facility.

Clearly the option of presenting a letter from the responsible authority of a student or seniors residence could be quite useful for seniors who live in a residence or for young first-time voters who may be students living away from home while they attend an educational institution. Students would also have the ability to use correspondence issued by a school, college, or university to provide their identification. All of this would be in addition to the fact that student identification cards and old age security cards are both authorized forms of identification.

I have not yet mentioned the forms of authorized identification that would be of specific benefit to aboriginal Canadians. Specifically, the forms of identification authorized by the Chief Electoral Officer would include certificates of Indian status, also known as status cards. This is in addition to attestations of residence issued by the responsible authority of a first nations band or reserve.

I would also like to emphasize at this point that the Chief Electoral Officer would continue to authorize acceptable forms of identification at the polls. Furthermore, the Chief Electoral Officer would be encouraged to continue his efforts to ensure that the list of authorized identification contains documents to allow those with particular challenges in proving their identity and their residence to be able to do so. In fact, this is the central message of my remarks here today in the House.

The fair elections act would do nothing to detract from the flexibility and adaptability that is inherent in the current system of voter identification under the Canada Elections Act.

The government recognizes that these are key strengths of our electoral system, and as a consequence, the reforms in the fair elections act would serve to enhance those positive elements in the current system while minimizing the very real risks of electoral fraud.

With specific regard to new Canadians, those who are eligible electors would have been resident in Canada for some time prior to obtaining their citizenship and being able to vote in their first election, and so would not face greater challenges than any other Canadian in obtaining one or more of the 39 forms of authorized identification I have just talked about.

Additionally, I would like to note that Elections Canada has produced, in 27 languages in addition to English and French, a document concerning voter identification at the polls, which is intended to make this important information more easily accessible to voters from ethnocultural communities.

The fair elections act would do nothing to impede such important and fundamental advertising on the basics of voting: where, when, and what identification to bring. In fact, the fair elections act would ensure that Elections Canada focuses its advertising on this crucial information.

The reforms that the fair elections act would bring to the voter identification procedures under the Canada Elections Act are important and much needed measures that would help to ensure that our electoral system operates with the integrity that all Canadians expect and deserve.

In particular, the prohibitions in the fair elections act on vouching and the use of voter information cards as replacements for acceptable identification are designed to protect the vote of Canadians. This certainly includes the specific groups that are mentioned in today's motion: first time voters like youth and new Canadians, aboriginal Canadians, and seniors living in residences.

As I mentioned in my earlier remarks, the fair elections act actually has just the opposite purpose, that of protecting all Canadians' voting rights. With the fair elections act, our government continues to respond to emerging challenges in order to ensure fair elections in which the voice of every voter is counted.

I will bring my remarks to a close today by reiterating my opposition to the motion that has been put forward by the New Democratic Party today concerning the important reforms the fair elections act would bring to Canada's voter identification procedures.

I certainly hope hon. members will join me in opposing this motion and supporting the important changes in the fair elections act.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to talk about this unfair elections bill.

Our elections process is going backwards. For the first time in Canada's history, we are disenfranchising people who have been enfranchised in the past. At every other step of the way, whether it was allowing women or aboriginal people to vote, or providing mechanisms for persons with disabilities or for persons who had difficulty proving their identity, we have always moved forward.

We have always moved to enfranchise people, and the Conservative government is moving backwards for the first time in our history. I think it is shameful.

Canadians expect us to fix some of the problems clearly identified by a number of events over the past, since the 2011 election, and even before that. Those events displayed to Canadians that there was a problem with voting: officials of Elections Canada were not following procedures appropriately; the lists are no good; the lists need to be improved; there is a considerably amount of potential cheating happening by political parties; and Canadians expect us to do something about it.

This bill does not do any of those three things. In fact, the bill makes cheating easier in some circumstances. It has absolutely no impact whatsoever on the list itself and on whether the list will in fact be improved—it will not. In terms of voting, all the bill does is disenfranchise a number of individuals who were able to vote before.

First, the minister and others keep talking about these 39 pieces of ID that Canadians can use. In fact, that is not true. None of them are in the bill. These pieces of ID are set by Elections Canada, with the exception that the bill says voters cannot use the voter information card. There are 38 pieces of ID. Those 38 include 25 pieces of ID that can prove who a person is. Then a person needs to find 1 of 13 pieces of ID to prove where he or she lives.

We are really looking at 13 pieces of ID. Those 13 are sometimes completely unavailable to some individuals. For example, a student living not in residence but at the home of another individual in another city wants to be able to prove that he or she lives there.

Those students do not receive a utility bill. They do not have a bank or credit card statement. They do not have vehicle ownership or insurance there. They do not have correspondence issued by a school, college, or university to that place because that is not their original residence. The correspondence would have gone to their other place. They do not have a statement of government benefits because they are not getting them. They do not have an attestation of residence on a first nations band or reserve. They do not have a government cheque or cheque stub. They do not have a pension plan statement of benefits.

They do not have a lease or a mortgage statement. They do not have income or property tax assessment notices because, again; it goes back to their original home. They do not have an insurance policy. They do not have a letter from a public curator, public guardian, or public trustee. They do not have a letter issued by a shelter, soup kitchen, a student residence, or a long-term care facility because they are not in any of those places.

Those students cannot prove their location. It is physically impossible. The government says there are 39 pieces of ID, but not for a student living not in residence and off-campus in another city. It is impossible for them to prove where they live. What are they to do?

In the days before this bill, these students could have been vouched for by someone who knew them, who did have the ability to prove where they live and who lived in the same riding. Now, that is absolutely being taken away from them. That is wrong.

I want to list three other cases of individuals in my riding who, in the last election, actually voted but who will not be able to vote in the next election because their ability to vouch is being taken away.

One of them was a senior citizen who had been living in the same place for the last 55 years, I think it was. For some reason, the voter information card did not arrive. We know what the reason for that was now: Elections Canada decided to change the postal code to the wrong one; another problem that needs fixing that is not being fixed by this bill.

That individual did not have anything to prove her location of residence. She had nothing, and she was terrified. I knocked at her door and reminded her to go vote. She said, “I cannot vote because I cannot prove where I live. I did not get a voter information card, which I would normally have used. I cannot do it now because I cannot prove where I live. I do not have my name on anything here.”

Her husband was standing next to her, and I told him that he could vouch for her. All he had to do was take her to the polling station, and with his ID he could vouch for her. They were overjoyed. However, that would be gone. The next time they would not be able to do that.

Another senior in my riding, who has lived in Canada for about 40 years, cannot get Ontario picture ID. She has been trying for two years. She cannot get it because she does not have the appropriate ID. She has a Canadian citizenship certificate, but it is not the card type; it is the big certificate type, which they will not accept in Ontario. She has a birth certificate, but it is from the wrong country, which they do not accept in Ontario. She has a passport. However, again, it is from the wrong country, which they do not accept in Ontario. She cannot get Ontario picture ID. She is in a position of not being able to use picture ID. She does not have the right kind of ID to vote in terms of proving where she lives. That is the nub of this problem, being able to prove where one lives.

She is now in the process of spending $130, which she does not have because she is a senior, to buy herself a passport. That passport will give her the ability to go to the Ontario government to prove who she is so she can get an Ontario picture ID card. That will cost her another $60. She is spending $190 to get enough ID to vote next time.

Why is it that Canadians have to spend money to vote? That should not happen, but that is happening in her case. It is going to take months. If this happened during the writ period, she would never be able to do that.

Finally, we have a person on disability payments, whose door I knocked on in the last election. I told her that she just needed to show the cheque stub that comes from the Ontario disability system to prove where she lives. She had nothing else. Persons on disability in Ontario are very impoverished. She could not afford cable or a phone, and she had no hydro bill. She had nothing to prove where she lived. Therefore, I suggested that she use the cheque stub.

A stub from a government cheque is a legitimate way of proving one's address. The trouble is, the Ontario government does not put a name and address on the stub. It is only on the cheque itself, which had already been deposited. She had no way of proving her address. In her case, she managed to find somebody in the building who would vouch for her; otherwise, she would not have been able to vote.

Those are three examples.

There is also the issue that Canadians want us to deal with of potential cheating by political parties during an election. There have been a number of allegations, news stories, and various things about robocalls, which were delivered to people to fraudulently send them to the wrong polling station. There were a number of issues regarding overspending by political candidates. There were issues regarding overspending by political parties, particularly the in-and-out scandal of 2006.

However, none of those issues are being dealt with in this proposed legislation. There would not be a way for Elections Canada to investigate properly, to subpoena evidence, to compel testimony, or force a political party to actually disclose what it has done. In fact, the bill goes one step further. It would permit a political party, in the guise of campaign fundraising, to have no limits on what it spends on communications with constituents, or with all of Canada.

The minister can correct me if I am wrong, but I doubt very much that the Conservative Party would give out a list of who it has sent communications to if asked by Elections Canada. The Conservatives have not been very forthcoming to this point, and I doubt they would do that to prove that individuals they communicated with have donated money in the past five years. That is unlikely and not going to happen. They are going to send stuff out willy-nilly. That is what will happen.

We would have no limit to the amount of communications that the party can send out during an election writ period, even though right now there is a limit on the amount of money that can be spent during an election. That is a very damaging piece of this puzzle.

I appreciate the time to explain why Bill C-23 does not work, and I urge members opposite to rethink their position and defeat the bill. Take a kill-the-bill position, as we like to say it.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, the member suggested that we go back to the fundamentals of Bill C-23. The government likes to call it the fair elections act. Nothing could be further from reality. For all intents and purposes, it is a Conservative elections act, and I do not say that lightly, in the sense that we have received very little. The only support I have detected for this legislation comes from the Prime Minister's Office and members of the Conservative Party. There is no other political entity in Canada that I am aware of that endorses this legislation. Elections Canada has very real problems with this legislation. It is weakening our elections laws. There was no consultation done. This deals with a fundamental pillar of our democracy and the government is forcing this legislation through using its majority.

Does the member not see the irony of a majority Conservative government forcing through changes to elections laws, given the many other events taking place around the world, especially when academics and others around the world are saying that what the government is doing with the elections laws is wrong? Why does he not recognize that what is happening to the fundamental principle of democracy with this piece of legislation is wrong?

Democratic Reform

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Mr. Speaker, last week 19 international scholars published a letter calling the fair elections act a threat to Canada's reputation as “...one of the world's guardians of democracy and human rights”. This was just one week after 159 experts here in Canada published a letter condemning the minister as a threat against democracy.

Today, a national newspaper ran an editorial with the headline simply, “Kill this bill”.

Will the Conservatives stop treating Bill C-23 as a piece of partisan legislation that is only to be rammed through Parliament?

Opposition Motion—Proposed changes to the Elections Act

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I have had the opportunity to emphasize in regard to Bill C-23 that we need to acknowledge it is fundamentally flawed. It is flawed to the degree that we have had editorials, and many different stakeholders from across the country who have expressed a great deal of disappointment, saying that the bill would be better off being killed than being allowed to continue in its current fashion.

I wonder if the member would support the idea that the government should leave the bill, work with opposition parties, with Elections Canada, and with other stakeholders, who have a vested interest in ensuring that Canada has good sound election laws. These would be election laws that would, for example, allow the Chief Electoral Officer to have the ability to compel witnesses.

We would be far better off doing this overhaul of Bill C-23, as opposed to even attempting to have it passed in its current state. Would the member not agree with that?

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I had the opportunity to sit through some of the committee meetings regarding Bill C-23, where it became very clear that the government has been negligent on this whole file. The member accurately portrays the sentiment of a good number of Canadians that Bill C-23 should go nowhere.

There are just too many fundamental flaws in the bill. One of the greatest, in my opinion, concerns the ability of the Chief Electoral Officer to compel witness testimony. That is so very important. When the Chief Electoral Officer was before the committee, I had an opportunity to question him directly regarding that. At the end of the day, we would have weakened election laws as a direct result of the bill.

Would the member comment on how badly this legislation needs to be amended. If the Conservative government continues to use its majority to pass the bill, is it not a slap in the face of democracy? Does the bill not, at the very least, need to be substantially amended, if not killed outright?

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Mr. Speaker, I stand here among volumes of papers and consultations from the academic world, both national, domestic, and international, as well as editorials, and all of this is piling up against this particular act. The Globe and Mail was so bold as to say this morning in its headline, “Kill this bill”, period. This was following a five-piece editorial submission by The Globe and Mail, which basically takes this bill apart.

In the National Post, there is full comment under the headline, “Don’t undermine Elections Canada”. It was a letter sent in by not just a couple of academics. Sometimes when there is legislation in the House, a couple of academics will write in, saying that they have spent a lifetime studying a subject and write serious papers and dissertations about it. In this case, there were not a couple, not 10, not 20, not even 50, but 160 academics who signed a letter with the headline, “Don’t undermine Elections Canada”, against this bill.

I repeat for the sake of Hansard and everybody watching at home, 160 experts signed this letter saying that this is not the way to go, and what is being purported by the government through the minister, originating from the PMO one can only assume, is that this is a systematic and very clandestine way of supporting voting suppression, at least the beginning stages of it.

I want to quote from The Globe and Mail because it had a couple of good things to say this morning about this, which I think is very pertinent to the conversation. It said:

The government has resorted to defending itself with out of context citations from experts,....

I will address that a little later and it was talked about earlier. It went on to state:

...[the] conclusions are the opposite of what the government pretends. Tightening the rules will prevent many eligible Canadians from voting; those affected are mostly not Conservative voters.

Therein lies, at the base of this, something that the Conservatives are attempting to do in a very clandestine way. There are some provisions in this bill that Liberals accept, such as the transmission of results across the country. Obviously, technology dictates that is something we should do, and other provisions, but at the core of this, as the member who moved this motion today pointed out, are five areas that we consider subtle ways, but as time goes on we realize it is not as subtle as they originally attempted, which was put forward by 160 academics.

I want to quote from the letter that the academics sent in. Remember that these are local academics. International academics have now gotten on board with this as well, saying, “By the way, what Canada is doing is the opposite of what it did in the past”. This is what is called a retrograde policy, as Elections Canada was and, in my opinion, still is a model for global democracy.

Many of us members travel internationally and speak to many our counterparts across the world. I have spent time at the Council of Europe. A while ago, there was a resolution calling on fairer democracies and institutions that uphold fair democracies, but in the report put out by the Council of Europe, the rapporteur also talked about how the intent is to create an independent body that is able to fully investigate situations with potential fraud in the system. I know the minister likes to talk about the independence of this particular office, meaning the commissioner, who is really the sheriff in town, finding out about how election fraud comes about, investigating that with charges to be laid, so on and so forth.

What he has done, though, is made this office independent of Elections Canada and put it into public prosecutions. The independence of this particular office is talked about as being the way to go, but here is the problem. If the tools by which that person can do his or her job are not supplied, then the job cannot be done, whether it is independent or not.

The minister wants to make sure the referee is independent. He wants to make sure that the referee on the ice is wearing the right uniform. The problem is that they did not give him a whistle, so he has to run around shouting to people that they should not do that, which does not make it very effective, does it? The play does not stop unless the whistle is blown, so the referee in this case is ineffective in doing the job on the ice, to carry the analogy further.

I will stop right there with that one, because I do believe that under public prosecutions, the intent may have been there from the beginning, but the follow-up of providing the tools is not there.

The robocalls incident is a perfect illustration of why these tools are needed, and that is why it surfaced through the current CEO of Elections Canada. It was the need to get the testimony to get to the bottom of this issue and find out who was responsible. We all admit in this House that something nefarious was happening, but so far just one person has been charged when we know that more people were involved.

The courts have already cast an opinion saying that the database system used by the Conservatives was at the core of this nefarious activity, but a lot of witnesses were not coming forward with testimony. If the commissioner had the ability to apply to a judge to compel a person to provide the testimony, provided that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is held up, then they would do that.

The Conservatives say that not even police have that authority. That is their argument. However, I would argue that actually the police do have tools similar to what we are asking for.

I use the example of wiretapping. Police can apply to a judge to get permission for wiretapping nefarious activities that have the potential of breaking the law, but they apply to a judge to do that. Lo and behold, a starker contrast would be the fact that there are provinces in this country that already have this ability. Their elections officers have the ability to do it. They do it because it is effective.

Finally, there is federal legislation that says this ability exists within the federal system. It is under the Competition Act. The commissioner there has the ability to apply to a judge to compel testimony in relation to contravening the Competition Act.

The model exists in other jurisdictions. The examples the Conservatives tried to use to refute why they should not have that power are simply not true. Both the CEO and the current commissioner said that the ability to compel testimony is key to finding out who has committed fraud on a massive level, such as in the robocalls situation. In that example, nefarious activity was happening, yet we could not get to the bottom of it for that reason.

I will go back to the letter submitted by the academics. I want to quote from it, because some of the quotes are worth hearing within the context of this debate.

They say:

We see no justification for introducing legislation of such pivotal importance to our democracy without significant consultation with Elections Canada, opposition parties, and the public at large.

Neither of these things was happening.

There was a meeting. I had a meeting with Elections Canada back around late summer. However, in that meeting, specific mention of new legislation was not there. When I spoke to the CEO of Elections Canada as critic for democratic reform, we did briefly talk about the potential of new legislation, so we were talking about it, but I wonder why the minister felt it was not necessary to have that discussion.

I want to quote from this letter again, this time on voter identification, because this is a very important issue.

Because of the ID requirements, a lot of people in my riding in central Newfoundland were not able to vote. They were able to vote later because of the vouching, but certainly it was because they lacked particular ID that mostly those in seniors' residences were not able to do that. There are lots of ID documents that do not have an address associated with them, and since they were living in residences, they did not have utility bills. Those bills would be paid by the residence itself.

Here is what the academics said in their letter:

The use of voter cards is especially important for Canadians who lack ID that proves their current address, such as students, senior citizens in long-term care facilities, First Nations citizens, and those who have recently moved. Although not perfect, VICs are more likely to provide an accurate address than most other forms of ID, including drivers' licenses. We believe that the elimination of VICs as a valid form of ID in federal elections would reduce the likelihood of voting by some citizens.

There is no doubt in their minds that this would happen.

Earlier today, the minister talked about 45,000 incidents that took place with Elections Canada officials when vouching was not recorded. However, as I said in my question, one cannot necessarily draw the conclusion that there were 45,000 incidents of fraud.

Why do we not get to the root cause of this situation? Was there a clerical error that officials were not able to fix at the time? Was it something that Elections Canada officials were not aware they had to do at the time, but the vouching was purely legitimate? These questions were not explored.

We say that the voter identification card, along with the system of vouching itself, does need improving. That is why we are here: to debate amendments that would improve the system. However, we should not throw something out simply because it contains inefficiencies. We should try to fix that system.

Remember, we can say that 45,000 incidents took place, or just over 50,000 incidents of potential fraud, but as has been pointed by the academics and by most people who are against the bill, we could be disenfranchising over 120,000 voters by bringing in this legislation. I know for a fact, because I have seen it myself—and I say that legitimately—that people at the poll were disenfranchised because they did not have ID containing their address.

I assume that at some point before the bill was introduced, the conversation was to fix the system and create efficiencies, but eventually the Conservatives got around to just throwing it out, period, on scant evidence that was just willy-nilly. The Conservatives seem to be saying that because of the so many thousands of people involved in a particular riding, the potential is there for fraud, but they did not investigate further to find out exactly what happened.

Vouching is a system that is used by many democracies throughout the world and, as is pointed out in this letter, by students, first nation citizens, seniors in residence, and people who have just moved.

The academics have also said this:

The Bill also fails to provide the Commissioner with the powers necessary to properly investigate electoral infractions. For example, the Commissioner will not have the power to compel witness testimony, a major stumbling block during the robocalls investigation.

We talked about that earlier.

They talked about campaign finance:

Bill C-23 would make several changes to campaign finance and expense reporting after elections. Taken separately, these changes may seem minor, but together they increase the influence of money in Canadian politics.

Earlier the minister said that Bill C-23 would fix efficiencies in reporting for leadership candidates. He referred to the Liberals, but in fact, what would this have meant for the current Prime Minister in his leadership battle? Nothing was out there—nothing.

I fear that a lot of this is geared toward a particular party or a particular cause and disenfranchises others. It is as though the Conservatives are not gaining something for Elections Canada or taking the opportunity to strengthen Elections Canada in what it does, but are trying to gain an advantage as political players. That is what is most disturbing about this situation.

All of this leads to the same conclusion reached by 160 international academics, The Globe and Mail that I cited earlier, the Toronto Star, major newspapers, and comment in the National Post. The evidence is climbing against this legislation. They are people who are experts in the field who would attack anybody who attacked democracy. They would do it to us, to the NDP, or to the Green Party or the Conservatives. They say that there are egregious attempts within this legislation to isolate voters, when improving the system was there for Conservatives to take advantage of and they chose not to do it.

The motion being put forward today brings up some very important policy about vouchers and voter identification as key stumbling blocks to many people who should be able to vote, but essentially I want to talk as well about how consultation was not there either. That is an incredibly disturbing part of this situation. In terms of putting information out to the average voter to entice a person to vote, the Conservatives talk about how it is up to parties to put out the message to get people to vote for them. It is ironic that a party that spends of millions in negative advertising is saying it is up to parties to convince people to not vote for something, to go to the polls constantly angry, but that is a debate for another day.

Elections Canada has an incredible opportunity to inspire people who have not voted before to go out and vote. There are people in their thirties or forties who have never voted. Motivating people to vote is a key part of Elections Canada, and Elections Canada's ability to inspire people to vote is one of the main reasons the international community cites it as a great international example of democracy.

I have nothing against the idea of putting out more information to tell people where and when to vote, but there has to be another way to inspire them to vote and to give the resources to do it and to communicate with people in an open fashion. If Elections Canada is truly independent, which the minister is now saying it is, he would have no worries about it doing these things, but apparently that is not the case.

Going forward, I hope that we are able to propose, accept, and converse about proper amendments that would fix many of these things that we oppose in the legislation.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. minister. I appreciate the fact that I was consulted in advance of Bill C-23.

In my written submission to the minister, I pointed out that Canada had a crisis of voter turnout and that claims that we had an issue of voter fraud were erroneous and there was no evidence for it. I urged him to further expedite voting by reducing the number of pieces of ID required in various circumstances in changes to the Elections Act that his administration brought forward a number of years ago. He did not give me a hint of what he had planned or I would have been a bit more forceful in my recommendations that the Conservatives not make voting harder for Canadians.

Given that Mr. Neufeld's report and Mr. Neufeld himself have made it very clear that they found no incidents of fraud, and I put it to the minister that the authorities could certainly have investigated it had they suspected it as there is more than enough information there to investigate if there was a suspicion of fraud, there is no suspicion of fraud. I say again that the electoral crisis in Canada is not that Canadians are voting more than once; it is that they are voting less than once, and we must change this bill.

Will the minister consider amendments?

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Minister of State (Democratic Reform)]

Mr. Speaker, the opposition has reacted with predictable hyperbole to the fair elections bill, yet the bill is full of the common-sense measures that are required for the improvement of our democratic system.

To start with, let us deal with the issue of vouching. The opposition has made a controversy over that question, so let us zero in on the issue at stake. Some people have argued that we should not need photo ID to vote. They are right; we should not, and we do not. With the fair elections bill, people will still be able to vote without photo ID in Canada.

In fact, with the passage of the fair elections bill, people will not even need government ID to cast a ballot in this country. People will have the ability to use 39 different forms of identification when they cast their ballot under the fair elections bill, just as is the case right now. So what is the change? A voter will be required to provide some proof of identity and residence; it will no longer suffice for people to simply have a voucher stand in place and assert who they are and where they live.

The risks of vouching are obvious. It is obviously risky to allow someone to vote without having any documented ID of who they are or where they live. They could conceivably vote more than once or in a constituency in which they do not reside.

What is worse than these mere risks is the fact that the safeguards that are meant to mitigate the risks were violated 50,735 times, or 42% of the time, in the last election, according to Elections Canada's own compliance report.

Supporters of vouching have mistakenly believed that they had experienced an “aha” moment recently, when the author of that report, Harry Neufeld, restated his long-standing support for vouching. That was nothing new, of course, nor had anyone ever suggested anything to the contrary. His support for vouching has long been documented. In fact, it was in his report that has been on the public record for a very long time. Anybody could have looked it up. It was not news that he restated that position.

The fact that a long-standing supporter of vouching was the one who actually reported the violations of the rules and its use should be all the more troubling to all of us. Still, some claim that the enormous number of irregularities were simply record-keeping hiccups.

The Neufeld report, regardless of what the author might now claim, said exactly the opposite. Let me quote from page 5:

Errors that involve a failure to properly administer these procedures are serious. The courts refer to such serious errors as “irregularities” which can result in votes being declared invalid.

If members do not like that, they should try page 14:

Too frequently, the errors are so serious that the courts would judge them to be “irregularities” that violate the legal provisions that establish an elector’s entitlement to vote.

Further, Neufeld noted that the sorts of vouching errors that occurred in the riding of Etobicoke Centre “could contribute to a court overturning an election”. That last clause was a quote from page 10.

Rules exist for a reason. They are the “legal safeguards, in place to ensure each elector is actually eligible to vote..”. That is on page 6. Their systematic violation is serious enough for our court to overturn an election result or invalidate a vote, according to the report.

What are these rules, and why does it matter that they were violated? The rule that was most often violated in the last election was the requirement that the local Elections Canada personnel keep records of who vouched and who was vouched for.

By the way, this can be found on page 64 of the final report.

In 45,000 cases there is no such record, so we do not know who was vouched for and we do not know who did the vouching. If we do not know who vouched, then those individuals could violate the rule that they are not supposed to vouch more than once. That is a rule because, if someone systematically vouches for a large number of voters, then that individual can allow voters to cast more than one ballot or cast ballots in constituencies in which they do not reside. That is why the rule exists. The fact that it was violated 45,000-plus times should be a concern to all of us.

We are proposing a very reasonable solution. Individuals could bring basically any document showing who they are and where they live. That document does not have to come from the Government of Canada, the Government of Ontario or any provincial government, or a municipal government. It could come from a utility company. It could come in the form of a student card or an attestation. There are 39 different options. If the opposition wants to focus on a particular category of elector, I am happy to share a form of identification within the existing 39 acceptable examples that would provide those voters with an opportunity to identify who they are and where they live.

Voter turnout is the next issue of debate that the opposition has raised. There are two things that drive people to vote. One is motivation and the other is information. Motivation is what parties and candidates offer to inspire people to vote, giving them something to vote for. Information—the where, when, and how—is the responsibility of Elections Canada.

Election Canada's own data suggests it has done a poor job of providing that information. After the last election, young non-voters reported that not knowing where, when, or how to vote affected their decision not to cast a ballot; 25% did not know where to vote; 26% did not know when; and 19% did not know how to vote. That was one of the factors that led them to make the decision not to cast their ballot.

In the last election, half of our youth in this country did not know that they could vote before election day. Three-quarters of aboriginal youth did not know. If people are busy on election day and are not aware that they can vote early, they miss their chance. That is what led, I think, Elections Canada to write the following in one of its post-election reports, “The most important access barrier was lack of knowledge about the electoral process, including not knowing about different ways to vote...”. The fair elections act would require Elections Canada to communicate this basic information, while the parties do the job of voter motivation.

Finally, the fair elections act would make the law enforcement watchdog, Commissioner Yves Côté, independent from the Chief Electoral Officer. Predictably, the latter does not like that idea. That being said, I think it is completely essential.

First, there are almost three dozen offences in the Canada Elections Act that deal with the conduct of the Chief Electoral Officer's staff. How can the commissioner investigate the CEO's staff when he is one of the CEO's staff himself?

Second, the fair elections act would move the commissioner into the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. The director has been responsible for laying charges under the Canada Elections Act for the last seven years, and during that time his independence has never been questioned and that is because it is unquestionable. The director is appointed on the recommendation of a committee of non-partisan public servants, a representative of each political party, and a representative of the law societies of the country. The appointment is then validated by an all-party committee of the House of Commons. After being put in that position, the director cannot be removed except through a vote by the House of Commons. In fact, that removal process is similar to what is required for officers of Parliament, including the CEO of Elections Canada and the Auditor General of Canada. No one would argue that those positions lack independence.

Prior to this debate no one has ever argued—and to my knowledge no one in the House of Commons has ever argued—that the Director of Public Prosecutions is not independent. I have never heard Elections Canada argue that the Director of Public Prosecutions is not independent. He has already exercised that independence as the chief prosecutor responsible for the Canada Elections Act for the last seven years. No charges can be laid under that act without his express sign-off and without the prosecution his office carries out subsequently in the courts.

Section 2 of the Director of Public Prosecutions Act specifically excludes the Attorney General, who is an elected politician, from any involvement in prosecutions related to the Canada Elections Act. I have never heard a single example where anyone has even alleged that this provision of the Director of Public Prosecutions Act has been violated. It has been scrupulously and faithfully followed by the DPP, the Attorneys General, and everyone else involved. Not only has there been no finding of wrongdoing in this respect, but I am not aware of even an allegation.

Beyond the independence of the DPP from the government, there is the ongoing independence of the commissioner from the DPP. Allow me to quote directly from clause 108 of the fair elections act. It says:

The Commissioner is to conduct the investigation independently of the Director of Public Prosecutions.

In other words, the prosecutor cannot direct the investigation. That job is exclusively in the hands of the commissioner under the fair elections act. Furthermore, for the first time, the commissioner would have a fixed term, he could not be fired without cause, and he would have control of staffing and investigations. That is real independence.

Canadians instinctively understand that these principles are rooted in both common sense and fairness. That is why they have not joined in the hysteria of the opposition.

The next point of peculiarity in the opposition's critique is related to fundraising. The opposition has come out against the provision in the act that would allow parties to exempt fundraising calls, emails, and letters from campaign expenses. The provision is based on a well-established principle that there is a distinction between raising funds for a campaign and spending those same funds for a campaign.

It is the same reason why people do not put mileage on their car while they are standing and putting gas in it. The mileage only starts to add up when the wheels start turning. The fuel in the car, by itself, does not cause the mileage to grow.

Is this a principle that was invented out of thin air? Actually, it was right in the NDP rule book for its leadership race. Let us look at rule seven, regarding expenses not subject to the party's expense ceiling: 7 d) says, “Any expenses for fundraising...”. Those expenses are explicitly excluded.

In fact, in the NDP rule book, the fundraising exemption is far more vast than what is proposed in the fair elections act. Our bill, by contrast, has clear definitions of what constitutes a fundraising expense. It must be directed at a previous donor of the last five years and it must have the purpose of raising funds, rather than some other purpose.

When the NDP excluded fundraising expenses from its leadership race, it had no such limitations on the exclusion. It was simply the case that anything claimed to be fundraising did not count as part of the party's spending limit. Therefore, for the NDP to now claim that it is opposed to the distinction between fundraising expenses and campaign expenses is a little rich, to put it generously.

We look forward to having continued debate on this bill. I expect there will be a very thorough vetting at the committee, where dozens of witnesses will come and share their points of view. I am prepared, should I be asked to return to the committee, to answer any further questions that the members may have. Although I have not been invited, I put out that offer to the committee.

That being said, this Elections Act reform is fair. It has common sense, and it would ensure that everyday Canadians stay in charge of democracy. It would put special interests on the sidelines. It would put rule breakers out of business. It would close loopholes to big money. It would bring in new penalties for political imposters who use rogue calls to deceive voters.

It would prevent political candidates from using unpaid debts as a way of getting around donation limits, as the Liberals were successful in doing in their leadership race.

These are changes to our electoral system that have been long required. The fair elections act would provide them. That is why I am proud to move the bill and to continue to support it as it travels through the parliamentary process.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr.Speaker, I appreciate the comments by the member, and I want to pick up on some of her comments in regard to the manner in which the legislation is before us today.

It is completely unacceptable that the government has chosen to put Bill C-23 before us in the fashion that it has. There was no legitimate consultation done with Elections Canada. There was no consultation done with opposition parties. There was no consultation done with other stakeholders, and this is one of our fundamental cornerstones of democracy in Canada.

It is fundamentally flawed legislation, and I am wondering if the member would go so far as to agree with what the Globe has said in its editorials, that the bill needs to be stopped in its tracks.

[Alexandrine Latendresse, NDP, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to speak to this motion today.

This motion deals with what is referred to as the new electoral reform bill, which would change many things in our electoral system. Our motion addresses three points in particular: vouching, voter education programming by Elections Canada, and the use of voter cards.

In our opinion, by getting rid of these three extremely important measures the government is harming certain specific groups in particular and I will try to explain why in my speech. Those groups are youth, new Canadians, aboriginal Canadians and seniors living in residences.

Let us begin with vouching. Vouching enables young people who attend school away from home or who are living somewhere where it is very difficult to prove residence to vote by showing identification in the presence of a colleague, a roommate or someone who knows them well and can confirm their identity so that they can vote.

The major advantage to vouching is that the information of both the voter and the voucher is taken down. When people talk about possible or hypothetical fraud in the vouching system, let us not forget that we have all the information from both people who are voting.

Does anyone really believe that someone who is going to cheat the electoral system would provide all their personal information, namely their ID card with a photo, their telephone number and their address? That is absolutely ridiculous. The idea behind vouching is to allow anyone who has difficulty meeting the requirements to exercise their right to vote.

Personally, I was in that situation for quite a while. I am from Montreal and I moved to Rimouski to go to school. I lived there for a number of years without any official proof of address. I lived in residence where electricity was paid for, so I did not have an electricity bill. I had nothing to prove that I lived at that address in Rimouski.

If I could not go to the polling station on election day to vote because I did not have such evidence or documents, I could not exercise my right to vote. That is the reality of the changes to the elections act being proposed today.

My second point has to do with voting using the voter information card, which also specifically affects these groups. As my colleague from Toronto—Danforth just mentioned in response to a question from the government, the 2011 target groups who could use voter information cards to vote were youth, aboriginal people and seniors in residences.

All those in positions of authority who have experience with the electoral system, including the Chief Electoral Officer, Mr. Neufeld and everyone who was involved in the process, have said that this excellent measure helped people to be able to vote. They also recommended that everyone be allowed to use voter information cards.

What did the government decide to do instead? It decided that even the target groups would no longer be allowed to use these cards. These people will be left to their own devices and will have to find a way to vote. The government is telling young people who want to get involved and who want to vote but who face many obstacles to fend for themselves, to make arrangements and to find a way to navigate the new system and vote. However, problems already exist. For example, voter turnout among youth is abysmal.

Mr. Mayrand said something in committee that really stuck with me because I think it clearly identifies the problem. He said:

It is essential to understand that the main challenge for our electoral democracy is not voter fraud, but voter participation.

With regard to the young people who will have difficulty, I would like to quote the motion that I moved in May 2013 before the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs because it is extremely important. It reads:

That the Committee:

(a) Recognize that reports of the Chief Electoral Officer submitted to Parliament from 2010 onward demonstrate that, if Parliament does not modernize our electoral system in order to engage young Canadians, lower and lower percentages of eligible voters will turn out to vote in future federal elections; and

(b) Conduct a comprehensive study before December 2013 on potential mechanisms to enhance youth electoral engagement in Canada, with the view to implement such changes before the next federal election, including: modernizing the online voter registration system; ensuring there are polling stations on university and college campuses across the country; recruiting and training more youth to act as elections officers; raising awareness about how and where to vote, especially among mobile college and university students; considering an electronic voting system; considering automatic registration; and, removing barriers to pre-registering young people at age 16 as prospective voters, in advance of eligibility to vote at age 18.

We thought of such measures because we believed that this issue had to be studied in order to determine how to increase the youth voter turnout rate. Instead of considering these ways to improve youth participation, not only is the government eliminating vouching and voter cards as means of identification, but it is also eliminating all of Elections Canada's voter education programs. Elections Canada will no longer be able to talk to anyone, except to tell voters where, when and how to vote. That is what our dear minister is repeating ad nauseam.

The problem is that encouraging young people to vote is not just about telling them how and where to vote. There are many different things that could be done today to improve the voter turnout of young people. Elections Canada is in the best position to know what to do. It has all the data and the information and the will to improve voter participation. However, it will not have the right to say anything to anyone, other than what it is allowed to say. That really is a problem. I would like to quote the Chief Electoral Officer, who appeared before the committee last week:

I am very preoccupied in this regard with the limitations Bill C-23 imposes on the ability of my office to consult Canadians and disseminate information on electoral democracy, as well as to publish research. I am unaware of any democracy in which such limitations are imposed on the electoral agency and I strongly feel that an amendment in this regard is essential.

The Chief Electoral Officer, Mr. Mayrand, was very clear and said that he was not aware of any democracy that has muzzled its electoral organization like this. This gag order is one of the most harmful things in this bill. Our electoral organization should be independent and able to talk to Canadians about the topics it considers important. If it is not allowed to talk to Canadians, this means it will also not be able to talk about potential cases of fraud, since this will not be one of the very limited number of topics the minister will allow the Chief Electoral Officer to talk about.

We believe that these three things have a negative impact on the participation of groups that are already at a disadvantage in the voting process. Meaningful action could be taken. For example, the Chief Electoral Officer made recommendations to address the potential problems with the voter identification cards and the vouching system. He made some excellent suggestions. For example, he suggested that the government give him the power to hire people earlier and that they be better training. If election staff are better trained and better equipped, there will be far fewer errors of this type that can lead to bigger problems.

The Chief Electoral Officer made a number of suggestions that were not reflected in this bill. That is unacceptable.

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

moved:

That, in the opinion of the House, proposed changes to the Elections Act that would prohibit vouching, voter education programming by Elections Canada, and the use of voter cards as identification could disenfranchise many Canadians, particularly first-time voters like youth and new Canadians, Aboriginal Canadians and seniors living in residence, and should be abandoned.

Mr. Speaker, I will begin by saying that I will be sharing my time with the member for Louis-Saint-Laurent.

Let me begin today's opposition day by stating flat out that our electoral democracy is in serious danger as a consequence of a bill before the House, Bill C-23, the fair elections act, which I think almost everybody who knows anything about the act is now calling the unfair elections act. Conservatives and the Minister of State (Democratic Reform) are, frankly, relying on Canadians' busy lives and complacency about the state of our democracy to ram legislation through the House. They are also hoping for media silence in order to pull off what I would call a kind of Westminster-majority-government coup. Effectively, that is what we are looking at.

Let me also remind everyone of a baseline fact, which is that the right to vote is one of the most fundamental rights in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Supreme Court has made clear that statute law needs to be oriented, not only in its enactment but in its interpretation, to enfranchisement, not to the opposite. The right to vote is not even subject to the notwithstanding clause, whereas other important rights, like equality rights, are. This underlines how very foundational and fundamental the right to vote is in our society.

I am going to state flat out a couple of overarching premises about this bill before arguing about the elements we want Conservative MPs, in good faith, to vote with us on today, namely, to get rid of three elements in this bill that are, frankly, atrocities.

Overall, Bill C-23 is a calculated effort and intricate tapestry to do two things. One, for ideological or perhaps for sound philosophical reasons, is to enact a set of principles that are unfair, frankly. Perhaps not from the perspective of the minister and his supporters, but standing alone, without looking at any partisan advantage, this bill is full of unfairness.

Everybody knows, and we would be blind if we did not notice and remiss if we did not mention, that this is also a bill designed to secure strategic partisan advantage for the party that lies behind the government. The two interact. There is no doubt that a lot of my colleagues in the House have bought certain lines and spin from the government and the minister to try to keep this in the philosophical realm and to try to ignore how much of an attempt this is to hijack democracy. I ask them now, and will ask again at the end of my remarks, to please know that Canadians are watching and will notice what they do on this incredibly important bill.

The bill would do four major things, in clusters. There are tons of points I could draw attention to. However, in clusters, this is what the bill does that is so incredibly unfair.

First, it engages in the result, and now, because that result is so clearly known, by intention, of voter suppression. The primary devices for this would be getting rid of the voter identification methods of vouching and the use of voter information cards as authorized by the Chief Electoral Officer.

Second, it is an active attempt to encourage voter apathy and disengagement, with perhaps the single most important factor being getting rid of Elections Canada's public education and outreach mandate in an incredibly brutal way.

Third, it either does not add the necessary tools to enhance the investigative functions and powers of Elections Canada, in particular the Commissioner of Canada Elections, or it actually undermines the investigative power of Elections Canada while simultaneously flipping to a focus away from organized fraud of the sort we are all concerned about, and have been for years, which we all thought was going to be tackled in this bill. It changes the focus from that fraud to a mythical narrative of citizen fraud. Fourth, and finally, it jacks up big money politics in a big way.

I want to come back to the third point, which ties together the questions of voter suppression and the lack of a serious tackling of schemes like the automated robocall scandal from 2011. Effectively before this bill came down, Canadian society and the House had trained a telescope on the government, demanding a bill that would deal adequately and seriously with the above by giving new investigative powers to Elections Canada to deal with the robocall scheme and anything like it. Instead, that telescope has been turned around. The government is looking back at average Canadians and saying that Canadians are the potential source of fraud, and not just them, but also the 200,000 election day workers who try to do their job as best they can every election and yet are now being blamed for a fictional situation of fraud in this country.

The NDP members have been doing what they can and I think Canadians would expect no less. Once they become aware of the bill and what it contained, almost to a person they were deeply concerned about it. They would never forgive us, and we would never forgive ourselves, if we were not taking the fight to the government on the bill in the way we have been doing because, frankly, as I have said before, some foundational elements of our democracy are at stake.

The efforts have been bearing fruit. Civil society stood up to the plate early on and has continued to do so. Too many organizations and individuals have come forward for me to name. I would say a good number in the print media have as well. Regrettably, that has not been the case yet with the national news broadcasters, but I am hoping that they too will soon see their responsibility to keep the bill in front of Canadians' consciousness.

We held eight town halls over the course of the last two weeks. They were full to the bursting point. I want to come back to The Globe and Mail as one of the examples of the print media. It did an unprecedented thing by writing five editorials in a row condemning the bill, taking it apart bit by bit, to the point that the first one said:

The...government's continued focus on the threat of voter fraud in federal elections is approaching absurdity. Everyone with any expertise who has examined the question in detail has arrived at the same conclusion: There is no threat. And yet the government insists that controversial provisions in its proposed Fair Elections Act are needed to eliminate this non-existent terror—even at the risk of disenfranchising thousands of legitimate voters. It makes no sense.

In another editorial, it says simply:

The Fair Elections Act needs a rewrite and a rethink. It isn't good for Canadian democracy.

Today, we see no doubt that The Globe and Mail is aware that the entire day in the House is being devoted to our opposition day motion. In an editorial entitled, “For the Good of the Country: Kill this bill”, the Globe states:

For the government, it is an opportunity to admit error and change course.... This bill deserves to die. The Fair Elections Act must be stopped. Killing it should be Parliament's first order of business.

With that, many of my colleagues will be laying bare the problems with the government's case, the minister's case, which stands on no evidential foundation for getting rid of vouching, getting rid of the use of voter information cards, and gutting public education and outreach.

My task is simply to say that I am speaking to my Conservative colleagues across the aisle. You frankly have been spun by cabinet and the minister. You have a duty to look at this in more detail because, if you do not, you will regret it. You must exert your independence and vote with us today on getting rid of these three elements. If you do not do the right thing, you will be remembered for not standing up for democracy when called for. And if you do not back down, people will remember.

I would end by saying and reminding you that contrary to what the minister has said in his own op-ed today in The Globe and Mail, accusing us and others of hysteria, the fact is that more and more Canadians are engaged, and more and more Canadians are enraged. You should pay attention. If you do not, 2015 will bring a surprise.

Democratic Reform

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Minister of State (Democratic Reform)]

Mr. Speaker, the Chief Electoral Officer will be able to continue speaking to the media after the fair elections act is passed. That is not an issue.

But the NDP wants to ignore the hard facts around the irregularities related to vouching. The reality is, regardless of what push poll they will send out in the next couple of days, Canadians believe there should be a form of identification so that we know who is voting and that they live in the riding in which they are casting a ballot. That is a bare minimum. It is common sense. That is the fair elections act.

Business of the House

[Nycole Turmel, NDP, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Mr. Speaker, today the Conservatives broke their own record for shutting down debate by using time allocation for the 52nd and 53rd time since the 2011 election. Add this to six closures—most recently on debate related to the fabricated evidence that the member for Mississauga—Streetsville presented to the House of Commons—and you have 59 instances of the Conservatives using the Standing Orders to shut down debate in the House. That is quite the record and quite the legacy.

The government House leader's command of the Standing Orders is so exceptional that today he forced time allocation of one sitting day on a bill that was slated to pass in less time than that. We were actually in favour of the bill and could have passed it fairly quickly. This prevented other work from being done. It is incredible what we are seeing in the House right now.

Today, in its latest stroke of parliamentary brilliance, the government tried to sabotage the testimony given by the Chief Electoral Officer in the committee hearings on its unfair elections act, Bill C-23. Unfortunately after stumbling out of the gates, the Conservatives were forced to abandon their plan.

The Conservatives' disdain for our democracy and its institutions would be shocking if they did not make such a regular display of it. Canadians deserve much better than a government that behaves as though it is above the law.

My question for the parliamentary leader is this: what brilliant tactics does he have in store for the House after the riding weeks that will further display his dazzling command of the procedures and practices of this place?

Democratic Reform

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Minister of State (Democratic Reform)]

Mr. Speaker, the commissioner already has the same investigative powers as a police officer. Furthermore, the fair elections act will increase the commissioner's powers by making him independent and allowing him to impose harsher penalties for offences committed, while Canadians who participate in elections will have to abide by more laws.

This bill will help protect our democracy. I would appreciate the Liberals' support.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Minister of State (Democratic Reform)]

Mr. Speaker, the Commissioner of Canada Elections already has the same investigative powers as a police force. He can use those powers right now. In fact, those powers are increased by the fair elections act, which gives him sharper teeth and a longer reach, including making it an offence for anyone to obstruct his investigation or give him false information. It also creates tougher penalties for existing offences.

That is what Canadians have asked for. That is what the fair elections act delivers.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Minister of State (Democratic Reform)]

Mr. Speaker, if there is an exclusion that he wants to revisit, like when the NDP excluded all fundraising expenses from its spending limits, for example, first he should contact his party, which makes its own rules for leadership races. Second, I invite him to bring forward any amendments.

However, the fair elections act will close the loans loophole that allowed the Liberal Party to take hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal donations simply by calling it unrepaid debt.

That is a step in the right direction. That is the fair elections act.

Bill C-25—Time Allocation Motion

[Bernard Valcourt, Conservative, Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development]

Mr. Speaker, I listened to that charade, and it confirms something. The hon. member was referring to the fair elections act, which the official opposition stated, before reading the bill, that it would oppose. Now I am tempted to conclude that he has not even looked at Bill C-25 because he is referring to it as relating to a first nations treaty. He is totally wrong.

This is not about a treaty; it is about an agreement entered into between Canada and the Newfoundland first nation, the Qalipu Mi'kmaq. This bill is about protecting the integrity of a process to ensure that the Qalipu Mi'kmaq first nation is finally constituted according to the agreement that has been reached with the first nation.

Bill C-25 is necessary to ensure that the original intent of the 2008 Agreement for the Recognition of the Qalipu Mi'kmaq First Nation Band is respected, and that the 2013 Supplemental Agreement can be implemented.

The purpose of the legislation currently before the House is to support the implementation of the 2008 Agreement for the Recognition of the Qalipu Mi'kmaq First Nation Band and the 2013 Supplemental Agreement between the federal government and the Federation of Newfoundland Indians.

Clearly, the opposition's partisan tactics and the busy parliamentary schedule mean that we will have to allocate some time to pass this bill, considering our full legislative agenda, which will only become busier in the months ahead.

Statements by the Member for Mississauga—Streetsville—Reference to Standing Committee

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Mr. Speaker, the third little spot in a row to stand up and talk about this point does not exactly scream diversity, does it?

Earlier, I asked my colleague from Welland a question. As I mentioned, I hoped that I would have a longer period of time because I want to get this out. I want to air this.

What we are talking about here, is my colleague from Skeena—Bulkley Valley moved that there be a prima facie finding of contempt. The Speaker found that the matter merited further consideration by the appropriate committee. We have a motion. We have a decision. The Speaker then invited the member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley to move the traditional motion. That is what happened. The Speaker is referring this issue to committee.

I have found it very curious, over the past day and a half, that Conservative members have stood up in the House and by the way they are arguing and presenting the “facts”, which I will put in scare quotes, it sounds like they are disagreeing with the Speaker. They are saying that it is not contempt. It was not to mislead. I just heard the member for Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley say that he believed the member meant this, and that he believed that the member did not mean that.

It sounds to me like they are disagreeing with the ruling of the Speaker to send this to committee. I have not understood this argument. I have not understood how or why they would bring this forward.

However, now it is starting to become clear. Procedurally, I did not understand that it was possible to vote against the Speaker's ruling, but I now understand that this is exactly what we have here.

We live in a day and age where communication is instant. I can read media reports well before the newspapers are printed the next day. I will read from a Globe and Mail article by Josh Wingrove. The first paragraph says:

The Conservative government is signaling it will vote down a motion to study whether one of its MPs misled the House of Commons, rejecting a finding by the Speaker that the issue deserves a closer look if only to “clear the air.”

That was my "ahah" moment. Maybe I am slower to get to it than others, but the Conservative government is going to vote against this. That is unbelievable to me.

We have a spokeswoman from the whip's office saying that all of the facts are known on the issue, so there is nothing for a committee to study, and there is little to be gained by sending the issue to committee. There is also a quote from the government House leader, who said:

The question you have to ask is if that is actually going to serve any utility? There’s really no dispute...Certainly, one cannot picture anything that will come of great utility from further discussion of the matter.

They are going to vote against this. I find that pretty unbelievable.

First of all, I heard my colleague from Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley say he believed that this is what the member meant and he believed that the member did not mean to mislead us. If he believes it, how about we have it aired out? How about we actually talk about it and figure out what is going on? Why did he make these statements? What was the intention here?

Let us go back to what the Speaker said:

...the fact remains that the House continues to be seized of completely contradictory statements. This is a difficult position in which to leave members who must be able to depend on the integrity of the information with which they are provided to perform their parliamentary duties.

Those are not very many words. They are two sentences, but those two sentences have a lot of weight. Members “must be able to depend on the integrity of the information with which they are provided to perform their parliamentary duties”. Parliamentary duties. Parlement. We are here. This is a place where we use words, where we talk, and where we have debate. It is a place of words.

I know that in the U.K., where our parliamentary tradition comes from, there is no paper. It is all in the spoken word. We are nothing but our words. We are nothing but our integrity and our words. Parlement.

We have a situation here where someone has diminished not only their own integrity but also the integrity of Parlement, of Parliament, and the ability for us to rely on our words, put weight on them, and believe in them.

I think that the Speaker made the right ruling and I do not know how the vote is going to turn out. Maybe there will be some rogue MPs on the Conservative side, but it looks like they are going to vote it down, and I find that truly outrageous.

There is another thing that I find truly outrageous. I am at what I perceive to be the end of the debate. I was here yesterday at the beginning of the debate. I heard the Speaker's ruling and then the response from the Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons. If the Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons is speaking, I would take that to be the words of government. That is not an individual private member speaking on a private member's motion; that is the word of government.

I was sitting in this very chair and I could barely stand to listen to the argument put forward. I have a lot of respect for the parliamentary secretary, I think he is a good guy, but the arguments he was putting forward were really sending me pretty close to the edge. There was one point in the debate where, I do not know if you noticed, Mr. Speaker, I actually threw up my arms and screamed. I do not see it recorded in Hansard, but it happened, because I was overcome with how preposterous the argument was that the parliamentary secretary was putting forward.

Now I have the opportunity to dissect the argument he was putting forward and I have been looking forward to this. He started by saying the following:

A few things have been said this afternoon that I think have not been accurate, and I want to try to set the record straight.

That is a good goal, but did he actually set the record straight? I do not think so, because he went on to say:

The other thing I want to point out, and I do not think it really needs to be pointed out to members, particularly any member who has been here for any length of time...there are opportunities when all members, and I emphasize all members, tend to torque their language a bit, perhaps to embellish or to exaggerate. Is that something we should encourage? Certainly not. Does it happen regularly? Yes, it does.

He talked about torquing language, embellishing, exaggerating, and asked whether it is something we should encourage, “I have exaggerated, I will stand here in the House of Commons and admit that I have exaggerated”, but let us look at what the member for Mississauga—Streetsville said:

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—

Maybe he can see through walls:

—walk into voting stations with friends who vouch for them with no ID.

He states again, referring to the minister:

I will relate to him something I have actually seen.

This is not exaggeration, this is not torquing, this is not embellishing. This is saying something that did not actually happen.

I will go back to the parliamentary secretary's speech. He went on to state:

I am suggesting that this happens perhaps all too routinely in this place, but should it then be considered contempt? My friend opposite continues to make the point that it was contempt. Again, that is simply not accurate. The Speaker has merely referred this to committee for an examination.

I am going to go back to what the Speaker said. He stated:

...the fact remains that the House continues to be seized of completely contradictory statements. This is a difficult position in which to leave members, who must be able to depend on the integrity of the information with which they are provided to perform their parliamentary duties.

Members should get ready because I am going to be going back to these two quotes a lot. The parliamentary secretary continued:

The problem we now have before us is that because the member for Mississauga—Streetsville came back to this place and corrected the record, he is now facing possible sanction

That is not the problem we have here. The problem is not that this guy might get his wrist slapped. The problem is that he stood up in the House, not once but twice, and said, “I have actually witnessed people doing these actions”. It is unbelievable.

The parliamentary secretary went on to state:

What the consequence or the net result of this may be is that the truth begins to be pushed underground.

What? How is the truth being pushed underground when the statements were not based on truth?

If somebody comes in and says “I did not actually see that”, how are we pushing truth underground by actually exposing it to light? How would we be pushing truth underground by actually referring this to committee and saying “Hey, member for Mississauga—Streetsville, what happened here? Why don't you tell us in your own words? Were you all excited about things? Did you want to contribute to the debate? Did you want to catch the eye of the Prime Minister?”

We actually have to have this discussion at committee. I do not think the truth is being pushed underground at all.

The parliamentary secretary then goes on, but there is so much material to work with that I am going to go to a point further on in his debate.

He says:

Since the Chair has not found the member to have lied, even though my colleagues opposite keep trying to tell that tale, they perhaps should stand up and set the record straight, because the Chair did not find the member for Mississauga—Streetsville to have deliberately misled this House

In other words, he did not find that he had lied, merely that the committee should take an examination and try to clarify the comments surrounding the member's statements of February 6.

I will go back to the piece of paper in my hand. The Speaker found that there were contradictory statements, and I do not think we can put enough emphasis on the fact that we have nothing but our integrity and the words that we say in this House. Our laws are created based on Parliament, on the fact that we get to stand here and speak and use our words and tell our stories from our ridings. One would hope that those stories were actually true.

The parliamentary secretary then went on to say:

While I know the opposition wants to convince Canadians that there is some nefarious reason behind the comments of my colleague from Mississauga—Streetsville, I would purport to you and everyone else in this place that he merely did what so many of us have done previously: in the heat of debate, he had simply gone overboard.

Mr. Speaker, you have heard me admit to exaggeration. I am sure that, under duress maybe, most of us in this House would admit to exaggeration, but we are not talking about being in the heat of debate and simply going overboard. This is not the heat of debate. I am looking at the quotes from the member for Mississauga—Streetsville. This is not a vigorous back-and-forth. This is not a moment in which all of a sudden someone says, “Oops, I didn't mean to say it that way.” This is two interventions, and I will repeat the words.

I have actually witnessed other people....

It was not even something like “This could happen, and, like, I have seen some folks picking up the cards, and maybe this happened.” He said, “I have actually witnessed other people picking up the voter cards”. He said, “I will relate to him something I have actually seen.” This is not the heat of debate. This is not a bit of an exaggeration. This is saying something that was not based on fact.

The member admitted it was untrue. I cannot get over the arguments put forward by government that this is just about a bit of torquing, a bit of exaggeration. The Conservative members are saying that if they exaggerate, they should not be punished for exaggeration.

First of all, it is not an exaggeration. Second, we are not actually talking about punishment. I do not believe that the Speaker, and I have his words here, said “And therefore, we send this man to committee to be punished”. No, not at all. He said we actually have to send this to committee. What we are doing is we are sending it to committee.

The Speaker does have a line in there about at least clearing the air. The member for Mississauga—Streetsville stands up, he says that he did not mean to say what he said, he wanted to set the record straight, and then nothing more. There is no more.

This is what we do. We get to the bottom of things. We air things out at committee. Sometimes we travel. Sometimes we hear from Canadians. Sometimes we hear from expert witnesses. In this case, we have to hear from the person himself who actually said these statements. We need to know why, what was going through his mind, and what was happening here.

The line that made me throw up my hands in exasperation was, “Would I like to see everything said in this place said in a reasoned, sensible manner, devoid of the partisanship that we see all too often?”.

I am going to skip to a little later to where the partisan piece came up in his speech again:

Opposition parties are trying to score some political points here, and I do not begrudge them that. It is what opposition parties do. They opposed Bill C-23, the fair elections act. We understand that. We understand that they are trying to do everything in their power to delay, obstruct, or perhaps even kill that piece of legislation. I get that. However, that is what I believe is truly behind the motion we are debating today.

Really? Then I think the Speaker would have probably seen through that. If the Speaker thought that this was just to delay, I hardly think he would have found this to be a prima facie case.

I want to go back to the scoring of political points, that we would like to see things devoid of the partisanship that we see all too often. The opposite is true here. If we look at the statements that the member for Mississauga—Streetsville made, that is the example of what the parliamentary secretary is talking about. Those statements are an example of someone trying to score political points. Those statements are an example of the partisanship that we see all too often.

The member was trying to score political points, saying things that were not true to support a position after the fact. If we want to talk partisanship, if we want to talk political points, I think we should go back to these statements: “I have actually witnessed other people picking up the voter cards..”.

Why would he say that? Was it being said to cause mischief, to validate the Conservatives' points after the fact, instead of having a hearing on whether we need changes to the Elections Act?

I will finish with the parliamentary secretary saying the following:

In conclusion, I agree, and I believe my colleague the member for Mississauga—Streetsville would also agree, that if one does not speak accurately in this place, records should be corrected. If one does not speak with accuracy on any point, whether it be legislation or during debate, it should not be tolerated. However, when is it right to punish someone for correcting the record? When does one become a victim for speaking what one needed to say, which was to correct the record?

Oh, so the member for Mississauga—Streetsville is a victim here. Right. The big, bad opposition is ganging up and punishing him. Give me a break. That is the wickedest twisting of words that I have seen in some time.

I believe that the Speaker was right in his ruling. I think we need to have an airing out of this. We need to understand what the member was doing. I do not think he was a victim. I do not think we are trying to punish. I think we are trying to get to the bottom of something in Parliament, where we use our words to talk about these issues, to debate these issues, and to represent Canadians.

[Françoise Boivin, NDP, Gatineau, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I found the speech given by my colleague across the aisle interesting. However, it felt more like a speech on Bill C-23 itself, rather than on the question that is before the House and on which the Conservatives will be asked to vote very shortly.

The Speaker of the House had to rule on some very specific points. In order to justify Bill C-23, the member for Mississauga—Streetsville said on two separate occasions that he personally saw an offence being committed. The Speaker of the House stated:

...one, it must be proven that the statement was misleading; two, it must be established that the member making the statement knew at the time that the statement was incorrect; and three, that, in making the statement the member intended to mislead the House.

It was deemed prima facie that the three elements were proven.

Therefore, what does the hon. member think about what his colleague did? Does it fit those three criteria, or one out of three or two out of three? We heard everything he said, but it is all about Bill C-23 and never about the subject of the debate today.

[Scott Armstrong, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Employment and Social Development]

Mr. Speaker, I am proud to stand here today to discuss this issue; two little Scotch guys in a row.

It is my pleasure to rise today to speak about how the debate before us relates to matters that come back to the subsequent discussion, which my colleague the member for Mississauga—Streetsville was engaged in when he was talking about the issues that started the debate today. He was speaking about a risk that flows from the use of voter notification cards at polling stations as evidence of a voter's identity.

Too often here in Ottawa there is a tendency to lose sight of the bigger picture. Canadians want us to remember that we were elected by them to make laws, so let us make sure we make good laws, because Canadians deserve no less.

We legislate to address known challenges and mischief. The challenge underlying the discussion today that led us here remains real and worthy of discussing. It is one we must not lose sight of when we engage in events like we are debating here tonight.

Let me speak about the issue of vouching. The pitfalls and dangers related to vouching in federal elections are real. We know they are real because of the evidence collected by the commissions initiated by Elections Canada.

According to the Neufeld report, commissioned by Elections Canada, relating to the administrative deficiencies at the polls in the 2011 election, vouching procedures are complex, and there were irregularities in 25% of the cases where vouching was used. That is one in four.

Even with increased quality assurance, the report indicates that the problem would not be remedied. Vouching is risky and subject to high levels of irregularities. This was identified in the Neufeld report, and I am going to quote from that section of the report:

Identity vouching procedures are unquestionably the most complex “exception” process administered at polling stations. The level of irregularities for vouching averaged 25 percent. During two of these elections, quality assurance programs involving Onsite Conformity Advisors (OCAs) were applied. However, vouching irregularities still averaged 21 percent during the OCA monitored elections. This indicates that overly complex procedures cannot be remedied simply by improved quality assurance.

Even though there were people onsite who had been trained as conformity advisors monitoring the election, we still had irregularities of 21%.

Very clearly, the experts have identified a problem that, if left unchecked, threatens the very integrity of what we need to cherish dearly when we talk about democracy in Canada, the very purity of our election process.

My colleague the member for Mississauga—Streetsville has apologized and voluntarily corrected the record for the words he used when debating these issues, but that should not take away from the issues that he was trying to put forward, because those issues are paramount to the discussion we are having tonight. At the heart of his intervention was a sentiment related to what he viewed as a serious concern for the integrity of the voting process.

Former U.S. senator Hillary Clinton once said, “Voting is the most precious right of every citizen, and we have a moral obligation to ensure the integrity of our voting process”.

Regardless of one's political stripe or leaning, we all understand that the integrity of our voting process must relate to our ability to know that our votes as Canadians are counted, one vote each for each known and registered and verified voter.

If we have a system that is open to abuse, then our entire electoral process and our democracy is diluted and rendered less meaningful and less true. This is where Bill C-23, the fair elections act, comes in. It addresses this threat to the integrity of our system.

The fair elections act would end vouching altogether and require in law that Elections Canada communicate what forms of identification will be accepted at the polling station, so that voters will know before they head to the polls what they need to bring with them to cast their ballot.

The Neufeld report chronicles the sheer number of irregularities associated with the outdated process of vouching. However, we also know that these irregularities have led to outright court challenges and controversies, which only further undermine the confidence Canadians have in our democratic electoral system.

Voter information cards are similar to vouching, in that the pilot practice of using voter information cards as identification to vote is also open to potential abuse and a weakening of the integrity of the election process. This was at the heart of the concern raised by my colleague from Mississauga—Streetsville.

Other than as a pilot project in recent elections, Canadians have always voted without using a voter identification card as proof of identification and residency. The argument that we have heard that not using the voter identification card to allow someone to vote at the polls would somehow destabilize the democratic system is false. That would mean that all of the elections that had taken place in Canadian history prior to the use of this card were somehow illegitimate, not fair and not true. I would argue that is a false statement.

However, media reports since 2011 have shown that the use of voter identification cards as ID presents proven risks of voter fraud. Illegal voting is not a laughing matter. Voter information cards are regularly sent to electors with inaccuracies that could allow those attempting to subvert election law to use them to vote more than once or in more than one riding.

The Elections Canada website defines the voter information card as a card with one's name and address. It shows that someone is on the voters' list and tells someone where and when to vote. In a Canadian federal election, the returning officer in each riding mails one of these cards to each elector whose name appears on the preliminary voters' list.

This comes back to a serious flaw that my colleague, the member for Mississauga—Streetsville, was seeking to bring to our attention. This is why we need the fair elections act, because it would prohibit the use of voter information cards as a form of acceptable identification and would require in law that Elections Canada communicate what forms of ID would be accepted at polling stations so that voters would know before they headed to the polls what they needed to bring with them.

Even with this change, Canadians would continue to have some 39 other pieces of identification to choose from when they go to vote. The options for voters in presenting identifying documents are wide-ranging, and my colleague, the member for Mississauga—Streetsville, was well aware of that when he made his statement.

However, I want to make sure that people at home understand the broad range of ID they would be able to use when they go to vote, and that everyone would have the opportunity to cast their vote fairly and legitimately. Therefore, I will list some of the types of ID one could use, including a driver's licence; health card; Canadian passport; certification of Canadian citizenship; citizenship card; birth certificate; certificate of Indian status card; social insurance number card; old age security card; student ID card; provincial or territorial identification card; liquor identification card; hospital/medical clinic card; credit or debit card; employee card; public transportation card; library card; Canadian Forces identification card; Veterans Affairs Canada health card; Canadian Blood Services card; CNIB ID card; firearm possession and acquisition licence or possession-only licence; fishing, trapping, or hunting licence; outdoors or wildlife card or licence; hospital bracelets worn by residents of long-term care facilities; parolee identification card; utility bills, such as telephone, TV, public utilities commission, hydro, gas or water bills; bank card or credit card statement; or vehicle ownership.

I think members are getting the picture that in the next election, after the fair elections act is put in place, people would have a big variety of types of identification they could use. No one would be turned away at the polls, because we would make sure, and Elections Canada would be tasked to make sure, that people would know what types of identification they have to bring to the polls in order to vote.

There would be accurate pieces of identification so that we could be sure that we have verified voters who actually live at the residence they say they do when they go to the polls, and so that we can be sure across this country that we have a fair election where actual citizens of this country vote properly and with proper ID. I think Canadians deserve no less.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I actually think he should apologize. If one does get caught, one apologizes. We instinctively do that as individuals. For example, I might have been going the wrong speed in the wrong place at the wrong time. Lights went on behind me and the officer came over. I said, “I missed a speed sign? Sorry”. However, I did not expect not to get a ticket. He wrote the ticket and I thanked him for that because he was doing what he should do. I was not obeying the rules.

There is a consequence for not obeying the rules. It does not mean to say he cannot apologize. That is part of it. Certainly, in my upbringing, in my household, that was how my father approached it. He expected me to apologize if I had bent a rule or broken a rule of the house, which my mother had decided would be the rule for the five of us children. However, there was also a consequence. There was not only an expectation that I would say, “Sorry about that; I didn't mean to do that, but I did”, then my father would have a consequence, like grounding me or those sorts of things. The worst thing, at 16, was that he would not give me the keys to the car for a couple weekends. That was always a really heavy consequence, because then I would have to get the bus. No offence to my friends who take urban transit, but when one lives in the country, buses do not come around. Therefore, that was a real consequence if he did not give me the keys to the car.

Clearly, there are consequences in this place as well. One cannot absolve oneself simply by saying, “mea culpa; I am sorry”. We have to face the consequences of our actions in this place. If the Speaker had simply gotten up and said the member has apologized and it is over, we would not be here. The Speaker ruled otherwise, and that is why we are here. The Speaker, in my view, was asking us to get it to a place, get it resolved for all of us, not just for the member for Mississauga—Streetsville, but all of us. That needs to happen.

I implore the government members to allow it to get to committee and let the work be done. They will get back to Bill C-23. They do not have to worry about it. They have the numbers in the House. One thing this little Scots guy can do is count. There are more on that side than on this side.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

Mr. Speaker, usually I would rise and say that I am pleased to join the debate, but I have a sense of trepidation about doing this. The member for Mississauga—Streetsville is someone I have come to know and quite like, so it becomes difficult when one has to stand and talk about his actions in the House.

My preference would have been for the government to simply allow this to go to committee, in which case the committee could have dealt with it a long time ago and dispensed with it. The committee could have ruled on it and brought back a recommendation. This way we would not be, as the government House leader has said, spending two days talking about this particular issue, which the member for Mississauga—Streetsville has ended up being the centre of.

Of course, this is public. It is televised. CPAC carries it. People can watch it on the Internet. Committees can be watched on the Internet, but they are less public than this forum.

Would it not have been collegial of the government, of which he is a member, to send it to committee to have it dispensed with? That is what the Speaker's ruling was intended to do. The Speaker believed that there was a case to have it resolved somewhere else and to have us look at it.

Here we are, looking at it here and throwing all the information out over and over again. It does not help the member for Mississauga—Streetsville to have it recast over and over again, but the government has given us no other opportunity. It has left us with this as the only outlet.

One of the government members said earlier that one may misspeak in the House. I started to think about when that happens. Has it happened to me as a member? It actually happened to me on Monday, during the debate on Bill C-18, the government's bill on agriculture.

It came to my attention in two ways. I did not actually know that I had misspoken. In relation to what is called UPOV '91, I actually talked about 1929, which is actually an international convention on plant protection. I interchanged 91 and 29.

The Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, when questioning me during the debate, said that I had gotten it wrong and was talking about something that had happened a long time ago. It dawned on me that I had misspoken and that I had used the wrong date. That is misspeaking. That is how one actually misspeaks.

The staff at Hansard then emailed me. I have the email here. It said that they would like to clarify the text. The email said:

Can you please confirm whether [the member for Welland] was referring to the 1929 International Convention for the Protection of Plants (Rome), or if he meant to say otherwise (UPOV 91)? Can you advise...?

Clearly we were debating UPOV '91, which is from 1991, not the International Convention for the Protection of Plants of 1929. That was dispensed with long before we were born. We may think that we are long in the tooth sometimes, but we are certainly not that long in the tooth.

That was an example of someone getting a date wrong and misspeaking. There needed to be a correction but not an apology. It was simply the wrong date that needed to be corrected to reflect what we were actually discussing and what the debate was really about, which was Bill C-18, of which UPOV '91 was a part.

Therefore, when the government rises to defend its colleague, which is admirable and I understand why it does that, to suggest that he misspoke, it makes it extremely difficult to comprehend. It stretches credibility, to be truthful.

Here is what the member actually said. I will quote it, because I have highlighted a couple of pieces that I want to put emphasis on to show how it could not have been someone misspeaking.

On February 6, 2014, 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”, and this is what I want to emphasize, “where there are many high-rise apartment buildings”.

He was adamant about it. He knew that he was from a place where there are lots of apartment buildings.

He further stated:

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 the blue box.

He knew it was one or the other. He went on to state:

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.

I want to highlight that he said that he witnessed it personally and knew that the cards went in either the garbage can or the grey box, because here in Ontario it is the grey box for paper. He said that he saw it at that level of detail and knew the people who took the cards out of the boxes. They were not strangers but campaign workers. I admit that he does not say if they were Conservative campaign workers, Liberal campaign workers, or other campaign workers. He just said “campaign workers”. We did not get any definitive information on that. The committee might be able to ask him who the campaign workers were and what he actually saw.

He then knew that these people went to the polling stations eventually. People vouched for those folks and they voted. He knew all of those things. That is hugely different from what I described earlier about my misspeaking in the debate on Bill C-18 when I got the date wrong. It is important to get the date right, but it was not misleading the House that the agreement actually happened in 1929 when it truly happened in 1991. The two situations are not even the same.

To bring the point home even more clearly, the member for Mississauga—Streetsville said it again. He said it slightly differently but basically with the same intent. He stated:

Earlier this afternoon I asked the Minister of State for Western Economic Diversification a question. I think my friend from York South—Weston will appreciate this because, just like the riding I represent, there are a lot of apartment buildings in his riding.

I emphasize his next words:

I will relate to him something I have actually seen. On the mail delivery day when voter cards are put in mailboxes, residents come home, pick them out of their boxes, and throw them in the garbage can. I have seen campaign workers follow, pick up a dozen of them afterward, and walk out. Why are they doing that? They are doing it so they can hand those cards to other people, who will then be vouched for at a voting booth and vote illegally. That is going to stop.

That will be stopped based on Bill C-23. It would put an end to vouching and it would not happen again. People could pick up as many of those cards as they wanted, because it would not matter. They would not be able to vouch for people. We would get rid of the cards and it would not matter any more.

The story was not misspoken, in my view. It was made up, because the member subsequently decided that he should come back to the House and say that he never witnessed it and did not see it. He did not come back to the House to say that he misspoke and that it was not in the apartment building but somewhere else. That would be misspeaking. If he had said, “I didn't know they were campaign workers, but I saw it”, that would be misspeaking. If he had said, “I'm not sure if they were in the garbage can or the grey box, but they discarded them”, that would be misspeaking. He literally laid it out and itemized it. He highlighted that it was in apartment buildings at the mailboxes on mail day, and people discarded them.

The member said he witnessed it, actually saw it with his own eyes, and that means he was actually there. He had to physically be in that place on mail day to see those residents, which meant he had to spend some time there.

After the member said it the first time, one would have thought that if he had truly misspoken, he would have said to himself that it was not really, wholly accurate, so why would he do it again? Well, if he reinforced the story again by saying almost the same thing verbatim, there are only two things that could be.

One is to suggest that one has some sense of speaking notes, and this is not to suggest that one party over another does not do this. Lots of us have notes.

If the member was allowed to go to committee, one could ask if the speaking notes were given to him by someone in the PMO, who told him to relate the story as if it was his when it really was not. Perhaps the member then realized that he had told a story that was not really his, but it was in his speaking notes, and he later knew that he had to retract it because it was not his story. The member might have felt contrite thinking it was something he should not have done, and he decided to retract the story.

I think that is a valid question to ask the member. However, we are not going to get that opportunity because we are here debating it, and the government thinks this is enough.

This brings me to the position of the government House leader. He talked about how telling this story was not misleading in the sense that someone was not being deliberately misled, but it somehow came to that at the conclusion of the story.

It really boils down to what the government House leader said in the House. He said:

It is quite common for us to misspeak in the nature of conversation...

—and I think I have articulated that—

...and I can understand the error made by the hon. member on the question of voting cards, because I think there are probably very few members in this House who have not, at second- or third-hand, heard anecdotes exactly to that effect.

Here we have the government House leader saying that everybody has heard those anecdotal stories about these cards that someone picks up and takes. Everybody has heard it.

He goes on to say:

I personally

—meaning the minister, the government House leader—

...have heard anecdotes from others, not having witnessed it myself. It is different from having heard an anecdote, but having heard it quite regularly, it becomes part of the normal discourse that “this is what happens out there”.

So the fact that we have heard an anecdotal story over and over again now makes it true. It must be true, because we have heard it more than once. If only that were true, because then if my friends across the way said, “We know you are six feet tall. We know you are six feet tall”, then I could actually believe I am six feet tall.

Well, it is not true. The fact that it is an anecdote will not make it true no matter how many times it is said. To base legislation on anecdotes is the worst type of legislation one could craft, by pretending the anecdotes are true and that we must change the legislation because we know this is what happens because we were told a story. Someone told a story that this is what happens, so therefore we must ban that practice altogether because, Heaven knows, we were told a story.

It is quite beyond belief, to be truthful, that somehow the government would come forward with legislation based on anecdotal evidence and that somehow that evidence must be clear, concise, and true. This is a government that will quite often say to us, especially in the agricultural sector, that something is based on sound science. Now it will be based on sound anecdotes. Now, as long as it is a sound anecdote and as long as it is said often enough, it will be taken as a true story.

Aesop's fables, even if told over and over again, will always be fables. They will not be true. They will be fables. Myths, whether urban myths or old-time myths, are simply myths. No matter how many times we repeat the myth, whether it be an urban myth, whether it be another myth, it will be a myth; it will never be true.

As for the member apologizing, I must admit that I do congratulate him for apologizing, but that apology will not take away from the fact that he came in the House and literally laid out a case in detail of what he said he saw and personally witnessed, not once but twice. He stood by it. He did not retract it that day, did not say, “Oh, my goodness. I think I have actually told an anecdotal story here. I should go back to the House and say that it is not a true story. I actually did not see it. It is what I heard.”

He did much later. It is commendable that he did retract, but it does not negate what he did the first time.

Many of us are quite often sorry for actions we have taken, but if we take actions, there are consequences for our actions.

The government always says to us, when it comes to criminal legislation, that it is about people taking responsibility for their actions, and if their actions are such that people deserve some form of punishment, then that is what is deserved by those people. There are times when I have to nod in agreement, although not always, of course. Sometimes there are mitigating factors.

In this particular case, the member should appear before committee. It is what the Speaker expects us to do. It is what the Speaker suggested that we probably should do, in my humble opinion. I will not put words in the Speaker's mouth and would never do that, but in my humble opinion, that is what I think he was trying to say to us, because it is only about what we say to each other and what we say to Canadians.

It pains me to say this, but when professions are put on a scale, unfortunately we are not near the top with the Canadian public. Quite often, unfortunately, the reason we are not at the top is because of what we see here.

Some of it is question period. Quite often it is just question period. However, now it is about misleading the House, which we are now debating. How exactly does that affect those who are watching and those who are looking at it? They shrug their shoulders and say, “Well, what do you expect from them? That's what they do. They don't really tell you the truth anyway.”

Words are what we use. Those are the tools of our trade. The words that we give to one another and share with one another are the tools of our trade. There is only way this place can function, which is for the partisanship and the back-and-forth to be acceptable. That is why the Speaker is sitting in the chair, refereeing: to ensure we stay within those boundaries so that repartee back and forth is acceptable.

What is not acceptable is coming into the House and misleading it. That is why there are rules. They are there for good reason. They are there to ensure that we do not actually do that and have legislation come before us that is backed up by myths, mistruths, anecdotes, or stories of some description that do not exist in real life, stories that we just simply make up, and then say, “We must do this because this is the story”.

The government prides itself on saying it bases a lot of its policies upon sound science, which is evidence-based and all about truthfulness to the best of one's ability and measuring, quantifying, and qualifying. Unfortunately, when it came to qualifying the member for Mississauga—Streetsville's words, they came up short, and the Speaker was very clear about how short they came up.

Now it is incumbent upon us, as difficult and as unpleasant as it may be for our colleague and for us, to send it to committee, where our colleague will then have to face whatever repercussions and decisions are made based upon his, not our, conduct that started this process. Those repercussions and decisions will come back for ratification.

We did not start this process. It is his words in this place that started us on this path, and the path can only come to its final destination, not its hoped-for destination, when indeed we go to committee, where he will have his opportunity to answer questions. From the committee will come some form of resolution. Only then, I think, can this be put to a final conclusion.

[Isabelle Morin, NDP, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for the question because, indeed, Bill C-23 contains many things. When the hon. member rose to speak to this bill, it was to talk about the vouching system. The Conservatives no longer want someone to be able to vouch for a voter's identity.

I have a little anecdote. I used the vouching system in 2008. I was a student in Sherbrooke at the time. I was living in an apartment with eight roommates. The hydro bill, the phone bill and the lease were not in my name. I moved around a lot, so the address on my driver's licence was my parents' address. I had to have someone vouch for me.

The Conservatives are telling students in this country that because they are students—students are more or less stable, their address is their parents'—they cannot vote. I am sorry, but in 2008, if I had not used the vouching system, I could not have voted. Voting is a fundamental right. It is important. The government keeps alarming everyone by saying that young people do not vote, but the vouching system was a good way to enable them to vote.

A member of Parliament makes up some story in the House because he wants to get rid of this option. I understand, the Conservatives do nothing for young people. If I were them, I would not want young people to vote either. In Canada, everyone has the right to vote at age 18. The Conservatives are trying to prevent that. That is what Bill C-23 proposes.

What we are talking about here is the member for Mississauga—Streetsville, who made up stories in the House. This case must be referred to committee because it makes no sense. If we let this go, there is no telling what this party will do.

[Philip Toone, NDP, Gaspésie—Îles-de-la-Madeleine, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for her speech. She raised a number of interesting points.

She identified a question that a number of people are asking. Is this a Conservative Party tactic? Why would the hon. member want to use such tactics for Bill C-23? What is in this bill that the Conservatives are so afraid of?

[Isabelle Morin, NDP, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise in the House today to take part in this debate. I believe that it will have a significant impact on the future of democracy in this country.

On February 6, during a speech he made in the House of Commons, the member for Mississauga—Streetsville stated that he had personally witnessed voter fraud. That is a serious accusation. He said the following:

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.

In my opinion, the member for Mississauga—Streetsville made a very serious accusation. A few weeks later, on February 24, the member came to and changed his story. He stated that, in fact, he had not personally seen what he had previously reported. He said that he heard such stories when working in the rental housing industry. That is why, on February 25, my colleague, the House Leader of the Official Opposition, raised a question of privilege, saying that the member had deliberately misled the House. I believe that that is exactly what the member did.

What are we to think of these contradictions uttered by a member of Parliament? As the representative of his constituents, he should ensure, more than anyone, that his words and actions meet the ethical standards that all Canadians are entitled to expect an elected member of Parliament to meet.

I would not like to be one of his staff right now. I have a duty to my constituents, whom I represent every day in the House. I am here to defend their ideals and values, to inform the House of their views. If I told false stories to the House of Commons, many people would probably call my office, send me emails or write to me on Facebook. It must be mind-boggling for his staff. The member decided that what he had told the House was no longer the truth. He made that decision two and a half weeks later.

I do not know what happened. The allegation was rather serious. He accused some people of election fraud. Perhaps he realized he had gone too far. However, for the past two days, our Conservative colleagues have been saying that it is no big deal. The member did not tell the truth, but because he apologized everything is swept under the rug, forgotten, and we should move on.

Indeed, I would like to talk about important issues, such as the situation in Ukraine and the economy. Yesterday, we were supposed to have a debate on food safety, which is a very important issue, but we now find ourselves talking about this matter. I too feel that we are talking about it a lot, but it is a very important issue. We are talking about our country's democracy and what is going on in the Canadian Parliament.

Yesterday, on March 3, the Speaker of the House ruled in favour of my NDP colleague. He clearly indicated that the member knowingly made false statements with the intention of misleading the House. The member deliberately told the House something that was false.

We must think before we speak. Earlier, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration said that if a member apologizes 18 days later, it is okay.

I would like to share a story. A few weeks ago, I learned of an immigration case in my riding. The lady came from Russia. When she arrived in Canada, she was asked about her status. She was asked whether she was married, in a common-law relationship or single. The common-law relationship does not exist in every country of the world. Therefore, she said she was single. A week later, she realized she was in a common-law relationship. She wanted to correct her mistake but was not able to do so.

Thus, there are times when it is important to be aware of what we say and what we do. We are parliamentarians. We speak on behalf of Canadians. I do not understand why that woman was told that she could not change her status. It was a nightmare trying to change the form. Here we have a member who apologizes, says he did not act deliberately, says he is sorry for coming up with this story to help his party, but it is not true. He apologizes, saying “I misspoke”. The Conservatives want to move on.

I think and I hope that we are more serious than that. I think this is a farce, and it is important to talk about it. It is important to explore this in committee, to see why the member did that.

We have been talking about it since yesterday. The member was in the House yesterday. He never stood up to defend himself, to ask a question, to say that maybe we should investigate further. He did not say anything.

I would remind the House that three conditions must be met in order for someone to be accused of misleading the House. The member met all three conditions. The first is that the individual made a statement that was misleading. The second is that the individual knew at the time that the statement was incorrect. Since it was entirely fabricated, the member knew that it was false at the time. The third condition is that, in making the statement, the member intended to mislead the House. We have seen this in the past. The member rose here to say that it was not true, because he knew that he deliberately misled the House.

Therefore, the member for Mississauga—Streetsville was in contempt since he said he personally saw what he described, when in fact he was fully aware that what he had just said did not reflect reality.

As was mentioned earlier, he did not say it just once. He said a second time that he had witnessed this fraud. Therefore, this member clearly intended to mislead the members of the House. This is an extremely serious matter that goes to the heart of our democracy and has to do with respect for our country's most important institutions.

The member deliberately chose to present as facts information that he knew was false, to justify the passage of a government bill that would deprive some Canadians of their right to vote.

We could talk about much more serious issues. I would much rather talk about the bill and its content, but that is what happened.

Moreover, the Conservatives are accusing us of wasting time. I am sorry, but it is not because of me that we are discussing this matter. It is because of one of their colleagues who rose in the House at the beginning of February and spouted nonsense. If I rose and began talking nonsense, I hope my colleagues would call me to order and remind me that I represent people and must speak the truth.

The member presented information to justify the government's decision to introduce an electoral reform bill that ends the vouching system, which tens of thousands of Canadians use properly. He did that as a member of Parliament. Therefore, initially, we had no reason to think his statement was not true. In making this statement, the member was fully aware that, in the eyes of Canadians, his status as an elected representative in the Parliament of Canada guaranteed that he was telling the truth.

Why did he show such contempt for Canadians? I do not understand.

I think there is a simple reason. The member for Mississauga—Streetsville invented evidence to support the government's plan to use Bill C-23 to eliminate the vouching system. I think it is sad that the government would use such tactics to pass a bill.

I am sure many people have noticed that the Conservatives are prepared to do anything possible to take the next election. That is what is going on here.

The member spoke about one of the aspects of Bill C-23. He wanted to talk about a supposed flaw that was completely manufactured, in order to manipulate what members of Parliament and the Canadian public thought about the Conservatives' Bill C-23.

The member's only goal was to make the Conservatives' plan to abolish the vouching system more relevant. This system enabled more than 100,000 Canadians to vote in the 2011 election.

In conclusion I want to say that it is very important to send this issue to committee so that we can shed some light on this affair and find out what went on during those 18 days.

During the debate, some members argued that we must not create an environment in which members are afraid to rise and apologize. However, the member did not rise the next day. He rose 18 days later, which is the problem. Therefore, I think this issue should be studied in committee.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

It is true, Mr. Speaker, my grandma would never have done that kind of thing. She had more intellectual honesty than that.

I am trying to understand what happened between February 6th and 24th.

If someone tells the House that he saw people commit illegal acts, why did it take him 18 days to realize he saw nothing of the kind?

No apology will erase the contempt of Parliament committed on February 6. What happened during those 18 days? How is it that the member for Mississauga—Streetsville appears to have suffered hallucinations on February 6 and suddenly had to set the record straight on February 24? We would like to understand.

Basically, this sham, this preposterous story, is supposed to justify the Conservative minister’s electoral reform bill. Constructing public policy and major reforms on baseless statements, smoke and mirrors, is very serious and utterly unacceptable.

We in the official opposition act in a responsible and honest manner. We want to know exactly what happened. Was the member influenced in a way that made him make such statements? Was he subsequently influenced again when he said he had seen no one commit an illegal act? If that is true, how is it that he, as an honest politician, did not notify Elections Canada?

This has nothing at all to do with misspeaking. I might be mistaken about the name of a constituency or a person and then have to apologize, but that is not at all the case here. The member stated on two occasions that he had personally seen such actions.

This brings us back to all the defects in the electoral reform bill. We are told, in an entirely Orwellian tone, that this bill will protect us from the influence of big money, whereas maximum contributions are being raised from $1,200 to $1,500. How can anyone have these two ideas in mind at the same time? This is absolutely inconsistent.

If you want to reduce the influence of big money on elections and political parties, you increase public funding and cut individual contributions. However, the Conservatives are doing the opposite. They probably have more friends than we do who are able to write cheques for $1,500. They are not being serious at all. They are cheating by creating a legal framework that will benefit them in the next election.

This is extremely serious in a representative democracy such as ours, in which people must be able to trust the laws that govern them. Not only do the Conservatives risk preventing tens of thousands of people from voting, but they are raising the limit on individual contributions to a political party to $1,500 and preventing Elections Canada from investigating by stripping it of that power and conferring it on a third party.

What enrages me most about Bill C-23 is that the Conservatives want to prohibit Elections Canada from promoting the right to vote. This is quite disturbing when voter turnout has been declining for years now.

The main body that organizes elections in our country will not be able to tell people that it would be good for them to go and vote, that their votes count and that we need them. No, the only thing it will be able to tell them is the location of their polling station. Elections Canada will no longer be allowed to encourage people to exercise their right to vote and to have a voice in the representation and governance of their country. That must suit somebody. That must benefit people who are not counting on citizen engagement or people’s desire for real change in this country.

It is particularly odious to make false statements in the House to justify an electoral reform bill that has undergone no public consultation, either with the opposition parties or with the Chief Electoral Officer, and even less with the people of our country.

For the NDP, that is unacceptable. We will stand against it.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to inform you that I will be sharing my time with the extraordinary member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine. I would like to congratulate her. It is important that we listen to what she has to say. It will be very interesting, more interesting than what we just heard.

I would like to take a moment to quote the member for Mississauga—Streetsville. I think it will give us some insight into what the word “misspeak” means to the Conservatives, or what it means to them to have misspoken.

On February 6, the member in question said the following:

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 the blue box. I have actually witnessed other people picking up the voter cards, going to the campaign office [I suppose he is following them] of whatever candidate they support and handing out these voter cards to other individuals [he saw three things there], who then walk into voting stations with friends who vouch for them with no ID.

He personally saw at least four things happen. He witnessed them.

Later that same day, he said this:

Earlier this afternoon I asked the Minister of State for Western Economic Diversification a question. I think my friend from York South—Weston will appreciate this because, just like the riding I represent, there are a lot of apartment buildings in his riding. I will relate to him something I have actually seen.

That same day, he repeated and reiterated his previous statement, and I quote:

On the mail delivery day when voter cards are put in mailboxes, residents come home, pick them out of their boxes, and throw them in the garbage can. I [first person singular] have seen campaign workers follow, pick up a dozen of them afterward, and walk out. Why are they doing that? They are doing it so they can hand those cards to other people, who will then be vouched for at a voting booth and vote illegally. That is going to stop.

Then, 18 days later, the member Mississauga—Streetsville had an epiphany. He suddenly realized that his story was completely fabricated and that he was gravely mistaken when he said that he had seen, with his own eyes, people using voter information cards to commit election fraud. It took him 18 days. I would like to know what went through his mind on February 6. Did he have a psychotic episode? Was he under the influence of drugs? Was he following instructions from his own party to make a dismal and fraudulent attempt to justify Bill C-23, which would prevent people from voting by using the voter information card they receive from Elections Canada and having someone vouch for their identity?

The Conservatives have a problem: they consistently give us public policies based on stuff they make up. Good public policy is usually based on good research and objectivity, on an analysis of a situation supported by facts to back up statements and proposals.

Bill C-23, which would implement voter suppression tactics worthy of the Republican Party, challenges a fundamental right of Canadian citizens—exercising the right to vote—based on arguments that are basically tall tales that misled Parliament.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Richmond Hill, ON]

Mr. Speaker, our party has demonstrated that we vote our conscience. We can point to many times when we have done that in the House. We can point to very few times when that has happened with the NDP over there.

I am very surprised that the hon. member does not see the partisanship involved in this. This is all it is. It is politics by the NDP. The NDP members are using an apology made in the House to try to prolong and continue to filibuster one of the most important pieces of legislation that has been put before the House, Bill C-23, the fair elections act. We know what that is about, and Canadians know what that is about. We look forward to getting on with the job and getting it done.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I find this debate unfortunate. We are having a discussion, not because of the partisanship of the official opposition, but because the Speaker of this House has ruled that there is an issue that should come to the members in order to, quoting the words of a former Speaker, “clear the air”.

An opportunity to clear the air has not been seized by the Conservative benches. I acknowledge that the hon. member for Mississauga—Streetsville did not need to apologize to the House. He could have perhaps pretended away the incident and never admitted to the incident that he claimed he saw, he had never seen.

I find the events that have taken place here extremely perplexing. As a member of Parliament, I will go back to my constituents and try to explain it. I will be unable to explain how it is that the member told us, two different times, that he saw voting cards being removed in order to stuff ballots by people who did not have a right to vote in those locations. I find that very troubling. I think we should be able to get to the bottom of it.

Calling Bill C-23 the unfair elections act is merely marketing; it is hardly misleading the House. Everyone knows that we are talking about Bill C-23. Some of us, myself included, Preston Manning included, find Bill C-23 going entirely in the wrong direction. We should try to make sure that people can vote, not remove their ability to vote.

My question to the hon. member is, would he not agree that we would have been much better served in this discussion, once the Speaker ruled, to get an explanation as to why these two very contradictory statements came before this House?

I will say that I appreciate the member for Mississauga—Streetsville apologizing. I will thank him for that, but I would like an explanation.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today because I want to participate in this debate and address the motion proposed by the member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley. The motion proposes that the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs study the facts surrounding the statements made by the member for Mississauga—Streetsville. I propose at the outset that we already know the facts. The question is what we do about it.

A study by the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs would be redundant and a waste of time, in my submission. The Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs is one of the busiest committees, producing more reports than any other standing committee. The committee already has numerous projects on the go, including studies arising from private members' business and a question of privilege related to Elections Canada. The committee is examining changes to the Standing Orders and is currently studying Bill C-23, the fair elections act.

At the present time, the committee is under siege by an NDP filibuster aimed at delaying the fair elections act, Bill C-23. This is unfortunate because Bill C-23 is a very important piece of legislation. This bill would protect voters from rogue calls and impersonation with a mandatory public registry for mass calling, prison time for impersonating elections officials, and increased penalties for deceiving people out of their votes. It would allow the commissioner to seek tougher penalties for existing offences and empower the commissioner with new offences to combat big money, rogue calls, and fraudulent voting. It would crack down on voter fraud, make rules easier to follow, allow for small donations in and big money out, respect democratic election results, uphold free speech, and provide better customer service for voters.

Getting back to the motion before the House, I would like to draw everyone's attention to a quick review of the facts that led to this question of privilege. On February 6, during debate on Bill C-23, the fair elections act, the member for Mississauga—Streetsville made a statement in the House about voter identification cards. He rose in the House on February 24 and corrected the record. The next day he added, “...I recognized that this was an error on my part”. He then sincerely apologized to all Canadians and all members of the House for the statement he made. He added that it was never his intention in any way to mislead the House, for which he has the greatest amount of respect.

As we know, it is a long-standing tradition in the House to accept the word of a member and to accept his or her apology. Notwithstanding that tradition, on February 25, the member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley rose in the House on a question of privilege charging the member for Mississauga—Streetsville with contempt; this, of course, after the member for Mississauga—Streetsville had delivered his apology to Canadians and all members in the House.

The government House leader responded by making the following point. He stated:

...the presumption in this House is that we are all taken at our word, that the statements we make are truthful and correct. That we are given the benefit of that doubt brings with it a strong obligation on us, in the cases where a member misspeaks, to correct the record so that nobody is left with inaccurate perceptions.

In this particular instance, the member for Mississauga—Streetsville, has done exactly that. Having misspoken in this House and having realized his comments were in error, he has come to this House and corrected the record.

That is the obligation that exists upon members. That is an obligation to ensure that nobody is left under false impressions. That is an obligation he has discharged. That is the obligation upon all members here, and for that reason I think that alone is sufficient to rebut any concern that there has been a contempt.

I will end the government House leader's quote there.

Also in that debate, the member for Kingston and the Islands recognized that the only reason the House was engaged in the debate on the matter was the fact that it had been raised by the member for Mississauga—Streetsville, who took his duty and obligation to correct the record seriously.

Instead of accepting the apology from the member for Mississauga—Streetsville, the NDP House leader chose to raise the matter as a question of privilege, putting the onus on the Speaker to rule.

When the Speaker finds that there is a prima facie question of privilege, the task of formulating the question to the House falls to the member who raised the issue. In this case, it was the member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley. As we all know, his privilege motion sets aside all business of the House. I believe he could have found another way to express his displeasure, without engaging all of us in the process, debate, and drama of a question of privilege.

The debate on his motion does not only use up the precious time of this House, but it proposes to use up a great deal of the precious time of a committee. This exercise is wasteful and unnecessary.

I will be encouraging members to vote against the proposal from the NDP for three reasons. One, the member who made the misleading statements apologized and voluntarily corrected the record. That is a very important point for all of us to realize. He apologized and voluntarily corrected the record.

Two, there is no merit in a committee study since all of the facts are known. He made a statement and he apologized for it. The real and only question left for the House to decide is how it wants to move forward on this issue considering the facts before it.

This brings me to the third reason to oppose the motion. The one outcome we want to avoid is to create an environment where MPs are punished for doing the right thing. The right thing for this House to do is to accept the member's apology and move on.

However, I am afraid it is too late for the high road at this point. The member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley has the entire House going down his road.

What does the NDP want to accomplish with a committee study? I looked at the procedural references the NDP House leader cited in his presentation to his question of privilege. In his intervention, he cited a reference from page 115 of House of Commons Procedure and Practice, second edition.

His citation references a case from December 6, 1978, where Speaker Jerome ruled that a government official deliberately misled a minister and that constituted a prima facie question of privilege. The member for Northumberland—Durham, who raised the question of privilege was invited to propose his motion to the House. The motion was defeated, and the matter was not sent to committee.

The NDP House leader also referenced a ruling from October 19, 2000, regarding misleading statements made in the House. Speaker Parent stated that he could find no support for a claim that the privileges of the House had been breached; so no committee study resulted from that.

He included a ruling of our current Speaker from May 7, 2012. The Speaker did not arrive at a finding of a prima facie question of privilege there either.

There was, however, a committee study that resulted from a ruling he referenced from February 1, 2002, regarding two statements made by the then minister of defence. In that ruling, Speaker Milliken noted the need for clarity in House proceedings and the need to ensure the integrity of the information provided by the government to the House. He also stated that integrity of information was of paramount importance since it directly concerned the rules of engagement for Canadian troops involved in the conflict in Afghanistan, a principle that goes to the very heart of Canada's participation in the war against terrorism.

A motion was moved referring the matter to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, and almost a week later, on Thursday, February 7, 2002, it was adopted.

The committee heard from a number of witnesses in that case. It heard from the member who raised the matter, Mr. Brian Pallister. It heard from the Clerk of the House of Commons, and the law clerk and parliamentary counsel of the House of Commons. It heard from the hon. Art Eggleton, the former minister of national defence; the deputy chief of the defence staff; the deputy minister of the department of national defence; the chief of the defence staff; the deputy clerk of the Privy Council, counsel and security and intelligence co-ordinator; the clerk of the Privy Council and secretary to the cabinet; the assistant deputy minister, global and security policy, department of foreign affairs and international trade; and J.P. Joseph Maingot, former law clerk and parliamentary counsel, House of Commons, and author of Parliamentary Privilege in Canada.

In addition, members of the committee were invited to submit questions in writing for Commodore Jean-Pierre Thiffault, commander of the Canadian joint task force in southwest Asia.

That is an impressive list of witnesses. Obviously, there are some similarities between this question of privilege and the question of privilege in 2002, but I believe members would recognize the many significant differences. There might have been more meat on the bone in the 2002 case than the straightforward facts of this case.

Also, I think it is worth mentioning that the status of the two members involved is significantly different. The 2002 case involved a minister of the Crown. A minister enjoys a special role in providing information to the House.

That said, and despite all that was involved in the 2002 study, and all that was at stake, the committee had to focus on the task at hand, the issue of two contradictory statements made in the House.

The report back from the procedure and House affairs committee stated:

We are not concerned here with the Minister's performance as a minister, nor with the chain of command or lines of communication in the military, the Department of National Defence, or the Government.

The committee also felt it was necessary to point out the following:

Parliamentary committees charged with examining questions of privilege must exercise caution and act responsibly in drawing conclusions. They must guard against allowing partisanship to colour their judgement. The power to punish for contempt must not be exercised lightly. It exists for those rare occasions when Parliament’s ability to function is impeded or compromised.

One could, in the case before us today, connect some dots and come to the conclusion that this is not about statements made by the member for Mississauga—Streetsville. Other agendas are at play here, agendas that are clouding the judgment of the NDP. I am certain that most reasonable people would agree that the case before us is of a different scale in importance than that in 2002. Even still, the conclusion of the committee in 2002 was simple and to the point. It stated:

After a thorough review of all the circumstances, the Committee has come to the conclusion that the Minister made a mistake....

It concluded that no contempt of the House was committed.

What are the facts surrounding the statements made by the member for Mississauga—Streetsville? He made a mistake. He rose in the House and said, “I recognized that this was an error on my part”. He followed that recognition of fault with an apology to the House and to all Canadians. He made it clear that he did not intend to mislead the House.

I submit that a committee study of this case is not necessary. It only makes sense in the mind of the New Democrats, who fervently obstruct anything constructive that comes on the floor of the House and to our committees. I understand that the role of the opposition is to oppose, but in this case, it has crossed the line.

As the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs warned, in 2002, we in the House must also guard against allowing partisanship to colour our judgment in the matter of privilege. We must not execute our power lightly.

The NDP should refrain from using this question of privilege to fight its battle against the fair elections act. It only exposes its fiend, outrage, and phoney crusade in its opposition to legislation that will put everyday Canadians, not big union bosses, in charge of their democracy.

I have a number of quotations from people across the country. I have documentation from Elections Canada, in cases where it has found fraud in past elections in this country.

As well, I hear the words of my constituents, who speak on a daily basis. I can tell members that they do not want election fraud any more than anybody else in this House. Supporting the fair elections act would go a long way to giving back fair elections to Canadians.

We all know that things happen during elections that should not happen. That is what the legislation, Bill C-23, would address.

With respect to the question before us, I encourage all members of the House to see past the partisan colours of their party. Let the House get back to business, and let the committees get on with their agendas. There is no place in committee for this matter. It has been settled. The member stood up and he apologized.

Statements by the Member for Mississauga-Streetsville—Reference to Standing Committee

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for sharing his time with me.

This is a grave matter we are debating here. It goes to the credibility of this place. The comments that I will make at the end, I hope, will give pause to reflect on a situation where we have a majority government.

What is the situation before us? We were debating Bill C-23, which is proposing significant amendments to the Canada Elections Act, with a number of amendments that are facing huge debate across the country, but within a vacuum of ability for Canadians to speak out. In the course of the debate, the member for Mississauga—Streetsville decided to speak twice in this place and to share certain information. As has been raised here previously, it was in the course of debate on a very significant bill to Canadians that sets out the rights to exercise the franchise. The member has now apologized to the House and admitted that he misled this place on observations that he personally witnessed in the use of the voucher system.

Why is this important? It is because of changes to the voucher system that the government wants to proceed with, which is to do away with the voucher. Frankly, right now, hundreds of thousands of Canadians, from seniors to first nations to students, rely on vouchers to exercise their franchise. We are fortunate to live in a country where everyone in society has the right to vote if they are a citizen. I raise this matter because I have received letters. I understand the same letters have been sent to the minister responsible for the new election bill.

I received a letter from the president of the students' union for the King’s University College, the president of the students' union for the University of Alberta, and the student association of Grant MacEwan University. These are all major institutions in my city.

What they relayed to me and the hon. minister is that they are deeply concerned that this move to remove the voucher is going to make it more difficult. Sieger Siderius, president of the students' association for the King's University College said: “...making the ability to vote more difficult seems antithetical to the inclusive democratic system that has developed in Canada”.

The president of the students' union of the University of Alberta, Petros Kusmu, said: “Voter turnout from students and youth is already relatively low in federal elections”. They think it is important that the government move toward making it easier for students to vote, and they are deeply troubled that to remove the ability to vouch may have graver results, lowering voter turnout from students.

The students association for Grant MacEwan University expressed the same concerns. “Students unable to provide [a] valid piece of identification under the Fair Elections Act as currently proposed risk disenfranchisement”. They are calling on me to call for the government to provide expanded consultation so they can voice their perspective.

Given that the government is still refusing to allow a committee to travel to discuss this important piece of legislation, the only opportunity for a person to find out what is in the bill and what the issues are around the voucher system is to view CPAC, or come to Ottawa if they have the opportunity, if they are studying here, and observe the debate.

What did the hon. member for Mississauga—Streetsville say in this place? He said:

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.

He said that once. On February 6, he again said:

I will relate to him [he means the Minister of State for Western Economic Diversification] something I have actually seen. On the mail delivery day when voter cards are put in mailboxes, residents come home, pick them out of their boxes, and throw them in the garbage can. I have seen campaign workers follow, pick up a dozen of them afterward, and walk out. Why are they doing that? They are doing it so they can hand those cards to other people, who will then be vouched for at a voting booth and vote illegally. That is going to stop.

As is clear in the House, and as the members representing the government side have attested to, almost three weeks later, the member for Mississauga—Streetsville stood up in the House and confessed that he completely misled the House, not once but twice.

How are we to be assured that Canadians following this debate managed to follow every day of it, so that they will have learned that in fact this hon. member had misled the House? This is a serious matter. This is a serious bill we are discussing and it is absolutely imperative that factual information be brought forward. There have been many questions back and forth in question period about proposed changes to the Elections Act, and a lot of concerns raised on behalf of constituents about the plan to do away with the vouching system.

This is a very significant matter. We are talking about the very right of Canadians to exercise their democratic right to vote for the members in this place. We have heard from young people, certainly in my city, who are deeply concerned about this proposed amendment. We had a member testify in the House that he personally had witnessed voter fraud with the use of vouchers, and then admit he never did witness any such thing. This is not simply a case where perhaps somebody had told him third-hand that there might be some fraud with vouching. He actually stood in this place twice and said that he personally had witnessed this and had witnessed voter fraud.

What is important is that, according to our procedures, the House Leader of the Official Opposition raised a question of privilege, the member spoke to it, and the Speaker issued a ruling. In issuing his ruling, the Speaker said that he had to consider three factors based on precedent. One was that it had to be proven that the statement was misleading; two, that it must be established that the member making the statement knew at the time of the statement that it was incorrect; and three, that in making the statement, the member intended to mislead the House. The member himself has apologized that he has done all three. However, aside from that, the reason we are here debating right now is because the Speaker made a ruling in this matter and, as the procedure goes, we do not get into this debate unless there is a prima facie case of contempt in the House.

We have heard a number of members state that we do not bring forward this kind of motion lightly, and it does not happen very often, and it certainly has not happened often while I have been in this place for more than five years. Therefore, it seems appropriate, given the procedures of the House, which are laid down in a chart in our procedural book, which is agreed to by all the members in the House, that there will be a vote in this place.

What happens when we have a majority government? We are having a debate here and we begin to sense how people might vote. It may be that those members on the other side might have a bit of conscience and think that this is reprehensible behaviour and that just standing up and saying, “Oh gosh, I should not have misled the House” is not enough, and that maybe this matter should be referred to the committee and an appropriate response taken. There is no predetermination of what the response is. The member could, for example, simply be asked to come before the bar of the House and apologize to the Speaker. It is not terribly reprehensible. We are not going to lock him up behind bars and so forth.

I am stunned that the members are complaining that we are taking up the time of the House on this. Would it not be nice if instead we were using the time to decide how many communities in Canada we were going to talk with about the proposed changes to the Elections Act, so that we could actually have a debate among Canadians on how we should change the law.

Clearly, my constituents and the youth in my city have expressed their will. They would like to have a voice in this statute. They have a right not to be misinformed on what has happened with the vouching system, and regrettably they have been given misleading information in this House. We can only hope that they have been able to follow this debate and that they know that in fact there is no clear evidence of fraudulent use of the voucher system.

[Philip Toone, NDP, Gaspésie—Îles-de-la-Madeleine, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for her excellent and enlightening speech. She clearly explained the issue that is before the House today.

If I relied on Conservative Party members on the other side of the House, I would have no idea what the issue is. After hearing the speech by the member for Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound, I no longer understood the point of the debate.

I would like to remind hon. members of the topic of debate. In the context of the electoral “deform” bill, Bill C-23, the member for Mississauga—Streetsville rose in the House and made misleading statements. He misled the House.

We therefore asked the Speaker to investigate what had been said in the House to determine whether, prima facie, the member made false statements and misled the House. The Speaker responded in the affirmative. We have three criteria that allow us to determine whether the House was misled, and these criteria were developed by the Speaker himself.

I am going to summarize them. First, it must be proven that the statement itself was misleading; second, it must be established that the member making the statement knew at the time that the statement was incorrect; and, third, the member must have intended to mislead the House.

According to the Speaker’s ruling, the situation meets those criteria prima facie. That is why this matter is before us. Will we refer it to the parliamentary committee responsible for examining this kind of issue, the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs?

After hearing the speeches of the members on the other side of the House, I believe we have lost sight of the motion. Hon. members will remember that it reads:

That the question of privilege related to the statements made in the House of Commons by the member for Mississauga—Streetsville be referred to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.

It is nothing more or less than that. I think that is clear. The member for Mississauga—Streetsville seems to have made two completely contradictory statements. We must go further and examine this issue.

Why must we do so? It is possible that the member spoke with Elections Canada or that Elections Canada communicated with the member. We do not know what happened. All we know is what the member himself said.

Hon. members will recall what he said in his speech on February 6. To paraphrase, he said that he lived in a very urban, very densely populated riding where there are a lot of apartment buildings and blue boxes. He claimed that people had found Elections Canada cards that had been discarded by voters in those boxes, and that they had picked them up so that they could take them to the offices of other parties, claim a new identity and possibly vote illegally.

It is a serious accusation for a member of Parliament to rise in the House and say that he has personally witnessed election fraud in Canada.

Let me go back to the original quote. I would like to do so because I think it is always better quote the member himself. What he said was very specific. That is why we have to wonder what the facts really are.

I would like people to pay attention to the details of what the member for Mississauga—Streetsville told us in the House. In response to a question he was asked following one of his speeches in the House on February 6, he said precisely this:

I will relate to him something I have actually seen. On the mail delivery day when voter cards are put in mailboxes, residents come home, pick them out of their boxes, and throw them in the garbage can. I have seen campaign workers follow, pick up a dozen of them afterward, and walk out. Why are they doing that? They are doing it so they can hand those cards to other people, who will then be vouched for at a voting booth and vote illegally.

A question is being raised in the House. The member for Mississauga—Streetsville did not merely miscalculate. He did not merely conjugate a verb in such a way that we did not know whether it was in the future or the past tense. It was not a typographical error. It was a specific and very detailed error. It would be very difficult for me to be mistaken for about three minutes of a speech. There might be perhaps one or two incorrect words in my speech, and I would definitely rise in the House and apologize for my mistake.

Here we are talking about a complete paragraph from the speech of a member of the House, where he said that he had actually seen a fraudulent act committed against the Canadian electorate. When he was asked to apologize and he returned to the House on February 24—18 days later—he did not do so. He merely stated that some of what he had said might have been inaccurate.

What was incorrect in all that? One specific thing? Everything? We do not know, and that is why it should be looked into by the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. The hon. member should provide more detailed explanations to Canadian voters, because those given so far are insufficient. He gave a brief apology of a few sentences in the House, whereas he made a 15-minute speech, and what he said over three minutes or so was downright incorrect, according to what he says. That merits the attention of this House.

We must have confidence that what is said in the House is accurate, honest and true. We cannot allow members to come into the House and say things as inaccurate as that. If someone truly saw what the hon. member claimed to have seen, that constitutes fraud. That is a violation of the Canada Elections Act. We are beginning to move into the criminal field. There are serious consequences for witnessing that kind of activity and keeping silent for three years. The member claimed to have seen this in 2011. This is 2014, and for all that time, he said nothing. He witnessed a very serious fraudulent act in his constituency and did nothing.

In this case, it seems to me, a member of Parliament has a much greater responsibility to act than an ordinary Canadian citizen. He knows this very well. He is a legislator. He is very familiar with the consequences of such a serious act. He has to report it. Either he failed to report that act, and today he is trying to hedge and have people believe it was a mistake, or it truly was a mistake.

I would like Elections Canada to tell us if there were any reports and if the member came forward at that time. Do we know what happened? That is deserving of the attention of this House.

Again, in the context of Bill C-23, the electoral deform bill introduced by this government, we want Canadians to vote in elections. For years, the voter turnout rate has been in constant decline. We should bring it up.

According to opposition members, the content of Bill C-23 will unfortunately achieve the direct opposite. It will stop people from voting and decrease the turnout rate even further.

With respect to voter cards, 800,000 seniors and 70,000 members of first nations used them to vote. Under the terms of the bill now before us, they would unfortunately no longer have that right. That is precisely why the member rose in the House. He wanted to condemn a practice that, as we see it, has helped people vote, rather than prevented them from doing so.

If this case is referred to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, we definitely want everything open to the public. That is why I am moving a motion. I do not want this to take place in camera.

I move, seconded by the hon. member for Québec:

that the motion be amended by adding, after the words “House Affairs”, the following:

“, and that all procedures in respect of this order of reference be held in public”.

[Anne-Marie Day, NDP, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Mr. Speaker, coincidentally, this happened just as Bill C-23 was being introduced.

I would like to think that this is not the case, but we cannot help but conclude that there must be a link between what the member said and the goal of wanting to fast track this bill through committee.

[Anne-Marie Day, NDP, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Gaspésie—Îles-de-la-Madeleine.

As a parliamentarian, I want to remind all my colleagues, and myself, that we have a responsibility to Canadians, a responsibility to the House of Commons itself, which establishes the procedures and practices of the House, and a responsibility to our colleagues who are elected members who vote on bills.

This question of privilege reminds us that, although we are parliamentarians and have privileges such as freedom of speech, we cannot use those privileges any way we like and deliberately mislead the House and our constituents by making statements we know to be incorrect in order to achieve a personal or partisan objective. What is more, in House of Commons Procedure and Practice, second edition, on page 115, it states:

Misleading a Minister or a Member has also been considered a form of obstruction and thus a prima facie breach of privilege.

We also have a duty to earn the trust of our constituents and the voters who vote for us. The practice of making false or contradictory statements in the House needs to end. It can serve only to fuel the public's cynicism about politicians and the disengagement the public has from its civic duty, which is to vote. It is already extremely difficult to get voters to the polling stations.

It is very important to me that we understand that it is in our best interest to faithfully apply the rules and procedures, as set by the House of Commons. We can have a bias based on our political stripes—I understand that—but we must show that the public's interest is our primary concern. We must do so objectively and with integrity, which means illustrating our points of view and the benefits of the bills we introduce without using smoke and mirrors. That is how we will win the respect not only of our constituents, but also of our parliamentary colleagues.

This is what the member for Mississauga—Streetsville 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 quite absurd because, as we know, when we go to the polling station the card in question is not enough.

When the member for Mississauga—Streetsville said “I have actually witnessed”, he was saying that he had witnessed criminal offences being committed. That is a very serious statement that should be taken very seriously because it refers to election fraud.

The member for Mississauga—Streetsville told Parliament that he had witnessed acts prohibited by Canadian law, acts that constitute election fraud according to Elections Canada. It is not a simple statement or mere speculation or even a misinterpretation. He said that he saw it with his own eyes. He said that twice, on two separate occasions in the House, to his colleagues. The first time, he asked the Minister of State for Western Economic Diversification a question, and the second time, he addressed his colleague from York South—Weston.

On February 24, the member for Mississauga—Streetsville once again rose in the House to make a new and completely contradictory statement, saying that he had made a statement that was not accurate:

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 means that what he reported was not the truth.

Here is what I am wondering about: Why did the member for Mississauga—Streetsville change his version of the facts? Why did the member for Mississauga—Streetsville wait 18 days before giving us the new version of the facts?

Is it because Elections Canada contacted the member for Mississauga—Streetsville in the interim? Since this is clearly a case of electoral fraud, a very serious accusation, will Elections Canada investigate?

I think it is unacceptable that those members voted on Bill C-23, which is currently being rushed through committee, on the basis of false statements by one of our colleagues. Some colleagues decided how to vote on Bill C-23 on the basis of unfounded and inaccurate statements. That is a serious blow to democracy and to the integrity of parliamentarians.

Erskine May is even more clear when it comes to a member later admitting that statements he made were false. Page 111 of Parliamentary Practice, 22nd edition, informs us that the Commons may treat the making of a deliberately misleading statement as a contempt. It also states that, in 1963, the House resolved that in making a personal statement which contained words which he later admitted not to be true, a former member had been guilty of grave contempt.

We have a duty as parliamentarians to build a relationship of trust with our constituents. I represent the people of Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles in the House of Commons. My constituents have the right to be able to count on me and the right to know what we are doing here. They also have the right to know where we stand on bills and why we are voting for or against them.

If tomorrow, someone from my riding of Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles asks me why I did not support Bill C-23, based on what this person heard or read in the speech the member for Mississauga—Streetsville made in the House on February 6, 2014, I would think that my constituent had been misled. That is very serious, which is why it is important to act with integrity. All parliamentarians need to understand their duty and responsibility towards the public, towards voters and towards our mandate as parliamentarians.

The statements we make in the House are not limited to the House. They have repercussions on people all across Canada.

When I think about the contradictory statement made by the member for Mississauga—Streetsville, I realize that the vote on Bill C-23, which is currently being fast-tracked through committee, will be based on erroneous information. The debate on Bill C-23 was not fair and honest. What is worse, it is tainted by an unfounded accusation for the sole purpose of getting the bill passed.

Is that our mandate as parliamentarians? I do not think so. Is that how we should be introducing bills that will affect the lives of millions of Canadians?

I highly doubt it. I want to talk more about our responsibility as parliamentarians. We spend many hours working on laws that affect the lives of Canadian families. If we do not follow the rules that are in place, what impact will these laws have on the daily lives of millions of Canadians?

The member for Mississauga—Streetsville should be questioned by the appropriate committee about what he did, so that we can determine where those allegations came from and why he used them to support Bill C-23.

[Jean-François Fortin, Bloc, Haute-Gaspésie—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to start by saying that the Bloc Québécois will support the motion to refer this question of privilege to committee.

As we have already heard, there are two contradictory statements before the House, and that makes it difficult for members to rule on the integrity and veracity of the statements that were made.

It is important for the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs to examine the statements and all relevant information that would help them to shed light on this contempt of Parliament. Given the circumstances, it is increasingly difficult to determine what is true and what is false in the debate on Bill C-23.

It is increasingly difficult for the public to understand and assess the credibility of the information they get from the government. We all remember the government's false advertising to promote a training program that did not even exist.

Does the member also disapprove of the increasing amount of misinformation we are seeing from his government?

Statements by the Member for Mississauga—Streetsville — Reference to Standing Committee

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, in the course of the debate, ever since the Speaker's ruling that this House is currently aware of two completely contradictory statements before us and that we should, in his view, clear the air by allowing this to go to committee, I have been wondering why the response from the Conservative members, such as from the hon. parliamentary secretary, has been to suggest that this is some sort of punishment and that somehow we will be penalizing people for coming to this place and telling the truth. I would think quite the contrary lesson would be learned, which is that members are at their peril if they try to tell us something when they know it is not true and they later tell us that they are sorry and that it was not true.

I accept that the hon. member has apologized. He is also a friend of mine. I am not interested in destroying his reputation or taking away his voluntary achievements or his accomplishments as a member of Parliament.

However, I would like to know why on two occasions we were told that there was this actual eye-witness evidence of voting fraud, which is the substance of and at the heart of taking away the rights of Canadians in future elections, in Bill C-23, when, in fact, nothing of the sort occurred.

I think we need to get to the bottom of that, and I do not know how we do it by cutting off debate and ending this today.

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

Mr. Speaker, we on this side of the House are convinced that the member misled us. What is more, the Speaker's ruling shows that the Speaker somewhat agrees with our position. As I said, and as my colleague mentioned in his comments and questions, the fact remains that the member for Mississauga—Streetsville did not simply present us with misleading or erroneous information, to put it politely and in parliamentary language. The facts he presented to us are directly related to the bill and were used by the government to support this bill that seeks to change the very basis of our democracy.

As much as I respect my colleagues, the controversial nature of these amendments and the controversy raised by this electoral “deform” bill show that the debate among members may not be enough.

I think that it is therefore all the more important to send this issue to committee to understand the accusations the member made. He retracted his comments, saying that he had heard about this happening, but there is a lot of confusion surrounding the issue. Did he see it happen? Did he hear about it from someone else? Did someone in the Prime Minister's Office tell him to say that? Did the government base the bill on that information? We believe so, but we must really examine the issue and find out more so that we have the correct information when we vote on Bill C-23. As I said, and it bears repeating, we are talking about the very basis of our democracy.

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

Mr. Speaker, this motion on the point of privilege regarding the member for Mississauga—Streetsville is such a strange situation. We usually like to start our speeches by saying that it is an honour to rise in the House, and it is an honour, but it is sad to be speaking to a subject like this one.

My colleagues from all parties spend a lot of time going door to door, visiting organizations, participating in events and talking to their constituents. We are no strangers to cynicism and negative comments about the work that we do as MPs and politicians. As elected members of Parliament, part of our job is to change that reputation and show people that we can have a positive impact on our communities and on their daily lives. We hope to earn their trust after an election, regardless of the circumstances of the election, whether we had a hard-fought win or we came in on a wave, like the orange wave in Quebec. We all have a responsibility to earn the trust of our constituents.

It is very troubling when members do things or say things that mislead the House, as in the case before us today. This situation is worthy of being examined, especially since it is related to Bill C-23, the electoral “deform” bill. This bill will change the very foundation of our democracy. Some aspects of the bill are very worrisome, and the public is not necessarily aware of them.

I want to expand on that point. When we rise to speak during debates in the House of Commons, we are not necessarily doing so just to convince our colleagues. We certainly hope to convince some of them, but at the end of the day, we rise to speak not only on behalf of our constituents, but also to them. We communicate ideas, try to help them understand the bill and, in most cases, share our thoughts on the bill and how our party feels about it.

When we debate a subject and try to explain a bill as complex and important as the one that amends the Canada Elections Act, we have to make sure that people know the real story. When a member actually misleads the House, and therefore the people we represent—those from Chambly—Borduas in my case—and all Canadians, that is extremely troubling.

My colleague from Skeena—Bulkley Valley said it well: if we look at the situation, we realize that the intervention by our colleague from Mississauga—Streetsville was clearly made with the intention to mislead the House. First, it has to be said, the statement was made not just once, but twice, at two different times. Obviously we are all aware of the time we are talking about the most, which was February 6, in the House. I was here and we were all surprised to hear such a thing. However, since the member said the same thing twice, the three conditions were met. You, yourself, said so in your ruling yesterday, Mr. Speaker. The hon. member was aware of what he was doing, he intended to mislead the House and this was not really a mistake.

Yesterday, the Conservatives gave some interesting speeches—and that is being kind—and we are hearing the same things again today: the member is fair and honest. He simply misspoke and he has apologized.

As I said in the House yesterday, a mistake is forgetting someone's birthday, someone you have not seen in a long time. Mixing up the name of a riding such as Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, which is long and complex, that is a mistake. It is an easy mistake to make when speaking in the House, especially if one is trying to speak without notes.

However, when someone stands in the House—as a member duly elected by the people, I dare say—and that individual states, with confidence and certainty, that he has seen a crime committed in his riding, that is a very serious accusation.

That is a far cry from mixing up numbers, a name, a date or any other information. We realize that the member was willing to come back to the House and have his remarks corrected in the Hansard. However, I doubt that the government, which proudly claims to be tough on crime, would be willing to forgive other criminals who simply apologized. I am not saying that the member opposite is a criminal, but he did commit an unforgivable act in the House, one that could be considered contempt of Parliament. That is what we are discussing today.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons said that there was no contempt, that we have all of the facts and that there is no need to study the issue in committee. However, during question period, when the Minister of State for Democratic Reform was asked how many cases of fraud were the same as those identified by the member for Mississauga—Streetsville in the House, he said that there were some, but he did not say how many or provide any details.

The minister is not able to provide clarification, but it seems that the member for Mississauga—Streetsville can. He corrected his statement, but that led to a lot of confusion. We therefore need to clear things up in committee.

It is essential to say things that are accurate. Nobody should mislead the members of the House and much less the people of Canada. This is very serious, because this is not a routine bill. In the past, the Canada Elections Act has not been the kind of thing that gets changed frequently. The changes proposed by the Minister of State for Democratic Reform are especially significant because they had to be put forward following a series of accusations and deeply disturbing scandals. In this case, we are talking about robocalls, but there was also the in-and-out scandal and the very serious Liberal scandals, such as the sponsorship scandal.

People are worried, and with good reason, about how elections are conducted. This bill was introduced long after a motion moved by the member for Toronto—Danforth, if memory serves. The NDP asked the minister of state for democratic reform at the time to introduce a bill within six months.

Not only has all this time been spent on introducing the bill, but false statements were made that misled members. This illustrates the bad faith shown by this government, which has the gall to defend the member in question.

Ms. Therrien, for instance, stood up to disclose factual things about employment insurance. There are other situations in which public servants may have made mistakes, and this has created a difficult situation for the government. In each of these cases, the government did not hesitate to publicly destroy those people's reputations. The Conservatives did not hesitate to put the blame for a difficult situation on public servants, instead of accepting that they were elected to form a government and assume their responsibilities.

It is interesting that the government is not treating a member of its own caucus the same way, after he acted inappropriately by misleading the House and Canadians. We would have hoped that the government would show its own members the same hard line that it shows public servants and other Canadians who sometimes do difficult jobs. There is a double standard here.

We in the NDP sometimes engage in overheated rhetoric in the House. We are all guilty of that. At the end of the day, however, we are talking about the truthfulness of the facts. We are talking about misleading the House. That is what the member did, and it needs to be studied at committee. It is not an exaggeration to say that our democracy depends on it. After all, this bill aims to deform—or reform, as the minister would say—our election laws. We really need to examine this issue and have a much higher standard for the members of this House.

Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to remind the hon. Leader of the Government in the House of Commons of what the Speaker's ruling said on this matter.

I think it is important that we remember that we have had a ruling from the Speaker. It is not a matter of opinion. The Speaker said, “At the same time, the fact remains that the House continues to be seized of completely contradictory statements”.

The Speaker then went on to rule, based on a previous decision from the previous Speaker of the House, the hon. Peter Milliken, who said “...if only to clear the air”. If only to clear the air, the Speaker ruled that we could delve deeper into getting the truth of what occurred.

The last shambles of a discussion was a diversionary tactic. As important as the motion is that the House deal with the report of the committee that looked into the matter of unresolved issues of injustice to Jewish refugees, I agree with members who said that it was a cynical ploy and not worthy of those who have championed the cause of Israel and Jewish refugees in the past.

However, as we look at this issue right now, we have not cleared the air. I have questions, and I am very fair-minded. I have stood in this place and defended the hon. member for Mississauga—Streetsville. However, I do not understand how such very contradictory statements could be made, particularly on an issue as fundamental as the right of Canadians to vote, the issues raised in Bill C-23, for which we have not a scintilla of evidence that we have a crisis in Canada of voter fraud. The only evidence brought before the House was that from the hon. member for Mississauga—Streetsville, which he has now admitted was not true. We are left in a conundrum of no explanation, and time is running down the clock.

It appears that the Conservatives do not want us to do what the Speaker said we had a right to, what Peter Milliken said a House has a right to, which is to clear the air.

The air in this place is polluted with diversionary tactics.

41st General Election

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the second petition comes from residents from the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. They are calling on the government to bring forward a full inquiry to get to the bottom of the attempts to defraud voters in the 2011 election. The petitioners point out that each one of these efforts was an offence under elections law. Now that the administration opposite is moving forward on Bill C-23 to have a registry of robocalls, perhaps it would also be interested in getting to the bottom of who caused them in the last election.

Foreign Affairs and International Development

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Okanagan—Coquihalla, BC]

Mr. Speaker, while my colleague seems to be on a bit of a roll this morning, unfortunately, it has nothing to do with the discussion at hand of refugees. He seems to be thinking that this debate happens to be about Bill C-23.

I would ask you, Mr. Speaker, to ask the member to come back to relevance and the issue before the House.

Statements by the Member for Mississauga—Streetsville--Reference to Standing Committee

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I know the hon. member has precious few minutes, but she should probably at least talk about the question of privilege rather than Bill C-23.

Reference to Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs

[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 who was living there before until maybe seeing this card. 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.

[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.

[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.

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

Mr. Speaker, is it distasteful from time to time? It certainly is. Is it personal? Many times it is. Do the members on our side do the same? Yes, we do.

Since the Chair has not found the member to have lied, even though my colleagues opposite keep trying to tell that tale, they perhaps should stand up and set the record straight, because the Chair did not find the member for Mississauga—Streetsville to have deliberately misled this House; in other words, he did not find that he had lied, merely that the committee should take an examination and try to clarify the comments surrounding his statements of February 6.

While I know the opposition wants to convince Canadians that there is some nefarious reason behind the comments of my colleague from Mississauga—Streetsville, I would purport to you and everyone else in this place that he merely did what so many of us have done previously: in the heat of debate, he had simply gone overboard.

There is no excuse for that. We do have a responsibility to speak accurately. However, if there is anyone who can stand in his or her place today and say that in his or her entire career in politics he or she has never torqued a comment, never exaggerated a claim, never perhaps gone a little beyond the pale when it comes to making comments during debate, let that person speak now, because that will be the first person that I have found who could make that claim, and I have been in politics an awfully long time.

That is how we are conditioned. That is what we do. It is not right to do so. The member for Mississauga—Streetsville recognizes that, first and foremost. No one else had brought this forward before my colleague stood in his place in this chamber and admitted to the House that what he said on February 6 was not accurate. He apologized for his comments. He set the record straight.

My friend the opposition House leader said that he should not be congratulated for that. I agree. However, at the very least, he should not be condemned for setting the record straight. He did what every responsible member of Parliament should do, which is that when one misspeaks in this House or says something that is not accurate, the member has an obligation to come back and correct the record. My colleague did that. As I pointed out, he did so earlier at committee, when the Minister of State for Democratic Reform appeared.

How can we talk about motivation? My friend opposite talks about motivation. He wants to explore motivation. It is quite simple. We work, live, act, and react in a hyperpartisan environment. There is certainly enough blame to be thrown around on all sides of the House. The opposition will obviously say that this partisanship, this mean-spirited environment and culture we seem to live in these days, is caused by our government. Arguments can be made to the opposite. Again, the members opposite who seem to be doing most of the heckling seem to be the ones who are most prone to making these personal, vitriolic, sometimes hyperpartisan attacks during question period. That is the environment we live in. It is unfortunate.

As a bit of an aside to this, I recall when Jack Layton, the former leader of the NDP, first came to this place as the official opposition leader. He pledged that his party would bring a new sense of decorum and respect to this place. Unfortunately, that did not last very long. I had great admiration for Mr. Layton, as did most of us in this place, and I wish that spirit of decorum and respect that he talked of was evident today. I think this place would be a better place for debate.

However, on the issue that is before us today, I simply state once again what we know. The member misspoke. He came back to this place and admitted that he had not spoken accurately on February 6. He apologized for his comments and not speaking accurately. All of the facts are now known and before us.

This has happened many times in the past in this place, and there have not been findings of contempt in all of the times that I have been here when a member has stood in this place and apologized.

Apparently that is not sufficient for member of the opposition. I can understand that. Opposition parties are trying to score some political points here, and I do not begrudge them that. It is what opposition parties do. They opposed Bill C-23, the fair elections act. We understand that. We understand that they are trying to do everything in their power to delay, obstruct, or perhaps even kill that piece of legislation. I get that. However, that is what I believe is truly behind the motion we are debating today.

If we want to talk about motivation, let us ask what the motivation is for the question of privilege that was first raised, which is to delay discussion of the fair elections act at committee as long as possible.

Mr. Speaker, as you well know, we have here a debate that is procedurally unlimited. No legislation will be brought forward as long as we are debating this question of privilege.

I was somewhat surprised, frankly, that when the motion was made to refer this matter to committee, the opposition did not put a deadline on it, because that would have perhaps forced this question of privilege to be dealt with immediately at committee, which would then further delay any attempts at examination of Bill C-23. Perhaps they will bring an amendment forward to try and do just that. However, that is the motivation that I see, and that is what is driving this debate today.

In conclusion, I agree, and I believe my colleague the member for Mississauga—Streetsville would also agree, that if one does not speak accurately in this place, records should be corrected. If one does not speak with accuracy on any point, whether it be legislation or during debate, it should not be tolerated. However, when is it right to punish someone for correcting the record? When does one become a victim for speaking what one needed to say, which was to correct the record?

I do not think we will be getting much reasoned debate from members opposite on this point. However, I think it is imperative to at least put on the record what we do know: there was no deliberate misrepresentation in the eyes of Chair; the reference to committee was simply to try to clarify and determine exactly what the member said and why he said it.

On that we agree. However, for anything else to be said or to say that there was a deliberate attempt to misrepresent is simply not the case.

Statements by the Member for Mississauga—Streetsville—Speaker's Ruling

[The Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

I am now prepared to rule on the question of privilege raised on February 25, 2014, by the House leader of the official opposition regarding statements made in the House by the member for Mississauga—Streetsville.

I would like to thank the hon. House Leader of the Official Opposition for having raised this matter, as well as the hon. Leader of the Government in the House and the hon. members for Winnipeg North and Kingston and the Islands for their comments.

I also want to acknowledge the statements made by the member for Mississauga—Streetsville.

In raising this matter, the hon. House leader of the official opposition claimed that the hon. member for Mississauga—Streetsville had deliberately misled the House on February 6, 2014, during debate on Bill C-23, the fair elections act, when he stated that he had witnessed evidence of voter fraud firsthand. He further argued that the matter was not resolved by the statements made by the member for Mississauga—Streetsville on February 24 and 25, where he admitted that, contrary to his original claim, he had not actually witnessed what he had originally claimed to have witnessed. In his view, this was not a simple case of someone misspeaking; he argued rather that it was a case where the member deliberately chose to take something he knew not to be true and present it as eyewitness evidence—something so egregious, it constituted contempt.

The hon. leader of the government in the House noted that the member for Mississauga—Streetsville had fulfilled his obligation to correct the record so that no inaccuracies persisted. He suggested that in and of itself this should be sufficient to “...rebut any concern that there has been a contempt”.

This incident highlights the primordial importance of accuracy and truthfulness in our deliberations. All members bear a responsibility, individually and collectively, to select the words they use very carefully and to be ever mindful of the serious consequences that can result when this responsibility is forgotten.

In calling on the Chair to arrive at a finding of prima facie in this case, the hon. House Leader of the Official Opposition cited my ruling of May 7, 2012, where at page 7650 of the Debates, I reminded the House that, before finding that a member had deliberately misled the House, three conditions had to be met:

...one, it must be proven that the statement was misleading; two, it must be established that the member making the statement knew at the time that the statement was incorrect; and three, that in making the statement, the member intended to mislead the house.

Arguing all three of these conditions had been met, he concluded that a breach of privilege had occurred.

It was with these criteria in mind that I undertook a thorough review of all relevant statements made in the House on this matter, focusing particularly, of course, on the statements made by the hon. for Mississauga—Streetsville.

Originally, on February 6, he stated:

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.

Later that day, he added, “I will relate...something I have actually seen.”

It was only on February 24 that he rose to state:

...on February 6...I made a statement...that is not accurate. I just want to reflect the fact that I have not personally witnessed...[fraudulent activity]...and want the record to properly show that.

On February 25, he returned to the House, characterized his February 6 statement as “an error on my part” and apologized “to all Canadians and to all members of the House”, adding that, “It was never my intention, in any way, to mislead the House”. The Chair takes due note that the member for Mississauga—Streetsville has admitted that his February 6 statement was not true and that he has apologized for his mistake.

As was noted by the hon. Leader of the Government in the House of Commons, we all recognize that there is an enduring practice here of giving members the benefit of the doubt when the accuracy of their statements is challenged. It is often the case that questions of privilege raised on such matters are found to be disputes as to facts rather than prima facie questions of privilege, primarily due to the high threshold of evidence that the House expects.

Speaker Parent stated on page 9247 of Debates on October 19, 2000:

Only on the strongest and clearest evidence can the House or the Speaker take steps to deal with cases of attempts to mislead members.

From what the member for Mississauga—Streetsville and other members have revealed, it is quite clear that the House has been provided with two narratives that are contradictory statements. At the same time, the member for Mississauga—Streetsville stated that he had no intention of misleading the House.

Speaker Milliken was faced with a similar set of circumstances in February 2002 when the then Minister of National Defence, Art Eggleton, provided contradictory information to the House. In ruling on a question of privilege raised about the contradiction, Speaker Milliken stated on February 1, at page 8581 of Debates:

I am prepared, as I must be, to accept the minister’s assertion that he had no intention to mislead the House.

In keeping with that precedent, I am prepared to accord the same courtesy to the member for Mississauga—Streetsville.

At the same time, the fact remains that the House continues to be seized of completely contradictory statements. This is a difficult position in which to leave members, who must be able to depend on the integrity of the information with which they are provided to perform their parliamentary duties.

Accordingly, in keeping with the precedent cited earlier in which Speaker Milliken indicated that the matter merited “...further consideration by an appropriate committee, if only to clear the air”, I am prepared in this case for the same reason to allow the matter to be put to the House.

I therefore invite the hon. House leader of the official opposition to move the traditional motion at this time.

Bilingualism in Canada's Legislative Process—Speaker's Ruling

[The Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

I am now prepared to rule on the question of privilege raised on February 6, 2014, by the member for Sherbrooke regarding a technical briefing offered by the Minister of State in relation to Bill C-23, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to certain Acts.

I would like to thank the hon. member for Sherbrooke for having raised this matter, as well as the Minister of State for Democratic Reform, the hon. House leader for the official opposition, and the members for Ottawa—Vanier, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, and York South—Weston for their interventions.

The member for Sherbrooke explained that, at the technical briefing he attended on Tuesday, February 4 on Bill C-23, the interpretation provided was often inadequate and, as he described it, “[a]t times, there was little or no interpretation or it was of poor quality.” This, he felt, had the effect of preventing parliamentarians from participating fully in subsequent debate on the bill.

The member went on to note that the protection of official languages in the House is fundamental to ensuring equality among all members.

For his part, the Minister of State for Democratic Reform recognized that no professional interpreters were present for the briefing, but claimed that parliamentarians had been provided all information in both official languages, including the presentation, information sheets, press releases, and the bill itself.

As has been pointed out by the member for Sherbrooke, the guarantee of access to and use of both official languages in parliamentary proceedings, in the record-keeping of those proceedings and in legislation is no less than a constitutional requirement—a cornerstone of our parliamentary system. As your Speaker, it remains one of my principal responsibilities to ensure that members are not impeded in their ability to carry out their parliamentary functions and that their rights and privileges are safeguarded.

In the case of official languages, the House has a long-standing practice of ensuring the availability of professional interpreters during House and committee proceedings. Indeed, this practice extends to many other activities, such as caucus meetings, briefings or any number of parliamentary activities and events. In such cases, if interpreters are not present, the activity is delayed until they arrive, or, if they are not available, the activity is rescheduled. Likewise, if a technical problem arises with the equipment, proceedings are suspended until the issue is resolved. Members will be familiar with this as it has sometimes happened here in the House.

To the Chair's knowledge, during government-sponsored activities, similar norms are observed. This is illustrated in a case brought to the attention of the House on October 23, 2013, when a technical briefing on a budget implementation bill was organized but cancelled when it became apparent that no simultaneous interpretation was available. In the Debates for that date, at page 303, the government House leader apologized to the House, and stated that:

...arrangements have been made to reschedule this meeting and to hold it properly in both official languages with that capacity available for everyone. It is certainly the expectation of this government that all business be properly conducted in both official languages.

Clearly, in that case, the government viewed the absence of professional simultaneous interpreters as a serious matter.

When a situation is brought to the Chair’s attention, it must be assessed within the somewhat narrow confines of parliamentary procedure and precedents. In this case, the member for Sherbrooke is asking the Chair to find that problems with interpretation prevented members from being able to access departmental information and that this constitutes a prima facie breach of privilege.

To arrive at such a conclusion, the Chair must assess whether the member has been obstructed in the discharge of his responsibilities in direct relation to proceedings in Parliament.

House of Commons Procedure and Practice, 2nd Edition, at page 109, states:

In order to find a prima facie breach of privilege, the Speaker must be satisfied that there is evidence to support the Member's claim that he or she has been impeded in the performance of his or her parliamentary functions and that the matter is directly related to a proceeding in Parliament.

In addition, at page 111, it indicates that:

A Member may also be obstructed or interfered with in the performance of his or her parliamentary functions by non-physical means. In ruling on such matters, the Speaker examines the effect the incident or event had on the Member’s ability to fulfill his or her parliamentary responsibilities.

The question before the Chair is simple: does attending a departmental briefing that was delivered without full interpretation meet that litmus test? Speaker Parent's ruling of October 9, 1997, is very instructive, when he states at page 688 of the Debates:

...activities related to the seeking of information in order to prepare a question do not fall within the strict definition of what constitutes a “proceeding in Parliament” and, therefore, they are not protected by privilege.

Today's case is analogous in that, whether a member is seeking information in order to prepare a question or to participate in debate on a bill, the same fundamental definitions and principles apply. Whether a member who is preparing to participate in proceedings—whether through a technical briefing or some other means—is not participating in the proceedings themselves. While such preparation is no doubt important, it remains ancillary to, rather than part of, Parliament's proceedings.

Furthermore, in this case a government department is responsible for the situation which the member decries. On this point, Speaker Bosley stated on May 15, 1985, at page 4769 of Debates:

I think it has been recognized many times in the House that a complaint about the actions or inactions of government Departments cannot constitute a question of parliamentary privilege.

My own ruling of February 7, 2013, reached the same conclusion, when at page 13869 of Debates, I stated:

It is beyond the purview of the Chair to intervene in departmental matters or to get involved in government processes, no matter how frustrating they may appear to be to the member.

The Chair must respect the strict confines of parliamentary privilege in reaching its decision. Therefore, while it appears that the hon. member for Sherbrooke has a legitimate grievance, the Chair cannot conclude that this situation constitutes a prima facie breach of privilege.

That being said, this decision does not diminish members’ need for full and equal access to information about legislation nor does it discount the value placed on the provision of such information in both official languages.

While I cannot provide the member for Sherbrooke a privilege-based parliamentary remedy to his grievance, he may wish to explore other means at his disposal by direct discussions with the minister or raising the matter with the Commissioner of Official Languages.

I thank the House for its attention.

Democratic Reform

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

Mr. Speaker, this weekend, people I spoke with about the unfair elections act expressed deep concerns that Conservative changes could make it less likely that new Canadians will vote. Instead of empowering immigrant communities, the proposed changes in Bill C-23 to remove the ability of Elections Canada to educate risk disenfranchising these Canadians.

Why will the minister not listen to these kinds of concerns and abandon his plan to gut the ability of Elections Canada to educate and engage?

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Minister of State (Democratic Reform)]

Mr. Speaker, according to the former chief electoral officer, the bill is an A minus. The committee, of which all parties have some membership, can work together to turn it into an A plus.

As to the issue of the investigator, he is the watchdog, and the fair elections act would give him sharper teeth, a longer reach, and a freer hand. That is what Canadians have asked for. That is what the fair elections act would provide.

Business of the House

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to rise on behalf of the official opposition to ask the government what it has planned for the House for the remainder of this week and next week.

Specifically, this week we are continuing to see the government's refusal to allow the committee studying Bill C-23, the unfair elections act, to travel, consult, and meet with Canadians and hear from them about their own democratic process. The homeless, first nations, seniors, and new Canadians are all groups that will have their ability to vote limited.

We now see the spectacle, as you have witnessed, Mr. Speaker, and we look forward to your ruling, of the government backbencher who tells tales about the phantom menace of vouching, in a ludicrous effort to give his government some backup on this bad bill. He also, at one point, suggested that Canadians could use death certificate identification to vote. That was one of the suggestions he had. These are strange conclusions. I will leave it at that, because this is the Thursday question.

When will the government actually put the member for Mississauga—Streetsville away on this file? He sits on the committee studying this bill, which is worrisome to all or many Canadians.

Finally, New Democrats are willing to confirm committee travel for all parliamentarians studying legislation and doing committee investigations if the government House leader is willing to confirm today that one of those committees, it could be the procedure and House affairs committee, could study and consult with Canadians on their democratic rights in Canada.

Financial Statement of Minister of Finance

[Fin Donnelly, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to budget 2014. The government's budget document was over 400 pages, but I must say that it is very thin on ideas and solutions.

The Minister of Finance speaks of returning to a balanced budget, yet this is the government that has created the largest deficit in Canadian history and has delivered eight deficit budgets in a row.

Under the watch of the Conservatives, more than $100 billion has been added to our national debt over the past six years. Their corporate tax cuts have resulted in over $200 billion in foregone revenue over the past six years. At the same time, they are failing to address high unemployment, especially among youth, and record levels of personal debt.

When we talk about managing the economy, Conservatives and Liberals like to sling mud at the NDP, but when we look at the actual numbers, New Democrat governments have the best record of delivering balanced budgets.

New Democrats have a progressive vision for our country, one that promotes a strong economy without compromising social or environmental prosperity. We believe in creating good quality jobs, protecting public health care, providing affordable child care, and protecting our environment. We believe that seniors should not have to work an extra two years before they are eligible to retire. Our vision is affordable and inclusive.

Government revenues would increase by reversing the Conservatives' corporate tax cuts, by creating value-added jobs here at home instead of shipping our jobs and resources overseas, and by ending subsidies to highly profitable oil and gas companies. It is about priorities and prosperity for all Canadians, not just the ultra-rich and well-connected.

This year's budget has been criticized as a Conservative re-election strategy: Do nothing this year, then roll out the goodies before next year's election. It contains many re-announcements of previously committed funds, especially on infrastructure.

My riding has one of the highest commuter rates. Traffic congestion is a daily reality, and infrastructure has not kept pace with our transportation needs. I fought hard to ensure that the Evergreen Line would finally be built, but more work remains. Sewers and waterlines need upgrading, bridges need replacing, and we need more sidewalks and walking paths. The government continues to expect cities to do more with less, to pay for transit infrastructure with uncertain and limited gas tax revenues.

Our region is one of the most unaffordable places to live in Canada. I am disappointed that the government is not addressing affordable housing in this budget. Housing is a basic need, and affordability affects us all, from mortgage rates and property values to the limited supply of quality rental suites. I am concerned about those living in co-ops who rely on a federal subsidy to help pay the rent. Many of these subsidies will soon expire, leaving residents with limited options.

Community groups that provide housing for the homeless and other vulnerable members of society are concerned that the new criteria for the homelessness partnering strategy may prevent them from accessing federal funding.

Housing for those who require mental health care is a concern for many in my riding. We cannot continue to let Riverview Hospital deteriorate before eyes. We need a vision for this site that preserves the land for public use and that addresses the lack of mental health housing in the region.

In this year's budget, the Conservatives continue their assault on public servants and labour unions. They are going after employee compensation through bargaining, focusing on disability and sick leave, despite a PBO report confirming that public sector sick leave is actually in line with the private sector.

Just before Christmas, many Canadians were shocked to learn that Canada Post intends to end door-to-door delivery service, increase the price of stamps, and lay off thousands of employees. These cuts will certainly affect seniors and people with reduced mobility. They also raise mail security issues.

Conservatives seem to think that this is a great idea. Canada Post's CEO even suggested that it would give seniors a chance to exercise more. Only a New Democrat government would defend workers, the middle class, and our most vulnerable.

British Columbia has the unenviable distinction of having one of the worst rates of child poverty in this country. It is not acceptable that one in five children lives in poverty.

This callous response by the government is on the record: “Is it my job to feed my neighbour's child? I don't think so”.

Adopting a poverty reduction plan with targets and a coordinated set of policies is the only proven way to eliminate poverty. However, this requires political will. The government could wipe out poverty among seniors with the stroke of a pen by simply increasing the guaranteed income supplement. Instead, seniors face rising costs on everything from prescription medications to electricity bills.

Last weekend, a team of volunteers joined me in a neighbourhood canvass to talk with their neighbours about affordability issues. People told us that they are feeling nickel-and-dimed to death.

The NDP has put forward simple, practical solutions to help make life more affordable. We believe that the government should regulate outrageous credit card processing fees that eat into small business profits. It should cap ATM fees, which are among the highest in the world. It should crack down on predatory payday lenders and prevent companies from charging customers a monthly fee just to receive a paper copy of their bills.

Many Canadians are unaware of the existing benefits available to them. After hosting a seminar on the disability tax credit, my office helped one family claim $5,500 in a tax refund it was entitled to.

I have also assisted small businesses in accessing government funding for innovation. Small and medium-size enterprises drive our economy and create the majority of new jobs in this country. However, with nearly 300,000 more people unemployed today than before the recession, the government is simply not doing enough. It should be helping SMEs to succeed, not hindering them.

Another NDP proposal for this year's budget asks the government to reinstate the popular eco-energy home retrofit program. This program is a win-win. It saves families money, creates good quality jobs, reduces energy consumption, and more than pays for itself in economic spinoffs and tax revenues.

Last weekend I was on the doorsteps. I had several conversations with constituents about Bill C-23, the unfair elections act. They are alarmed by the Conservatives' cynical approach, which they feel will bring American-style politics north.

The Conservatives' scheme to overhaul Canada's Election Act reeks of a government that puts political interests ahead of the national interest. Bill C-23 aims to make it harder, not easier, to vote by scrapping voter information cards and eliminating the vouching system. It restricts Elections Canada from promoting the very act of voting, leaving that responsibility to political parties.

At a time when voters feel alienated from the democratic process, the Conservatives are moving to disenfranchise even more people from their right to vote. Canadians are asking for real electoral reform, not blatant partisan attempts to tip the scales in one party's favour.

I have long held the position that Canada should adopt an electoral system of proportional representation to ensure that voters' expressions are better represented. I was speaking to concerned citizens in my riding last week from Fair Vote Canada, who raised this very issue.

I also continue to hear loud and clear from constituents who are fed up with paying for an unelected, unaccountable, and still under-investigation Senate. New Democrats believe in abolishing this archaic institution and focusing on making Parliament work for all Canadians.

The NDP's vision for our country is one that promotes economic stability without sacrificing social or environmental prosperity. We need a government that understands the realities of today and that is willing to tackle the tough challenges of tomorrow. We need a government that agrees that it is our responsibility to ensure that future generations have clean and safe drinking water, healthy rivers and oceans, abundant wild salmon, and a stable climate.

In conclusion, while there are some positive elements in this budget, I cannot support a budget so thin on ideas and solutions.

Democratic Reform

[Stephen Harper, Conservative, Prime Minister]

Mr. Speaker, the fair elections act gives voters the option of using 39 different types of identification. We will obviously work with voters to ensure that they are able to vote.

Financial Statement of Minister of Finance

[Brad Butt, Conservative, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. During debate on Bill C-23 on February 6, I stated in the House that I had witnessed an event that had taken place with respect to voter information cards.

After reviewing the transcript in the blues, I recognized that this was an error on my part. Today, as I did yesterday, I withdraw those comments from the debate portion of my opportunity to speak on Bill C-23 on February 6.

I was referring to information that was relayed to me many years ago when I worked in the rental housing industry, but it was not first-hand knowledge; it came from second and third parties. I raised this at the earliest opportunity yesterday when the House resumed after its week-long break.

I would like to sincerely apologize to all Canadians and to all members of the House for the statement that I made. It was never my intention, in any way, to mislead the House, for which I have the greatest amount of respect.

Statements by Member for Mississauga—Streetsville

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I was in the chamber when the original comments were made a few weeks ago and then yesterday when the member stood in his place to provide clarification.

It is important to recognize that members often stand up and make accusations that someone has misrepresented the facts. Over the years of being a parliamentarian, I could safely say that on at least a dozen or so occasions a member has said one thing, with the intent to leave an impression, but then had those comments thrown back at the member and raised in a matter of privilege to say that the member originally misled the house.

I want to go back to the specific statement on February 6 that the member for Mississauga—Streetsville made, and I will quote directly from the document, which states:

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 the blue box.

However, the following is the important part, which I think we have to take note of, and I am quoting the member directly:

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.

This is not just an off-the-cuff comment. This is a very serious allegation.

We know that there is a great deal of debate on Bill C-23, the fair elections act. I suspect, Mr. Speaker, that you will likely find that Elections Canada, among others, is following the debate. Therefore, as the NDP House leader has already articulated, and which I will reinforce, one could question why a couple of weeks later, yesterday, the member stood up inside the chamber and stated:

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.

I would like to highlight two things.

One is that, having commented on many matters of privilege related to misrepresentation, I have heard numerous Speaker rulings, which say that all members are hon. members and one has to be able to clearly demonstrate that the misrepresentation was intentional.

It is very difficult to narrow down what would be a privileged issue on this particular point of misrepresentation. A member of Parliament would have to intentionally mislead or lie and then admit to intentionally misleading and lying, and to say both, inside the chamber, in order to qualify as a violation of our rule of misrepresentation, which is in fact what we have here. It is unique in terms of the privileges that I have seen raised over the many years I have been a parliamentarian.

Let there be no doubt that it was not an offline comment. This was seriously articulated by the member. He stated that he saw individuals with take-out voter ID cards who then used them in an illegal fashion. It is very clear. I understand that he implied that on more than one occasion. We should be looking seriously at that.

Let me add a second aspect to this. Earlier I made reference to Elections Canada. 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.

I am very curious, and I am sure many members are curious, about what the member actually saw. He tried to correct the record, but he did not provide very much detail. Did he see some of the voter cards in the blue bins and just left them there? Did he see anyone approach the blue bins? Did he see some people pull out the cards and throw them in the garbage? Did he follow to a campaign office the individuals who pulled out those voter cards? A lot of questions need to be answered.

I would suggest that this issue is a matter of privilege. I would also suggest that the member come forward and articulate more details or appear before PROC to answer a series of questions on whether he violated our rules.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I do rise on a question of privilege. I rise today pursuant to Standing Order 48(1).

It has been demonstrated that the member for Mississauga—Streetsville has deliberately misled the House. Given the seriousness of the matter, it is my duty as a member of Parliament and House leader for the New Democrats to bring the matter to the attention of the Chair and to the House. Members of the House are well aware of the rights and immunities afforded to parliamentarians, so that they may carry out their duties as members of Parliament. However, for the sake of clarity, let me remind my colleagues that on page 65 in Erskine May' s Treatise on The Law, Privileges, Proceedings and Usage of Parliament, “parliamentary privilege” is defined as:

...the sum of the peculiar rights enjoyed by each House collectively...and by Members of each House individually, without which they could not discharge their functions....

What I believe we are looking at here is a contempt of Parliament, one that is an offence against the authority and dignity of this House, one that chips away at the foundation of our parliamentary democracy and the requisite for healthy and honest debate. This is a serious charge. We take it seriously. We would insist that the government also do so.

Let me take a moment to provide the House with an account of what has taken place. In hearing my remarks, Mr. Speaker, I will ask you to find that the grounds exist that this is a prima facie contempt of Parliament, at which point I will be prepared to move a motion to have the matter referred to the appropriate committee for further study.

Yesterday morning, the member for Mississauga—Streetsville rose in the House and said the following:

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.

Let us take a look at what it was that the member for Mississauga—Streetsville said in the debate on February 6 while the House was debating the government's unfair elections act at second reading, under time allocation imposed by the current government. It seems clear-cut to me and to others that the member was providing misleading statements in the House, given what he told the House just yesterday. In a question for the Minister of State for Western Economic Diversification, the member for Mississauga—Streetsville said:

Mr. Speaker, I want to talk a bit about this vouching system again.... 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 the blue box. 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.

Does the minister not believe this kind of thing will get cleaned up properly with this bill?

Later in the day, the member rose again to mislead the House during the questions and comments portion of his own speech. He said:

Earlier this afternoon I asked the Minister of State for Western Economic Diversification a question. I think my friend from York South—Weston will appreciate this because, just like the riding I represent, there are a lot of apartment buildings in his riding. I will relate to him something I have actually seen. On the mail delivery day when voter cards are put in mailboxes, residents come home, pick them out of their boxes, and throw them in the garbage can. I have seen campaign workers follow, pick up a dozen of them afterward, and walk out. Why are they doing that? They are doing it so they can hand those cards to other people, who will then be vouched for at a voting booth and vote illegally. That is going to stop.

The context of this, and why this is equally important to the fact that the member misled the House, is that he misled the House to justify the reason his government has brought in its unfair elections act. He has brought evidence forward as a member of Parliament, whom we take on faith as telling the truth when he does it, saying this is the reason the government has brought in this bill, to end the vouching system that some tens of thousands of Canadians use properly, by claiming there is evidence of voter fraud that he has seen and witnessed and brought forth as evidence to this House. That is a serious charge. It is a serious charge and may sway members of this House to, in fact, support the government's legislation, when they ought not to if it were not the truth.

Members must know that they have the information needed to do their job well, which is to represent their constituents. The government wasted no time in passing Bill C-23 in the House at second reading by using a time allocation motion. Now, it is fast-tracking it through the committee stage without having heard from interested Canadians and members of civil society from across the country.

To think that it is somehow acceptable for members of the government to come into the House and make up stories as justification for the supposed merits of this terrible bill is totally ludicrous and should not be allowed to simply pass, by having the member rise more than two weeks after the fact, during a private member's business hour, and reveal to the House that this was all, in fact, untrue.

In his ruling on February 1, 2002, on a similar matter, Speaker Milliken stated:

The authorities are consistent about the need for clarity in our proceedings and about the need to ensure the integrity of the information provided by the government to the House.

The authorities to which Speaker Milliken was referring include, but are not limited to, the following: House of Commons Procedure and Practice, second edition, which states, on page 115:

Misleading a Minister or a Member has also been considered a form of obstruction and thus a prima facie breach of privilege.

Page 63 of the 22nd edition of Erskine May states:

...it is of paramount importance that ministers give accurate and truthful information to Parliament, correcting any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity.

Erskine May is even more precise when a member later admits that the statements he or she made were not true. On page 111 of Erskine May's Parliamentary Practice, 22nd edition, it states:

The Commons may treat the making of a deliberately misleading statement as a contempt. In 1963 the House resolved that in making a personal statement which contained words which he later admitted not to be true, a former Member had been guilty of grave contempt.

Mr. Speaker, on May 7, 2012, and in a handful of rulings since, you have stated the following regarding the conditions that have emerged surrounding misleading statements in the House, which I will cite:

It has become accepted practice in this House that the following elements have to be established when it is alleged that a member is in contempt for deliberately misleading the House: one, it must be proven that the statement was misleading; two, it must be established that the member making the statement knew at the time that the statement was incorrect; and three, that in making the statement, the member intended to mislead the House.

That is a clear and high bar to prove all of those three conditions in order to find a contempt of Parliament: that the statement has to be untrue, that it has to be established that the member knew it at the time to be untrue, and that when making this untruthful statement to the House, the member was intending to mislead the House. This seems to me a very straightforward case, and I am sure all members of the House would agree.

The first of these conditions has been met, since the proof that the statement was misleading comes directly from the member himself when he admitted that what he said on February 6 was false. The second condition has been met since the statements in question have to do with what the member of Mississauga—Streetsville did or did not personally witness. On February 6, he told the House that he was relating something to the House that he had actually seen and then yesterday told us he had in fact not seen these things at all. What we are talking about is voter fraud, something very serious and not casual.

The third of these conditions has been met since there can be no other explanation as to why the member for Mississauga—Streetsville made the misleading statements that he did over two weeks ago, other than to deliberately and intentionally mislead the House on an important piece of legislation that affects all Canadians. He clearly intended to mislead the House by fabricating a story and then tried to use it to justify why members should be voting in favour of the Conservatives' unfair elections act.

Members of the House will remember a case in 2001-02 in which my colleague from Acadie—Bathurst, among others, argued that Senator Eggleton—who was defence minister at the time—had deliberately misled the House. It happened during question period, when he was responding to questions regarding how much he knew about when exactly prisoners captured by Canadian troops in Afghanistan were transferred to the Americans.

Speaker Milliken ruled that there was a prima facie case of privilege and referred the issue to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs for further study.

After hearing a former clerk of the House, Bill Corbett, testify about the issue, the committee indicated the following in its 50th report to the House:

...it is not uncommon for inaccurate statements to be made in the course of debate or Question Period in the House. The issue is whether the statements were made deliberately, with the intent of misleading the House or its Members. In the case where a Member later admits to having knowingly provided false information...the issue of intent is clear.

Mr. Speaker, let me repeat that last sentence because it is important in satisfying the conditions you have set out.

In the case where a Member later admits to having knowingly provided false information...the issue of intent is clear.

We are at the point in the life cycle of the current Conservative government where it seems to be out of gas and spinning its wheels. Bill C-23, the unfair elections act, is creating solutions to problems in our voting system that do not exist, when the real problems of our electoral system have often been the ones the Conservatives have perpetrated on the Canadian public.

The member for Mississauga—Streetsville went so far as to make up a story to try to persuade members to vote a certain way on this flawed bill. Time and again, the Conservatives' lack of judgment and these types of dirty tricks are exposed. However, despite all of this, instead of changing their behaviour to fit the rules of the game, they are changing the rules of the game in order to fit their bad behaviour.

In a ruling on October 19, 2000, regarding misleading statements made in the House, Speaker Parent stated:

Only on the strongest and clearest evidence can the House or the Speaker take steps to deal with cases of attempts to mislead members.

Mr. Speaker, with the strongest and clearest evidence at out disposal, I would urge you to find that a prima facie case of contempt of Parliament has occurred, at which point I will be prepared to move the appropriate motion to have this case referred to the standing committee.

This bill is a contempt on the voting public. The member for Mississauga—Streetsville has performed a contempt in this House. It is a sad and perhaps tragic irony, but it is a fact. The conditions that this House has laid out—you yourself included, in your statements and rulings to guide all members in the way we conduct ourselves—are the conditions we have applied to this case. It is clear in all three of those very precise indications and tests that the member has misled the House knowingly, which is a prima facie case of contempt. The fact that he did it in a bill that is meant to disrupt and perhaps further erode the confidence of Canadians about our electoral system is tragic.

Opposition Motion—Instruction to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs Regarding Bill C-23

[Françoise Boivin, NDP, Gatineau, QC]

Mr. Speaker, once again, the only thing the Conservatives have managed to do today is avoid saying anything about the content of the motion.

The motion is not Bill C-23. The minister prevented us from spending more time debating that bill. Then he had the nerve to rise while we were talking about a motion to let the committee do its work properly after preventing us from engaging in further debate in the House. Maybe if he had been there when I expressed my opinion, or if others had had more time to say what they think about this issue, he would have the answer to his question.

I would advise him to read the motion, since he likes to tell us to read his bill. Our motion is a little shorter than his bill. He should read those ten lines and then tell us that what the motion proposes is anti-democratic.

[Françoise Boivin, NDP, Gatineau, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am quite pleased to have the opportunity to speak to our opposition motion. First, I would like to mention that I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for York South—Weston.

I am pleased to rise to speak to the motion because I have already had the opportunity to speak to Bill C-23. I believe that it is important to point out that this motion is being brought forward on an opposition day.

It is an opposition motion, as the previous speaker, the member for Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, pointed out, and it concerns some very specific points in the very specific context of Bill C-23. Time allocation has been imposed to prevent discussions from continuing and to shut down debate. A time limit has been imposed in order to send the bill to committee as quickly as possible, which will prevent many of our colleagues from expressing their views on this matter.

Based on what I have heard today in the House, what is about to happen in the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs may not be what I would call a great example of democracy.

When I arrived in Parliament for the first time, in 2004, I had the great pleasure, as a new MP, of sitting on the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. I recognize that there was a minority government, but that was another reason for us to work together.

I heard the member, who is the vice-chair of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, tell us that the committee members usually work together quite well. I think it is important to explain why to the people in the House.

The Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs belongs to all of us. This committee is responsible for ensuring that our democracy is healthy and is working well. The Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs deals with questions of privilege or the various issues that the chair is sometimes called upon to consider. In general, the members who sit on this committee realize that they have the very important job of ensuring that ours is a true democracy and that this democracy and our ability to speak in the House are not undermined. Our rules and procedures already do enough to enable the government to play hardball when introducing its bills.

We need to put this bill in perspective. It is not a matter of repeating speeches similar to the ones we heard on Bill C-23. I am sure everyone here had the pleasure of reading that brick of a bill.

I agree with the member who spoke before me. He said that the bill contained a lot of technical aspects. However, there are also a lot of substantive elements in this bill. I was shocked to hear them say with a straight face that the bill was all technicalities. I certainly do not think that figuring out how we can get people to exercise their right to vote is a technicality. Figuring out who will oversee how Canadians exercise their right to vote, how our elections are carried out and so on, is not a technicality. I think it is important to point that out.

Now we have a motion that was moved by my colleague from Hamilton Centre. As I was reading the motion, which starts with, “That it be an instruction to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs that...”, I could not believe that we were forced to move a motion in the House to obtain a right that I think should have been a sine qua non in Bill C-23.

I read the motion and saw what it was about. Sometimes, during discussions that take place in the committee I sit on, I have concerns about the daily exercise of a real democracy. When I hear speeches like the ones I have heard today and there is such a lack of discussion, I am extremely worried that this will extend to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.

We all know how important consultations are. I realize that I can use Skype and my computer to consult people. However, absolutely nothing beats meeting people in person. It is not true that anyone who wants to voice their opinion of certain decisions that are about to be made can come to Ottawa and speak their mind.

Earlier, I heard my colleague talk about a trip taken by the members of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. I was probably the only member of the committee who refused to go along. Is it right to travel to Australia, New Zealand, England or Ireland to study the changes in the electoral system, when we could read about them in a book by the wonderful Law Reform Commission of Canada?

It seems to me that, instead, we should go see what impact Bill C-23 will have on certain communities in Canada and certain groups that are targeted by some of the measures. We should talk with different groups, not just about the issue of vote suppression, which is extremely important and a major concern of the NDP, but also about the fact that this Conservative government thinks low voter turnout is a result of Elections Canada failing to do its job to promote the elections.

Last week, I went to my riding and talked with some people, including some young people from Nicolas-Gatineau composite school. There was a fundraising activity organized by Alexandre Guindon, a bright young guy in his final year of high school. We talked about the current state of Canadian democracy and how young people are not interested in voting.

If youth are disinterested, it is not because Elections Canada is not doing its job. It is because this kind of issue has been treated with such a cavalier attitude. We are faced with a government that does not pay much attention to the existing rules and then changes other rules. That raises some questions. The public is becoming somewhat cynical, and I am seeing that not just among young people, but among seniors as well. They are saying that voting is becoming increasingly complicated, that they no longer know what is required and that they have no desire to go vote. We need to meet with these people in their communities and reach out to them.

It is impossible to be against the idea and possibility of meeting with groups if none of them have made that request to the committee. It concerns me to see that the Conservative majority on the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs is standing in the way of openness and the full and appropriate exercise of democratic rights.

I am gravely concerned to see that this has spread all the way to this committee, because this is the committee that protects our privileges. If it is unable to protect Canadians, I wonder how capable it will be of protecting those who represent Canadians in the House.

Everyone should reflect on that for a minute. We were told to read the bill and we read it. Now, the Conservatives need to read the motion and realize that it will not bite. It simply says that Canada, a democratic role model for other countries on how to exercise the right to vote, should start by looking in the mirror.

[Alexandrine Latendresse, NDP, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I sincerely thank my hon. colleague for his intervention. I have been working with that member on the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs from the very beginning.

When he speaks, he often raises excellent points. I heard many in his speech here today. I think some elements need a little clarification.

He told a lot of anecdotes, so I will also use a bit more of an anecdotal approach. Personally, for several years—I mean about four or five years—I lived far away from my parents while I was in school, and I never changed my address. I did not have any of the things that students are asked to have in order to vote where I was. I therefore always used vouching in order to be able to vote, since I lived a 10-hour drive from my parents' place.

I wonder if the member could explain how he can justify the fact that someone like me who is interested in politics would not have been able to vote in federal elections if the measures proposed in Bill C-23 had been in effect at the time.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am rising to join the debate here. I have listened with considerable interest to the foregoing discussions, some of which, to be honest, seem a bit histrionic given the nature of the subject matter we are dealing with.

I have spent over a decade on the procedure and House affairs committee. Normally, people ask me how I manage to pull through on such an uninteresting committee and how I keep myself awake. However, as members can see, there is fun, travel, and lots of histrionics involved in all of this stuff, apparently.

The motion proposes to have the committee do three things with regard to Bill C-23, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act.

First of all, the motion proposes to hear witnesses, and it provides what I think is a very reasonable list of them:

…witnesses from, but not limited to, Elections Canada, Political Parties as defined under the Canada Elections Act, the Minister of State who introduced the bill, representatives of first nations, anti-poverty groups, groups representing persons with disabilities, groups representing youth advocates and students, as well as specific groups which have been active in society on elections rules….

It is all good, and I can think of others that I would add to that list.

The motion has three things, and I will drop down to the third, which is:

…proceed to clause-by-clause consideration of this bill after these hearings have been completed, with a goal to commence clause-by-clause consideration for May 1, 2014.

This is probably a reasonable timeline more or less, and one could quibble over that. However, in general, I do not think it is an unreasonable timeline.

Then, in the middle of the motion, is to have the power

…to travel to all regions of Canada, (Atlantic Canada, Quebec, Ontario, Northern Ontario, the Prairies, British Columbia and the North), as well as downtown urban settings… and rural and remote settings, and that the Committee request that this travel take place in March and April 2014….

As a member of the committee, I would get to join in on this road show. Putting aside the small quibble that I never considered northern Ontario to be a separate region of Canada on a scale with, say, Quebec, I find it to be a fairly reasonable layout of the different parts of the country we could go to. The trouble with travelling around this way is that it would not improve our ability to hear from witnesses who have worthwhile, intelligent things to say.

I had the good fortune to be on the last travelling road show of the procedure and House affairs committee about a decade ago. I think I am the last person still on the committee who was on it at the time we travelled, in that case, all over the planet to hear about ideas for electoral reform. We divided the committee into two groups. Some of us went off to Australia and New Zealand while others went off to Germany and Scotland to look at their electoral systems. We were looking at alternative electoral systems to what Canada had at the time, and still has.

I wrote about my experiences in an article, which I happen to have a copy of here, called the “Road to Electoral Reform” from the Canadian Parliamentary Review in the autumn of 2005, in which I made the following observation:

On February 1, 2005, committee members (including me) voted a travel budget of $289,695 for the European and Antipodean trips. Later, while the committee was abroad, one committee member…complained to the media about the large size of the travel budget.

It was not I who complained but a member who at the time was sitting as a Liberal and who now sits as a New Democrat. However, I concurred at the time and I still concur with the assessment that we did not get value for money on that occasion. I assume we can travel more inexpensively this time, were we to do so, than we did travelling all over the world.

For one thing, the committee insisted on travelling business class. I am sure we could all agree to travel coach, at best, and perhaps by some other means of locomotion. There was a fair bit of expense, partly because, as all such committees do, we had to ship translators, clerks, and all kinds of people, to make sure that we could function as a committee wherever we happened to be. However, it seems to be a lot of expense for not much benefit.

In the intervening years I have chaired the international human rights subcommittee. We hear frequently from experts who come from all corners of the globe by means of video conference. We have seen video conferencing vastly improve from where it was 9 or 10 years ago. We have people, not just from first world countries, but from other countries, who come in loud and clear. The fact is that we can hear from people from more or less anywhere without the need to travel, and we can provide them with simultaneous translation and so on.

Now, this is significant because we regularly hear from two different witnesses. In fact, the week before the break, we heard from one witness in Ottawa and another witness by video link at the same time We got two for the price of one in the allotted hour. We cannot do that when we are on the road, unless we also have video links on the road with us, which would be an additional expense. I cannot see how we would improve our efficiency with that.

The fact is that when we are dealing with issues like problems relating to urban groups, downtown areas, or remote areas of the country, we are going to get a lot of common issues. We are going to get distinctions too, and we will best see what those issues are if we have an interaction of the sort that can be done electronically. All of this can be done better without travelling than it can be done when we are travelling.

For example, there could be a goal to look at some form of infrastructure. If we were going to consider whether a new tunnel had to be blasted through the Rocky Mountains to accommodate a rail line, I could see the point of travelling. I cannot see the point of travelling for this sort of situation.

There was a very interesting case before the Supreme Court about a year and a half ago, in which a former Liberal member of this place, Borys Wrzesnewskyj, challenged the election of a current member of this place, the member for Etobicoke Centre. The Supreme Court heard the case, which had to do with whether it was legitimate for individuals at a seniors' residence that has closed access—these are the very elderly who have 24-hour care—and who voted in the absence of someone vouching for them, ought to have had their votes counted.

Interestingly, in that election it was the Liberal position that they should not have been allowed to vote because no vouching had taken place. That is the opposite of the position that is being taken today.

However, the interesting thing about this is that the Supreme Court of Canada held hearings in Ottawa and it was able to do so without having to travel to the site. Now that court and other courts have, on very rare occasions, travelled on location. Courts might do this sometimes for murder investigations, for example. However, in this case it did not feel the need because there was no need.

The issues that we are dealing with are issues that can be dealt with best by doing it here in Ottawa. That is a very clear example.

In the midst of saying this, I overheard a member pointing out that it was a split Supreme Court decision. That is correct. In fact, there was a majority and a minority. I am not sure how that relates to the question of whether it had to travel. First, good Lord, if we could not allow split decisions, nothing but unanimous votes could occur in this place, let alone the Supreme Court, so I cannot imagine what the member's objection is.

However, no one objected. No one on the Supreme Court, or anywhere else, objected to them holding these hearings in Ottawa. It was the best place to listen to these arguments.

I sometimes hear people using such extraordinary language in this debate that one would be left with the impression that they are talking about the kinds of civil rights abuses and voter rights abuses that took place in the American south prior to the 1960s.

I am looking at a petition that is available online where people are encouraged to write in about Bill C-23. It has made incorrect assertions.

Under Bill C-23, Voter ID cards will no longer be accepted. This will prevent thousands of students, seniors and Aboriginal people from voting.

Actually, under Bill C-23, the card that reminds people to vote will not be accepted as ID. That is very different from what is being implied here, that somehow people's identification would no longer be accepted. Of course, this would not prevent anybody from voting.

In the example I just gave of Borys Wrzesnewskyj saying that the current member for Etobicoke Centre should not be allowed to sit here, what he was saying is that we insist that individuals be deprived of their right to vote if they do not meet up with the highly technical definition, and highly restricted version, of their right under section 3 of the charter to vote. That is the position that the NDP has defended. The broader position that one has a right to vote has not been taken into account.

The NDP uses this kind of language. Here is another example from the same petition:

Bill C-23 makes it much harder for students, seniors, aboriginal people, and low-income Canadians to prove their right to vote, and will prevent many thousands of Canadians from voting.

The fact is that many people have distinct issues that can make it difficult to vote. These people include seniors, some of whom do not have the kind of ID that we often think of, such as a driver's license; students; aboriginals; and, I would mention, disabled people, particularly people with mobility issues.

I would add other groups to the list as well, such as people who have recently moved. The NDP motion makes no reference to people in suburbs. I guess I can see why the NDP has forgotten that the suburbs even exist, given the amount of electoral success it is having there. Recently constructed suburbs across the country have not been properly enumerated. In every election, this is where there are the greatest problems.

When I was first elected, I remember very distinctly that in Kanata, a suburb of Ottawa, Morgan's Grant was an area that had just been built. It is not new anymore, but it was in 2000. One polling station was set up, which included something like five or six times as many voters as any of the other polling booths at that location. The result was that after the poll shut, it took over an hour for everybody to go through and vote, simply because Elections Canada had not been aware that so many people were living in the area, which on their maps was still empty fields.

All of these people have genuine problems related to exercising their ability to vote. What these people need to know is how to exercise their franchise. How can they learn that? They can learn that if Elections Canada runs advertisements advising them how to exercise their franchise, for instance, if they have just moved into a location and have not received a voter card, or if they have been asked to go and vote on the voter card at an address that is wrong. That happens a lot. We hear all kinds of talk about how the Conservative Party was ostensibly trying to send people off to the wrong locations.

Let me tell the House about what happened in my constituency. When the riding of Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington was set up in 2004, people who lived in the town of Perth were told to go and vote in Perth Road Village, which sounded good. The local returning officer was unfamiliar with Lanark County, which had been added to the riding. However, Perth Road Village is the road from Kingston, Ontario, to Perth. Perth Road Village is an hour's drive from Perth. Therefore, residents were told to go and vote in a place that they literally could not get to.

What do people do in a situation when Elections Canada has told them to go and vote in the wrong place? What do people do if they go to the polling station they are used to going to and there are no forms to fill out so that they can vote at a location other than the one they normally vote at? Are they deprived of their ballot, their right to vote and their franchise? Those are the kinds of questions they should be answering for people, but of course, they do not do that.

Their advertising right now is all about why people should vote. We have all seen these ads from various elections. I suspect that they are extraordinarily ineffective at getting people out to vote. The ads are all about why it is people's fault that they are not getting in a vote, why they are not motivated enough to get out and vote, and why they should be motivated. If they were better human beings and better citizens, they would be out there voting. That is nonsense.

The primary reason for people not voting is that they do not know how to.

The Chief Electoral Officer does not go around knocking on doors, but during elections I do. We have all had this experience, I suspect. We knock on the door, but the person does not come down, at least not immediately. Then we realize that the reason it did not happen is that the person is an elderly shut-in on the second floor who cannot get down until a son or stepson or whoever comes and carries him or her down the stairs, or perhaps someone was changing a diaper. How are those people going to get out and vote? Letting those people know how they can vote at advance polls or how they can vote by mail, et cetera, can be an enormously valuable exercise. That is being offered.

I mentioned the highfalutin rhetoric suggesting that somehow people are being deprived of their right to vote and that somehow we face a civil rights crisis of the sort that existed in the American south. I find this deeply offensive, and I took the time to go and look up a couple of examples of the abuses that went on in that part of the world in that era to make the point that nothing of the sort exists here.

I have with me a couple of Louisiana literacy tests from the 1950s and 1960s. These were collected by a man named Jeff Schwartz, who is a former volunteer with the civil rights group Congress of Racial Equality. He has been collecting and archiving and putting online some of the forms that were used in various southern states in order to ensure that African-American voters could not participate.

The courts had agreed in the United States that it was reasonable that people had to have at least a grade 5 education or had become knowledgeable to that level in order to exercise their citizenship rights. By the way, no such rule exists in Canada. There is no requirement that a person be literate in order to vote. That is a very important distinction.

However, that requirement could then be manipulated. Local authorities could test and see whether an individual was fit to be registered to vote. The authorities would exercise these tests in a highly arbitrary manner designed to ensure that every white voter, no matter how ignorant or illiterate he or she might be, would get to be registered, and that every African-American would be excluded, no matter how intelligent, articulate, or well educated that individual might be.

Having looked at some of the questions on this test, I can say we can forget about a grade 5 education. I have been in five degree programs, including two Ph.D. programs. I have taught university and I have published two books, and I cannot figure out the answer to some of these questions.

For example, here is a question from the Louisiana form:

Write every other word in this first line and print every third word in the same line, (original type smaller and first line ended at comma) but capitalize the fifth word that you write.

What is the right answer to that question?

Question 9 from this list states, “Draw a line through the two letters below that come last in the alphabet”, and there is a series of letters.

Question 10 states, “In the first circle below write the last letter of the first word beginning with “L” , and there is a series of circles.

Another question is “Cross out the number necessary, when making the number below one million.” That is interesting. Does it mean the number below 1,000,000, which is 999,999, or does it mean to take the number with all these zeros and scratch them all out to get 1,000,000? Of course, this was designed to ensure that if I were a white guy and got it wrong, it would be right, and if I were an African-American guy and I got it right, I would be wrong anyway.

By the way, the literacy test mentions that “This test is to be given to anyone who cannot prove a fifth grade education” and “Do what you are told to do in each statement, nothing more, nothing less.” That is an important caveat that makes sure someone will fail. It continues: “Be careful as one wrong answer denotes failure of the test.” Imagine if that was on a driver's test. We would have no drivers in Canada. It then states, “You have 10 minutes to complete the test.”

I could go on and on. If I get the consent of the House, I would love to table these items so that members can examine them. If not, I can provide the email address.

My point here is there have been genuine abuses of the rights of voters. I have given an example from the United States, but we can find examples from other countries, including this one.

No such abuse is being considered or has been considered by any party that is here. The fact is that we have a good system, but we want to make it better by doing a series of technical amendments to how elections run in Canada. It would benefit the country and it would benefit democracy.

[Alexandrine Latendresse, NDP, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member for his comments. I really enjoyed working with him for many years as part of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.

When we were working together in committee, we were always able to come to a consensus and move forward without constantly butting heads. However, I find his question a bit sad. I would like to remind him that during the last committee meeting, we spent an hour asking the minister questions and there was no stalling or anything of the sort. Well, that is where the committee is at right now.

During the first committee meetings about Bill C-23, the government very clearly stated that it was not completely closed to the idea of holding public hearings. That was what we proposed in exchange for our collaboration, and the government said it would look into it. In the end, the government slammed the door in our faces and said that it was out of the question.

I am wondering what happened to discussion, co-operation and understanding. I do not think that the NDP is the problem.

[Alexandrine Latendresse, NDP, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to have the opportunity to speak to this motion today. It is absolutely crucial that we examine Bill C-23 properly. Not only is our motion—which calls for public hearings on the matter to be held across Canada—entirely reasonable, but these hearings are absolutely essential in order to better understand our Canadian democracy and improve the Canada Elections Act as much as possible, as it should be.

I am fortunate to be a member of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, the committee we are discussing here today, the one being asked to conduct these consultations. As vice-chair of the committee for a little over a year now, I have had the opportunity to take part in many debates. For instance, at the beginning of this period, the committee was tasked with examining the recommendations of the Chief Electoral Officer. The committee also had to produce a report on what it thought of those recommendations and on the changes that he recommended that the government make to the Canada Elections Act.

After the 2008 election, the Chief Electoral Officer made about 50 recommendations. Some were minor, while others were quite significant. They would have corrected the major problems with the Canada Elections Act. When the matter came before the committee, the process was quite long and a great deal of discussion took place.

However, the tremendous advantage of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs—and one of my colleagues here today can confirm this—is that it is one of the committees that operates most effectively on the Hill. That is my opinion. Most of the time, things are dealt with by consensus and by mutual understanding, and we almost always manage to find common ground that everyone can agree on. That is the advantage of dealing with matters that are usually non-partisan.

As for the recommendations of the Chief Electoral Officer, at the time, I thought we had an excellent discussion. In the end, we were able to produce a report that most committee members agreed on. They found many of the Chief Electoral Officer's recommendations to be worthwhile

We now have before us a bill that we have been waiting for for a very long time. It has been a long time since these changes were requested. It has been a long time since the committee tabled its report. It has been a long time since the NDP, in response to major election fraud issues, had a motion unanimously adopted in the House, outlining the specific changes that needed to be made to the Canada Elections Act as quickly as possible. This is urgent. The Chief Electoral Officer was very clear. These changes must be made as quickly as possible so that they can be implemented in time for the 2015 election.

If we wish to prevent other cases of major fraud, such as the robocalls, and other issues that emerged during the 2011 election, such as voter suppression, then yes, significant changes need to be made as quickly as possible. However, Bill C-23 contains all sorts of measures that come out of left field and do not solve anything. That is a problem.

For example, the Chief Electoral Officer made an excellent recommendation with regard to vouching: election workers should be hired in advance in order to prevent as many problems and administrative errors as possible. Right now, the Chief Electoral Officer does not have that authority. He was therefore asking to be able to hire election workers earlier in the process so that he would have more time to give them the proper training and did not have to hire workers too quickly and at the last minute. This would considerably reduce the number of administrative errors made on election day. Is this measure included in the bill? No. Instead, the government decided to completely eliminate this system, which allowed some groups of people, namely young people, people living in rural areas and others, to vote. This bill will completely deprive them of that right.

It is thus absolutely essential to go and get the opinions of the people who will be most affected by this bill, meaning people with reduced mobility, seniors, members of first nations and students.

I would like to focus on youth and students, because they are very important to me. Last spring, I tabled a motion before the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs to study voter turnout among young people.

We know this is a major problem because fewer and fewer young people are voting. The numbers are quite alarming. During the 2011 election, the 18 to 24 age group had the lowest turnout by far at 38.8%. That means that barely 38% of young people between the ages of 18 and 24 came out to vote on election day. Those who did vote used the voter card or vouching. Youth voter turnout is currently at a catastrophically low level. What is more, some of those who voted in 2011 would not have been able to if these measures had been in place.

The minister keeps saying that his bill will contribute to improving youth voter turnout. The problem is that this is not 1984 and ignorance is not an asset. Just because the minister says that the bill will improve youth voter turnout does not mean that it will magically be so. The truth is, if the Conservatives were truly interested in improving youth voter turnout, then why would they get rid of the voter card as a form of identification for voting, and why would they get rid of vouching? No other measure has made it easier for young people and students to vote.

To come back to the heart of the motion, if the Conservatives are so convinced of the merits of their measure, if they are so convinced that it will truly help young people vote more, then why would they not consult them? Why would they not go across Canada, meet with the groups most affected and ask them whether they really think that these measures will contribute to improving voter turnout at every election?

When I hear what the Conservatives have to say about how they have no intention of consulting or desire to consult, that tells me they know exactly what they are doing. I think they are perfectly aware that these measures will make it harder for young people to vote. That is their goal. That is what they are trying to achieve.

Consulting—going to see people to ask them what they think about an issue as fundamental as our democracy—is not complicated. It is something committees do all the time.

Two years ago, I participated in a diplomatic mission of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development. I went to Ukraine with an all-party group of MPs to hold public consultations. All day long, people from all over came to talk to us about democracy in Ukraine, about how it works, about what could be improved, about major problems and obstacles to democracy in Ukraine.

We did not stay in Kiev. We went all over, to all the regions. We went to Kharkiv in the east and Lviv in the west. We travelled around. We went to see people. That gave us a complete picture of the reality over there. Had we stayed here in the basement of the Centre Block, had we told the Ukrainians to Skype us and tell us what was going on in their country, I do not think we would have been able to understand the situation as well as we did.

It was an extraordinary opportunity. It is something that Parliament must do, and it is fantastic. Why can we not do the same thing here, in our own country? Why is it so hard to say that this is something very important that needs to be done? We need to go to every region across the country to meet with people and talk to them about the state of our democracy and the proposed changes. We need to ask them what they think and find out what their reality is.

We need to go to downtown Vancouver, where homelessness is an issue. We need to go up north and talk to aboriginal communities. We need to go anywhere where there are major issues. That is not too tall an order if we want to do our best to improve democracy in Canada.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Mr. Speaker, I would prefer to see the committee take direction from the House rather than see what we know is going to happen, which is that the Conservatives, who are in the majority on the committee, will take their direction from the parliamentary secretary. We know that is what happens on all committees.

We heard a lot of the government spin on Bill C-23 from the member for Mississauga—Streetsville, but we heard nothing on why he is opposed to engaging Canadians in their own communities. When he was talking, I almost had a vision. That vision was that the Conservative backbenchers in this place would actually stand up for democracy, break ranks with their government, and allow a committee to travel across the country and hear from Canadians. I ask the member opposite if he thinks it might even be three or four.

I hear Conservative backbenchers get up and talk about how they are members of the government. They are not; they are members of the governing party, and they have a responsibility to their constituents to stand up.

Does the member think that one or two or three might stand up for democracy, rather than the usual situation of being puppets on a string, taking their direction from a parliamentary—

[Brad Butt, Conservative, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

Thank you very much for that interpretation, Mr. Speaker.

I have been here all day listening to the debate. Just about every single speaker on both sides of the House has talked about elements contained in Bill C-23 as part of the debate today. Obviously, the member for Malpeque was not paying attention.

The bill would also make it harder to break elections—

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. The motion before us today is not about the fair elections act. The government already invoked closure on the fair elections act in this chamber. The motion before us today is about whether certain witnesses should appear and whether the committee should hold cross-country hearings. That is the motion. I submit that the member is out of order in his remarks by talking about the fair elections act. We are not talking about it.

[Brad Butt, Conservative, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise on today's opposition day motion. The NDP is asking the House to direct the work of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, of which I am a member, during its consideration of the fair elections act.

While I wholeheartedly support the need to consult with stakeholders and Canadians about the important issues raised in the fair elections act, I believe that it is the responsibility of our committee to decide how it will conduct itself and how it will structure its hearings. I am confident that the committee will ensure a thorough and comprehensive hearing of the fair elections act and will make every effort to hear all who are interested in this important matter.

The communications technology available makes it possible to hear from a wide range of individuals, wherever they may be. I will, therefore, be opposing the motion and encourage other members to do the same.

Let us talk a bit about the fair elections act. The act is a vital piece of legislation that proposes comprehensive changes to the Canada Elections Act. The fair elections act would ensure that everyday citizens are in charge of democracy by putting special interests on the sidelines and rule breakers out of business.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, people all over Canada are concerned about what the Conservative government is doing with respect to Bill C-23. In fact there were 3,000-plus delegates at the Liberal Party convention, and one of the priority resolutions was on this issue.

If I could quote directly from it, it says:

Whereas, instead of correcting these problems, Bill C-23 will amend the Canada Elections Act by:Further restricting access to voting by disallowing vouching for voters, thereby preventing approximately 120,000 Canadians from voting;Threatening the independence of the Commissioner of Canada Elections, by making this position part of government rather than leaving it with Elections Canada, which is independently answerable to Parliament;Prohibiting the Chief Electoral Officer from communicating broadly with Canadians;

This is my personal favourite:

Hampering investigations into election breaches, by failing to give the Commissioner the power to compel witnesses to answer questions or provide documents;

This issue is very serious. The question we really need to get answered is why the government opposes taking this committee to Canadians by taking it to different cities in Canada in different regions so that Canadians have an opportunity to express their concerns directly to the government on a fundamental law that affects one of our principle foundations, that being democracy.

Why does the member think the government is so tough in not wanting to go outside Ottawa to hear what Canadians have to say?

[Marie-Claude Morin, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today because I want to help protect something that is very precious to Canadians: our democracy.

The motion moved by the member for Hamilton Centre is a reasonable response to the Conservatives' misguided efforts with respect to democracy. As my colleague from Sherbrooke said earlier, this is electoral “deformation”.

What we are asking for is not complicated. We want Canadians and stakeholder groups to have a chance to express their views on these significant changes to our election legislation. When I say Canadians and stakeholder groups, I mean Elections Canada, the minister, of course, first nations, anti-poverty groups, people with disabilities, youth and students from all parts of the country, urban, rural and remote alike.

The committee has to travel. It cannot stay here in the ivory tower in Ottawa. No one can deny that Ottawa is an ivory tower. When we are here, we do not know what is going on in the rest of Canada.

Many committees travel in the course of their duties. Going to see people is essential. We have no choice. I do not see why the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs would not travel in this case. The government will say that it would be an expense, and I agree. However, some expenses are essential to democracy, and consulting the people is one such expense.

I think that, in devising this reform, the Conservatives did not pay much attention to people's reality. I think they could not care less. They are not spending money on the right things, if you ask me, and this is a serious threat to our democracy.

Since we are talking about democracy, I would like to take a little step back. The word “democracy” means “power to the people”. We all agree on that. I think the government is afraid of the people. The Conservatives are well aware that because they came up with such a bad bill, consulting people who are worried about this kind of reform might not go well. People would put the Conservatives in their place. That might be what happens.

I have not had the opportunity to speak to Bill C-23, the subject of our motion. I would like to provide a brief overview to illustrate how essential our motion is and how badly the government has botched this bill.

To start, this bill will strip Election Canada of its investigative powers. The Commissioner of Canada Elections will now be under the Director of Public Prosecutions. That would be like removing the RCMP's ability to investigate Criminal Code offences. It makes absolutely no sense. This is a serious change that will prove to be completely ineffective.

Furthermore, the government also wants to take away the Chief Electoral Officer's power to engage in public education, but public education is essential. This will in no way contribute to increasing voter turnout. The Chief Electoral Officer will not be able to talk to people about aspects of the electoral process or work to prevent electoral fraud. This is especially problematic.

The Chief Electoral Officer will also have to seek Treasury Board approval to hire experts. This is serious interference in the work of a senior official. That is not so unusual around here, as we know that the government enjoys that type of thing. However, this makes our electoral system less effective and again threatens our democracy.

The bill will also eliminate the ability of electors to prove their identity through vouching. This may seem minor, but it is a very serious issue. Some people will no longer be able to vote. Let us take for example an elderly woman who does not have a driver's licence and whose accounts are all in her husband's name. She will not be able to vote. Another example is a student who has a student card but does not have a driver's licence. That person will not be able to vote.

I would also like to add that voter information cards will no longer be able to be used as proof of identity. This creates the same problem.

The bill also increases the maximum threshold for individual donations from $1,200 to $1,500. This means that the electoral process would continue to favour people with money. Why are we doing this when Quebec did just the opposite? Quebec decreased the maximum amount of donations. I therefore do not see why we are doing the opposite. It does not make any sense.

The bill will also make it possible for candidates to contribute $5,000 to their own campaigns. I would like to give a very specific example. When I ran for my party, I had little to no money. If this bill had been in effect at that time, I could not have run for office and I would not be here right now. However, my constituents tell me that I am living up to their expectations. This bill would therefore rule out quality candidates who do not have the money to contribute to their campaign. Money is always being put first and foremost.

As I was saying earlier, many committees travel in the course of their duties and that is essential. I do not see why committees should be prevented from going to consult with Canadians. I want to reiterate that I believe that the government is afraid of what might come out of those consultations. To reassure my colleagues, I would like to add that I often hold consultations in my riding on anything and everything. I like consulting my constituents and finding out what they think about many topics.

The government should start doing that because it is essential, particularly since this bill has a direct impact on various segments of the population that need to share their opinions. Consulting these people will only help us to do a better job, and of course, we should go to them rather than making them to come to Ottawa. It is really important.

As I was saying earlier, good things do not come cheap. We need to move forward and improve our electoral system. Electoral reform would be a good thing, of course, but not in this way. This is not the right approach. That is my opinion and that of all my colleagues here at this time. You cannot impose things on people in this way, by ramming them down their throats and telling them that this is how it will be from now on. We do not do that in our country. We have a democratic country that is a great place to live. We want to keep it that way. That is not what the government is doing at this time.

This government is jeopardizing a number of things, and that is very problematic. If the Conservatives were to accept this motion, it would be a good start, because consulting people and implementing real electoral reforms together with the people is a step in the right direction.

[Pierre-Luc Dusseault, NDP, Sherbrooke, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to start by saying that I will be sharing my time with the member for Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot.

I am pleased to speak today to the very important motion moved by the NDP. It has come to this with the debate on Bill C-23, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to certain Acts.

This involves a law that is vital in a democracy. The Canada Elections Act is the most important law for our democracy. It is considered to be almost constitutional. We must examine the proposed changes with the greatest respect for democracy and Parliament, because the latter is responsible for this act.

The act was amended in the past. However, this is the first time, if my memory serves me well, that a government wants to amend it in such a cavalier manner. The government has not even bothered to consult or approach the other parties in this House, even though the other political parties participate in all elections and the democratic process.

Not only have the Conservatives failed to consult the parties, but they are also introducing legislation that will make draconian changes to the Canada Elections Act. I will not go into the details of the bill because I have already done so at debate on second reading.

However, I do not think that this is how the government should have gone about changing the Canada Elections Act. From the outset, the government has been trying to move forward with this as quickly as possible. Why? The reason is simple. The government is trying to hide things. The bill contains things that the Conservatives do not want to spend a lot of time talking about.

In fact, the government wants to move on to something else as quickly as possible, as is the case with most of the bills it introduces. The government tries to expedite the process in order to ensure that bills are passed very quickly before the public has time to realize what is happening. Once the Canada Elections Act has been amended, there will be no going back, unless we want to go through the lengthy process of amending the law again.

I am clearly very concerned about this issue. The bill makes significant changes that could affect certain segments of the population, namely young people. We have heard this during today's debate and at other times as well.

In Sherbrooke, there are two universities, one of which is located in my riding. There are also a number of colleges and CEGEPs. I therefore feel quite strongly about this issue.

As an MP, it is my duty to represent the interests of the people of Sherbrooke when it comes to this bill and today's motion, which deals specifically with consultations.

The committee should hold consultations across Canada, including in the Eastern Townships and Sherbrooke, which are areas that could be affected by this bill. It is the committee's duty to do so.

We are often asked why the House should tell a committee what it needs to do. I think the reason is quite simple: all the resources available to the committee have already been exhausted. The request has already been made and all the possibilities have been exhausted. As the chair of a committee, I can attest that the committee will continue to control its own destiny and agenda, no matter what happens.

If the House votes in favour of this motion, that would put pressure on the members of the committee in question. They would practically be forced to move forward and abide by the decision of the House as a whole.

I think that is what it has come to because we have already exhausted all the other avenues with the requests made in committee that were rejected by the Conservatives. We hope that this time, because all MPs will vote, some from across the way will see the light and vote with us on this motion that we have moved. We hope to be able to hold the consultations that we have been calling for since the bill was introduced, so that we can go directly to the people this affects. I think that is the key in all this.

I think this is the least we can do, given how important this law is for our democracy and how much respect we have for it. This has been done in a number of other files, for a number of other bills. Consultations have been held across Canada for various things. Earlier, other members gave examples of bills that were before parliamentary committees. Those committees decided to travel and hold consultations on those various bills.

Today, we have a bill to change the Elections Act, and the government is refusing to hold any consultations and talk to Canadians about this. It makes us wonder how important the Canada Elections Act is to the government when it cannot accept a request as simple as holding consultations like the ones that have been held for many other bills in the past.

It makes us wonder what the Conservatives are afraid of. That is the question that comes to my mind when I see the Conservatives opposing the idea of talking to Canadians. They must be afraid of something. We already heard the Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons say in committee that it would be a circus, a ridiculous spectacle. I do not remember his exact words, but he seemed to be ridiculing the idea of consulting Canadians. The parliamentary secretary seemed to be saying that it was ridiculous, there was no point and we should not consult Canadians.

We completely disagree. I think that we would see the complete opposite. It would be even more helpful for the committee members who will study the bill. After several consultation sessions, the committee members would be able to go through the bill clause by clause, taking into account what they heard in the various communities across Canada, whether it was on aboriginal reserves—which we think will be significantly affected—on university campuses or in seniors' homes. These are examples of places the committee could visit to make a better study of this bill.

I think this bill has a number of shortcomings, and I think that consultation is the best way to make improvements. I may be naive, but even after three years here, I have faith that it is possible to improve this bill. Maybe I am kidding myself, but I still think it is possible.

The best way to improve the bill is to consult the people who will be affected by the changes to the Canada Elections Act. This may involve some amendments to the bill, because we will truly know what kind of impact these changes will have and how we can improve the bill. I hope that will be possible.

I ask my colleagues in all parties to support this motion to consult all Canadians across the country.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I have read Bill C-23 carefully. It is important for all members to note that it does not list what forms of ID would be acceptable. The process would be much harder than my hon. colleague seems to understand; for instance, I'll turn to some of the examples he used. Could a student with a student card vote? No. Imagine that student has a student card and a transcript? Could that student vote? No. Imagine that student has a student card, a transcript, and a birth certificate, all IDs mentioned by my hon. friend. Could that student vote? No. Students could not vote unless they were responsible for the utility bills at their place of residence and they had a bill to prove their residence. This is a complicated area and could eliminate the right to vote.

My friend asked if it is a privilege or a right to vote. He just needs to look at section 3 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which says that voting is a right.

We do not have a fraud scandal in this country. We do not have any evidence that Canadians are voting more than once. We have evidence that people are trying to confuse voters by sending them to the wrong polling stations. We have a lot of evidence that Canadians are losing trust in the system and are not getting out to vote. We do not have any evidence of the idea that Canadians are voting more than once. Our problem is that they are voting less than once.

Proportional Representation

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I also rise today to present a petition gathered by citizens of Canada who want to see our electoral system reformed, and want to see proportional representation. The signatories of these petitions are primarily from the Winnipeg and Brandon areas, appropriate today as we debate Bill C-23, which would fail to make our elections fairer.

Democratic Reform

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Minister of State (Democratic Reform)]

Mr. Speaker, voters can already use any of 39 forms of identification accepted by Elections Canada. In addition, the fair elections act will require Elections Canada to inform voters about the pieces of identification needed to vote in an election. Yes, voters need more information, and that is what the fair elections act will give them.

[Nycole Turmel, NDP, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservatives' bill will deprive many young students and low-income seniors of their votes, and it will make life harder for people who do not have ID or who have a disability. The Conservatives are always coming down hard on the most vulnerable people in society. Today we are offering the minister a chance to get out of the Ottawa bubble. Will there be a free vote on the NDP motion for public consultations on C-23?

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

Mr. Speaker, Canadians are upset about the unfair elections act, upset about changes that would suppress the vote of youth, first nations, the homeless, and even seniors.

Changes to elections rules should be non-partisan. Instead, Bill C-23 would in effect rig the Canada Elections Act to give the Conservative Party an unfair advantage.

Canadians want to be heard and they must be heard, so when will the Conservatives do the right thing and agree to cross-country hearings with the Canadian people?

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Minister of State (Democratic Reform)]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians have spoken. They have asked for a bill in the House that would keep everyday Canadians in charge of democracy by putting special interests on the sidelines and rule breakers out of business altogether.

That is why we have brought forward the fair elections act, which would close loopholes to big money, especially the use of unpaid debts. It would prevent fraudulent voting and it would provide increased opportunities for law-abiding, honest Canadians to cast their ballots.

The NDP announced its opposition to this bill before even reading it. It is time that the NDP read it, studied it, and, we would hope, supported it.

Opposition Motion—Instruction to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs Regarding Bill C-23

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Minister of State (Democratic Reform)]

Mr. Speaker, I hope he knows the difference, because the reality is that his own party announced its opposition to the fair elections act before even reading it. I am not sure how New Democrats could know the differences between the status quo and the act without reading it.

Let me focus on the issue of section 18, which the member referenced. The fair elections act would amend it to require the agency to inform people of the basics of voting, including where and when, the ID to bring, and the special tools available to help people with disabilities cast their ballot. Beyond that, it would require the agency to inform people of how they can register to vote and correct any misinformation that might incidentally be on the existing voters list.

These are all things that Canadians need as basic tools to vote. Unfortunately, Elections Canada's own data shows that they do not have it. About 60% of non-voters said they did not vote for reason of everyday life issues. They said they found it inconvenient or difficult, or that they were busy. The fair elections act would ensure that this same 60% of people would be aware that they could vote early through an advance ballot, by mail or at their local Elections Canada office.

How could the member across possibly be opposed to that information being provided?

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

Mr. Speaker, the short answer is that I have a very different understanding from the minister of the relationship between causation and correlation.

The minister has spent a lot of time on this, and he is now paring back. Criticism has shown him the error of his way, not on this point, but on the Neufeld report. He was constantly citing irregularities early on, as if they amounted to fraud, or even the serious risk of fraud. Gradually he has begun to nuance because he knows that people have read the report and understand that is not what Neufeld said.

There is the same thing on this score. Causation is not correlation. I asked the minister in our earlier debates why we cannot have the new section 18, as written in Bill C-23, alongside the old section 18. The two sections are not in conflict. The new section is a kind of marching order to Elections Canada to engage in the kind of targeted information-giving that the minister has made the case for being beneficial. However, he has made no case that public education and democratic outreach themselves are not beneficial. That is the difference between causation and correlation.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, Elections Canada accepts 39 forms of identification, including student cards. That is just one example; Elections Canada accepts many other documents. However, we are changing the legislation to compel Elections Canada to inform the public of the types of identification required. Young people should have this information before the election so that they can go and vote with the proper identification in hand.

The fair elections act will make that happen.

I should also point out that we need to help disabled Canadians cast their ballots. The fair elections act would require that the agency inform disabled Canadians of the special tools available to help them cast their ballots. For example, the Canadian National Institute for the Blind has stated:

Voting is a democratic right for all Canadians. We are happy to have the opportunity to work hand in hand with Government representatives to increase accessibility and awareness of elections amongst the blind and partially sighted community. We need to empower all Canadians to participate in the democratic process and make choices about their leadership....

We could not agree more.

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister and for Intergovernmental Affairs]

Mr. Speaker, I am sorry you had to suffer that speech by being in the chair.

The reality is that this particular piece of legislation has yet to have a minute in committee. We know that when Bill C-23 was first introduced, the New Democrats, before even reading the bill, had said they would not support it. That was painfully obvious when the critic for democratic reform admitted in front of the press that he had not read the bill and said the NDP was still not going to support it.

Moreover, we had some debate in the House and heard two areas of concern. One was with respect to vouching. I note that on page 25 of the bill, it states that subsection 143(3) would be modified but still provides some leeway for the polling officer with respect to people's addresses. I have yet to hear from the NDP what it would propose. We also know the Minister of State for Democratic Reform has clearly stated that the Chief Electoral Officer would still have the mandate to go out and speak to people.

In the absence of hearing anything from the NDP on what it would do differently in the bill, outside of those two areas, would the hon. member agree that we should start committee hearings on this and get further debate going?

Election of the Speaker

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, it is indeed interesting that we are debating this particular motion at this time. One of the things I have noticed in sitting on the PROC committee is that there is a great desire from individual members to talk about principled issues related to democracy.

I made reference to a different motion, Motion No. 431, in the form of a question to the mover, which I did to highlight the fact that we have another motion dealing with another issue, but they are all about the idea of change and how we can improve the system. It makes me wonder what else we could be doing and having the PROC committee take a look at.

We are talking about the important principle of electing a Speaker, and how the Speaker should ultimately assume the responsibilities of the chair. After we debate that this morning, later on today we will be debating Bill C-23. Tomorrow morning, I will sit in the PROC committee, and we will debate Bill C-23.

I say that because, at the end of the day, I do not question the level of interest members have with regard to the important issue of the Speaker and how the Speaker assumes the responsibilities of the chair. However, we have to recognize that the interest in this goes beyond the chamber. There are many academics, other stakeholders, and average Canadians who take an interest, because it has a significant impact.

One member made reference to the fact that this is, in essence, one of the fundamental principles of our democracy. The legislation we have in Bill C-23 is a greater piece of legislation, I would argue, in terms of the responsibility of members of the House before the PROC committee today. Members need to be aware of what is taking place in the PROC committee today because of the profound negative overall impact it would have, and because of everything that has taken place in the bill's coming before the committee. This is something members need to note.

I just wanted to highlight this issue before I made my comments related to the Speaker, because it is important for us to recognize this whenever we can.

Having said that, as part of a provincial legislature I have had the opportunity to go through both worlds. These are the world where a Speaker is appointed and the world where the Speaker is elected by peers. I would like to share a little bit on that point.

I can go back to 1989 and 1990, when we had an appointed Speaker in the Manitoba legislature. Denis Rocan was the Speaker. Gary Filmon was the premier who appointed him. One of the early decisions that had to be made was with regard to Meech Lake. Members of the chamber might recall how important that decision was. It had a profound impact on the entire country. In essence, it defeated the Speaker recognizing an individual who sat in a third party. By using the word “no”, he was ultimately able to prevent the Meech Lake accord from passing, denying Canada that constitutional reform.

I was there at the time. Speaker Rocan, in looking over and watching Mr. Harper because it was a very difficult situation at the time, played a critical role—

Committees of the House

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday the Minister of State for Democratic Reform called cross-country hearings on the fair elections act a “costly circus”, and his colleague called them a “gong show”. Yet the Conservatives are happy to propose spending $600,000 on other committee travel.

Could the Minister of State for Democratic Reform tell us why some committee travel is acceptable to him, but travelling across the country to talk about democratic reform is not worth the effort?

Intergovernmental Affairs

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Mr. Speaker, arising out of question period, the Minister of Transport raised a serious concern about the ability of the transportation committee to travel, to hear from Canadians about rail safety.

She did not express those consultations as being a gong show or a costly circus, as her colleagues have done, so I would seek to move the following motion that I believe will remove the impasse and allow the minister to have the hearings that she so desperately wants. It would allow Canadians to also have hearings that they so desperately want about our Elections Act. I move:

That it be an instruction to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs that in relation to its study on Bill C-23, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to certain Acts, that it have the power to travel to all regions of Canada: Atlantic Canada, Quebec, Ontario, northern Ontario, the Prairies, British Columbia, and the north, as well as downtown urban settings and rural and remote settings, in the winter-spring, 2014, and that the necessary staff accompany the committee.

41st General Election

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I rise this morning to present two petitions.

The first relates to the ongoing investigation of the calls that were made, generally referred to as robocalls, in 2011.

It is a timely petition because, as we know, Bill C-23 actually has a good regime. One part of Bill C-23 that I like is the part that deals with regulating robocalls.

The petitioners in this case are from the Ottawa area and some from British Columbia. They are calling for a full inquiry to get to the bottom of what occurred in 2011.

Fair Elections Act—Speaker's Ruling

[The Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

I am now prepared to rule on the point of order raised on February 6, 2014, by the hon. House leader for the official opposition, regarding the form of Bill C-23, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to certain Acts.

I would like to thank the hon. House leader for the official opposition for having raised this matter, as well as the hon. leader of the government in the House of Commons and the member for Abitibi—Témiscamingue for their comments.

The opposition House leader claimed that a significant error had occurred in the tabling and the drafting of the bill, namely that there was contradictory information provided in the French and English versions of the summary of the bill. More specifically, he explained that the notion of exemption, though central to that section of the summary, was absent in the French version.

In claiming that the bill is, therefore, in imperfect form, the House Leader for the Official Opposition invoked House of Commons Procedure and Practice, second edition, which states on page 728 that:

In the past, the Speaker has directed that the order for second reading of certain bills be discharged, when it was discovered that they were not in their final form and were therefore not ready to be introduced.

As well, he noted that Standing Order 68(3) states that, “No bill may be introduced either in blank or in an imperfect shape” and asserted that the correction of errors on websites or through reprints of bills does not remedy such cases.

The hon. government House leader countered that the summary of a bill is not, in fact, considered to be a part of a bill and, thus, even grievous errors in the summary would not constitute grounds to find a bill to be in improper form. He cited precedents to demonstrate that previous Speakers had withdrawn bills only when they were not finalized or even drafted, and he noted that, on May 17, 1956, Speaker Beaudoin determined that a bill has to have blanks to be considered to be in imperfect form.

The hon. government House leader also noted that the wording was correct in both the version now before the House and in the version found on the Internet.

In drawing the attention of the House to the inconsistency found in the summary of the advance copy of the bill, the opposition House leader has reminded us all of the importance of proper drafting. This is recognized in House of Commons Procedure and Practice, second edition, on page 720, which states:

The enactment of a statute by Parliament is the final step in a long process that starts with the proposal, preparation and drafting of a bill. The drafting of a bill is a vital stage in this process—one which challenges the decision makers and drafters to take carefully into account certain constraints, since a failure to abide by these may have negative consequences in relation to the eventual interpretation and application of the law and to the proper functioning of the legislative process.

It is therefore comforting to know that members take their responsibility seriously and scrutinize the bills that come before the House.

Having said that, I must inform the House that in the official version of the bill, the one printed and found on our website, the concept of exemption has not been omitted. In other words, the inconsistency the opposition House leader noticed has been caught and corrected in the version of which the House is officially seized. On that basis, it would seem that the issue has been resolved.

But, I also want to take the time to add that the summary of a bill is not, per se, considered part of a bill. This is quite clear in House of Commons Procedure and Practice, second edition, on page 733:

The summary is a comprehensive and usually brief recapitulation of the substance of a bill. It offers “a clear, factual, non-partisan summary of the purpose of the bill and its main provisions”. The purpose of the summary is to contribute to a better understanding of the contents of the bill, of which it is not a part.

In addition, procedural authorities and precedents have provided us with a clear understanding of what constitutes an incomplete bill. O'Brien and Bosc, on page 728, states:

A bill in blank or in an imperfect shape is a bill which has only a title, or the drafting of which has not been completed.

In the present circumstances, the Chair is satisfied that Bill C-23, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act and other acts and to make consequential amendments to certain acts, is in proper form.

I thank all hon. members for their attention and I trust the references provided will assist members as they proceed to study the bill as it wends its way through the legislative process.

41st General Election

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Minister of State (Democratic Reform)]

Mr. Speaker, the question was about the powers of the existing election commissioner. Let us clarify.

First of all, he can compel testimony before the courts after charges are laid through something called a subpoena. He can compel documents by seeking a warrant from a judge, and all of his powers of investigation are the same as those of police officers investigating the most heinous of crimes.

Furthermore, under the fair elections act he would have sharper teeth, a longer reach, and a freer hand, including total independence so that he can make his own decisions about investigations and staffing, and he will not be able to be fired without cause.

Democratic Reform

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

Mr. Speaker, the government is trying to shut down debate on legislation that would change the way elections are run in this country.

It is shutting down debate on a bill that is supposed to combat electoral fraud but that instead would target Elections Canada and ordinary Canadian voters. It would also give Conservatives an unfair advantage.

Would the government at least allow Canadians to have their say on it? Will it support the NDP's proposal for cross-country hearings on Bill C-23, the unfair elections act?

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Minister of State (Democratic Reform)]

Mr. Speaker, the NDP members have not read the Canada Elections Act. Sections 533, 534 and 535 already require the Chief Electoral Officer to testify and submit a report before Parliament, which automatically becomes public. These sections are not being changed in any way in the Fair Elections Act.

Supporting Non-Partisan Agents of Parliament Act

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Centre-North, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I look forward to a spirited debate on Bill C-23, the fair elections act, I believe in under an hour. I would ask my colleague to entertain us with some relevancy to this particular piece of legislation.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill C-23, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to certain Acts, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

Fair Elections Act

[Peter Van Loan, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I am rising to provide further supplementary submissions to those I made earlier, as I indicated I would, on the point of order raised this afternoon by the hon. House leader for the official opposition.

I have had a chance to consult the cases that were cited in footnote 99 associated with the passage from which the hon. member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley quoted on page 728 of House of Commons Procedure and Practice, second edition.

In one of those cases, on May 16, 1978, at page 5461 of the Debates, Mr. Speaker Jerome directed that a bill be withdrawn after introduction because, “...while the document in respect to the motion was prepared, the bill itself had not been finalized and therefore is not ready for introduction”.

Second, in another case on December 15, 1980, at page 5746 of the Debates, Madam Speaker Sauvé directed that a bill be withdrawn on the same basis. Indeed, the bill in that case had not yet even been drafted.

These are in very stark contrast to the situation at hand.

Unlike those cases, we do have a bill. We have been hearing about it in the House all week long. The hon. House leader of the official opposition even quoted, from the summary of the bill, an explanatory text accompanying the clauses of the bill. Of course, we have had many people in the debates today and yesterday referring to parts of the bill.

In my earlier submissions, I spoke to the relationship between an explanatory note and a bill. Members will recall that the House leader was saying the difficulty was with the explanatory note, that there was a difference in the translation between the French and the English, and therefore the bill was not in its proper form.

I will add to my earlier citation by quoting from the treatment O'Brien and Bosc give to bill summaries at page 733.

The purpose of the summary is to contribute to a better understanding of the contents of the bill, of which it is not a part. For this reason, it appears separately at the beginning of the bill.

Once again, there is another citation that demonstrates that the summary, which is what the member was referring to, is not part of the bill. Even if there were an error in the summary that was grievous, that is not a reason to say the bill is not in its proper form. It is not part of the bill.

I do have a few other precedents that I would like to offer in relation to these supplementary texts of an explanatory nature, which get appended to bills.

I will start with a ruling of June 14, 1938, at page 450 of the Journals from Mr. Speaker Casgrain. He said:

The explanatory notes do not form part of the bill proper and they do not have to be approved by the House. They are only given as reasons for the text and to facilitate discussion.

That was a long time ago; 75 years ago or more.

Next, I have Mr. Speaker Beaudoin's ruling, which is much more recent, May 17, 1956, an interesting time, at page 568 of the Journals.

...explanatory notes are not part of the bill nor are the marginal notes....The bill consists of the various clauses that are there. In order to judge whether a bill is blank or in an imperfect shape, it had to have blanks when it was introduced and given first reading.

Later, he said in relation to what is now Standing Order 68(3): “No bill may be introduced either in blank or in imperfect shape”.

He continues:

Therefore at that moment the hon. Member cannot raise the point of order because he does not have a copy of the bill. The bill has not been printed. It is my duty, however, to satisfy myself. He was referring to his role as Speaker.

Mr. Speaker Beaudoin's ruling was sustained at the time upon appeal by a vote of 152 to 57.

On March 29, 1972, at page 1268 of the Debates, Mr. Speaker Lamoureux also confirmed the courtesy nature of the supplementary content that gets printed with bills.

As the hon. member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley pointed out, there was a translation error in the text from which he quoted. That text was prepared by the Department of Justice and bore on its cover the following note: “Advance copy to be formatted and reprinted by Parliament”.

The proviso was added to the courtesy copies of the government bills that were provided to MPs following the point of order by the hon. member for Kings—Hants, which was also cited today, and I think some of us remember that debate.

The official version of Bill C-23 of which the House is seized was ordered by the House on Tuesday to be printed. That motion is recorded at page 493 of the Journals. That copy of the bill, the official copy printed by order of the House and as published under the purview of our law clerk, can be viewed on the Internet, and there the House can see the corrected text in the bill’s summary.

In conclusion, I will briefly recap my arguments. First, the test for the application of Standing Order 68(3) takes place prior to introduction under the authority of the Chair, not at this stage. Second, explanatory notes and summaries do not even form any part of the bill; it is simply a courtesy measure to assist hon. members in performing their jobs. Finally, the wording issue of which the NDP has complained is not even in the version of Bill C-23 before this House.

I think we can see that there is no merit to the point raised.

Business of the House

[Peter Van Loan, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, this afternoon we will continue to the second of our four days of second reading debate on Bill C-23. I do want to draw attention that debate is on the fair elections act because that is significantly more than the five hours that the NDP critic yesterday proposed that the House should have as a debate at this stage.

We think that four days is better than five hours. We want more debate. Unfortunately, we did lose the debate this morning because of the delay and obstruction tactics from the opposition. However, we are optimistic that we will be able to proceed and have further debate today.

In fact, we would hope to have it also tomorrow and on Monday. The fair elections act, as we have all heard, will ensure that everyday citizens, everyday Canadians, remain in charge of Canadian democracy. Of course, it has had strong reviews, including an A minus from a former chief electoral officer for Canada.

Tuesday morning will see the ninth day of consideration of Bill C-2, Respect for Communities Act. It has now become painfully clear that the opposition will not agree to these common-sense rules that allow communities to have a say in whether a drug-injection site should be opened in their midst.

Mr. Speaker, the highlight of next week will be the budget presentation, with the hon. Minister of Finance delivering that in this chamber at 4 p.m. on Tuesday.

Wednesday and Friday of next week will be the first and second days of debate on the budget in the House.

I understand that Bill C-15, Northwest Territories devolution act, will be reported back from committee shortly. We will see that it gets considered at report stage, and hopefully third reading. At the moment, I am setting next Thursday aside for that purpose.

Bill C-23—Time Allocation Motion

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased that the member acknowledges there are some positive aspects to the fair elections act, and I look forward to working with him, or whichever delegates the NDP sends to the committee, to ensure that the fair elections act is even better.

[Peter Van Loan, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

moved:

That, in relation to Bill C-23, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to certain Acts, not more than three further sitting days shall be allotted to the consideration at second reading stage of the bill; and

That, 15 minutes before the expiry of the time provided for government orders on the third day allotted to the consideration at second reading stage of the said bill, any proceedings before the House shall be interrupted, if required for the purpose of this order, and, in turn, every question necessary for the disposal of the said stage of the bill shall be put forthwith and successively, without further debate or amendment.

Bilingualism in Canada's Legislative Process

[Anne-Marie Day, NDP, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Mr. Speaker, on February 4, I went to 2 Rideau St. for the recommended technical briefing that had been set up by the Privy Council. This was not their first time. These are people who are supposed to be well prepared and have a well-equipped translation service. We have it all the time in committee. We should be entitled to it.

Bill C-23 is very important and showed up out of nowhere. It is also very long. I need the technical information in my first language, which is French. When someone recommends that we go to these meetings, they should automatically ensure that there is simultaneous English and French interpretation. We do not want people beside us or at the front to try to translate the information for us.

MPs and senators were invited to this meeting. The briefing was organized by the Minister of State for Democratic Reform, the member for Nepean—Carleton. There were a number of interpretation problems, from the very beginning of the session. Several times, there was no interpretation at all. This is not a criticism of the public servants who were there and who did their best.

As a French-speaking member of Parliament, it is absolutely necessary for me to receive technical information on a bill as important as Bill C-23, the Fair Elections Act in my mother tongue, as this is something that affects every one of our ridings.

As the member for Sherbrooke said, it is very serious when MPs are prevented from doing their job because one of the official languages is treated as a secondary language.

In conclusion, I would like to share a quote from O'Brien and Bosc's House of Commons Procedure and Practice. On page 61 of the 2009 edition, they state, “The privileges of Members of the House of Commons provide the absolute immunity they require to perform their parliamentary work...”.

A technical briefing must be given in both official languages in a way that is not just so-so, but perfect.

[Pierre-Luc Dusseault, NDP, Sherbrooke, QC]

Mr. Speaker, this is the first time that I have risen on a question of privilege, and I am somewhat saddened to have to do so.

I care deeply about official languages. I rise today in the House to follow up on a recent incident by raising a question of privilege that warrants an official response. I believe that the Speaker is best equipped to deal with this matter.

Questions of privilege are of paramount importance to the democratic institution of Parliament, and the Speaker has ruled on these questions many times. I will try to explain what happened last Tuesday. I believe that the delay in raising this question of privilege is reasonable as this incident occurred just recently.

Members and senators were invited to a technical briefing on Bill C-23, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to certain Acts, organized by the Minister of State for Democratic Reform, who is also the member for Nepean—Carleton. As we know, debate on this bill began yesterday and will undoubtedly continue today.

I will try to explain what happened last Tuesday and attempt to convince you, Mr. Speaker, that there is a prima facie breach of parliamentary privilege. I am referring to the privilege of receiving, in both official languages, information about bills introduced in the House when they are drafted and debated.

Briefings are crucial. They help members to prepare before debating and voting on a bill as complex as the one in question, which is 242 pages long. It goes without saying that technical briefings are very important for such massive bills that contain so many elements. It is not mandatory that ministers provide these briefings. However, this one was offered, and we noticed many issues with the interpretation during the briefing.

It seems that no one contacted the interpretation service in advance. The interpreter who arrived had not received the documents he needed to do his job. The interpretation was often inadequate, whether it was from English to French or vice versa. The interpretation from English to French was particularly poor. At times, there was little or no interpretation or it was of poor quality.

Many of the issues with the interpretation surfaced when the members were asking questions. Some of my colleagues were there. When members and senators used the microphone in the middle of the room to ask questions, the interpreter could not hear them. Obviously, he was not able to translate the questions.

That said, the Speaker will have to ascertain the facts to determine, based on the information he obtains or he receives from other members, whether there was a prima facie breach of privilege.

I would like to remind everyone of the classic definition of parliamentary privilege. I am sure you know it, Mr. Speaker. However, I will repeat it for the benefit of my colleagues. I am quoting from Erskine May:

Parliamentary privilege is the sum of the peculiar rights enjoyed by each House collectively...and by Members of each House individually, without which they could not discharge their functions.

This is a fundamental principle of our institution, as I mentioned at the start of my speech. The privileges of each individual parliamentarian as well as the collective privileges of the House of Commons must be respected at all times.

Today, the question of privilege is very important because it is entrenched in the Constitution Act, 1867. Section 133 sets out certain legislative guarantees for parliamentarians when it comes to the use of Canada's official languages. These include the right to use either language in legislative debates, the use of both languages in the official records and minutes of Parliament, and the use of English and French in printing and publishing acts.

While departmental briefings are not specifically covered by the Constitution Act, University of Ottawa law professor André Braën notes that the purpose of section 133 is to grant “equal access for anglophones and francophones to the law in their language” and to guarantee “equal participation in the debates and proceedings of Parliament”.

This leads me to conclude that this protection of official languages in the House is fundamental to ensure equality among all members. It means that those who do not understand French or English can be on the same level as other members.

For example, if we give a technical overview of a bill in English to a member who only understands French without providing interpretation, this member is at a disadvantage in the legislative process compared to others who understand English perfectly. He or she is not getting the same quality of information. I think that is a fundamental issue in Canada's legislative process.

Mr. Speaker, I hope you will conclude this is a prima facie violation of privilege. This Latin expression, which means “on the face of it”, is of course commonly used.

To summarize the events, members attended a briefing on Tuesday morning, at 10 a.m. The session included paper documents that, I must admit, were properly translated. Members had been promised a briefing session to help them better understand this legislation before debating it here. However, they barely had 24 hours to review 240 pages. That is not a lot of time. However, as I said earlier, there is no requirement to provide such briefings.

The officials from the Privy Council Office who were present acted in good faith. They tried several times to correct the situation and accommodate the participants in both official languages, but they failed to do so. Even my colleague from Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, who could perhaps elaborate on her own experience, had to leave during the information session because there was simply no interpretation service. Accordingly, she did not have the same rights as other MPs who understand English, like myself, since I understand it pretty well. Although there was no interpretation service, I understood what was being said in English. I can understand it pretty well, but not as well as I would have understood the French.

This has been examined in various cases, including Att. Gen. of Quebec v. Blaikie et al. Chief Justice Deschênes of the Superior Court of Quebec upheld the obligation to use English and French at the same time throughout the legislative process. Any disruption of that practice violates both the letter and the spirit of section 133. This substantiates my comments.

In October 2013, my hon. colleague from Skeena—Bulkley Valley also raised this question regarding Bill C-4, the budget implementation bill, for which a similar information session was held for the members. Unfortunately, the interpretation services were inadequate. If I remember correctly, there was no interpretation at all. As a result, the meeting was cancelled and held the next day. In that case, the breach of privilege was avoided.

In this particular case, which is very similar, there was a major difference that might prove there was a breach of parliamentary privilege. The meeting continued despite the fact that the interpretation service was having a lot of trouble. As I said earlier, one MP even had to leave because of the poor quality of the service. I am not saying that the people there were not acting in good faith; they tried to make the situation better, but it did not work.

The bill in question deals with electoral reform, and it is very important to Canadians. The least the government could have done was to provide a technical briefing in both official languages to ensure all the members of the House are on a level playing field when they have to debate the issue. That was obviously not done.

I think a situation like that is unacceptable because it prevents parliamentarians from doing their jobs and fully participating in debate. Mr. Speaker, I would like you to make a ruling confirming that this is in fact a breach of the privileges of members of Parliament.

I would be willing to move an appropriate motion if you ask me to do so. Mr. Speaker, I look forward to your decision on the prima facie breach of parliamentary privilege that may have taken place last Tuesday.

Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics

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

Mr. Speaker, I would like to request the unanimous consent of the House to move the following motion: that, notwithstanding any Standing Order or usual practice of the House, immediately after the reading of the order of the day for second reading of Bill C-23, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to certain Acts, a motion that the said bill be referred forthwith to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs be deemed moved and be subject to provisions of Standing Order 73(1).

Democratic Reform

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Minister of State (Democratic Reform)]

Mr. Speaker, the Fair Elections Act will allow donations of small amounts and will exclude those from the wealthiest.

We will also eliminate the practice of using unpaid loans to get around donation rules. I want to add that a small increase in the limits will enable small donors to contribute a bit more to democracy, all the while ensuring that checks and stricter legislation protect Canadians against the undue influence of money.