Mr. Speaker, I rise this evening, in spite of the shameful time allocation motion, to speak to the elections modernization act at second reading. I think that the “elections modernization” part of the title is a bit much, since one of the main changes is to restore the voter card as a valid piece of ID. I will get back to this point.
I want to start by saying that it is shameful that the government has resorted to a gag order on this matter. In a former life, I sat in another Parliament, the Quebec National Assembly, which unfortunately uses the British system. Never would a government take advantage of its parliamentary majority to change election laws. In 1999, a change was made regarding voter ID. I want to inform my colleagues in the House that this does not enhance the integrity of the vote. The government will not make it easier to vote by simply considering the voter card as a valid form of ID. My colleagues can Google what happened in Quebec in 1998. An organized identity-fraud system was uncovered as part of the Berardinucci case. The court issued two rulings, and since then, voters in Quebec have been required to produce a piece of photo ID to vote.
During the last election, Quebec had no problems with voter identification. Voters in municipal, provincial, and federal elections have no problem showing ID. However, voting is a sacred act in a democracy, and we should not make it too easy. I am hearing talk about the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but voting is not a freedom. Voting comes with a duty, the duty to prove eligibility to vote.
The minister wants us to hurry up. She says this bill will go to committee, where it will be improved. That is not at all the experience I have had with clause-by-clause studies of bills in committee after second reading. What we actually hear is, “Talk all you want, sweetheart, but when your speaking time is up, we will use our parliamentary majority to do whatever we want.” The government votes down amendments and does not improve bills.
In my opinion, on an issue as important as voting rights and election laws, this government should not procrastinate and wait until the last second to try to change a few things in hopes of not looking stupid. When they first came into office, we were facing a major reform to the Canada Elections Act. We even hoped to change the voting system. Anything was possible. What we heard from Canadians can never be taken away from us. That special committee's report went into the trash. It was called a special committee because it was open to all parliamentarians, even those who did not belong to a recognized parliamentary group in the House.
In the debate on changes to the Elections Act, the next logical step would have been to give independent MPs the right to speak and even to vote in that committee. Now the minister wants us to hurry up. I would encourage her colleagues to slow down instead.
People told us that they were fed up with the party line, that the party line was one of the reasons they were so cynical. Government is all about executive power. It is all about cabinet. MPs who want to be ministers are more interested in doing the executive's bidding than honouring their mandate as parliamentarians here in the House. We are legislators, not ministers. We belong to the legislative branch and we represent the people. In a Parliament like ours, legislative power is the foundation of democracy. When my colleagues on the government side exist solely to rubber-stamp whatever the Prime Minister and the ministers tell them to, they are not doing their job. That is why voters do not bother to vote.
It is utter nonsense to say that people will not vote because it is too difficult or because the identification requirement prevents them from voting. During the hearings on electoral reform we held for months, people told us what keeps them from voting. For example, they say that their riding has been red since their great-grandfather's time and that this will not change, or that the riding has been blue since their great-grandmother's time, and this will not change. They are being stripped of their power of representation, and this is why democracy is suffering.
They told us that they want their vote to count. The current government not only proved unable to keep its promise to bring in a new voting system that represents the plurality of representation and ensures that every vote counts, but also went to great lengths to prevent all votes from actually counting, as they would if voters could finance the political parties they believe in through the votes they cast. Voters would then vote in accordance with their beliefs instead of voting strategically.
I have certainly spent a lot of time in my political life criticizing Jean Chrétien, but at least his legacy in politics and in this House was to give voters the ability to vote with conviction because he allowed their vote to finance a political party. That party might not get an MP elected, but that system gave the party the same chance right out of the gate to have its voice heard on an equal footing, in a democratic society, in the democratic debate that is an election. This also enabled the party to have the necessary funding between elections to promote its views.
To me that is democracy in a nutshell, but it is nowhere to be found in a bill that claims to limit spending. It does not even limit the government's pre-election spending. We have fixed-date elections and the government continues to make announcements, to use taxpayers' money to pay for its ads.
Under these circumstances, it is clear that we will be voting against the bill.
