This bill was last introduced in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session, which ended in September 2019.
Karina Gould Liberal
This bill has received Royal Assent and is now law.
This is from the published bill.
This enactment amends the Canada Elections Act to establish spending limits for third parties and political parties during a defined period before the election period of a general election held on a day fixed under that Act. It also establishes measures to increase transparency regarding the participation of third parties in the electoral process. Among other things that it does in this regard, the enactment
(a) adds reporting requirements for third parties engaging in partisan activities, partisan advertising, and election surveys to the reporting requirements for third parties engaging in election advertising;
(b) creates an obligation for third parties to open a separate bank account for expenses related to the matters referred to in paragraph (a); and
(c) creates an obligation for political parties and third parties to identify themselves in partisan advertising during the defined period before the election period.
The enactment also amends the Act to implement measures to reduce barriers to participation and increase accessibility. Among other things that it does in this regard, the enactment
(a) establishes a Register of Future Electors in which Canadian citizens 14 to 17 years of age may consent to be included;
(b) broadens the application of accommodation measures to all persons with a disability, irrespective of its nature;
(c) creates a financial incentive for registered parties and candidates to take steps to accommodate persons with a disability during an election period;
(d) amends some of the rules regarding the treatment of candidates’ expenses, including the rules related to childcare expenses, expenses related to the care of a person with a disability and litigation expenses;
(e) amends the rules regarding the treatment of nomination contestants’ and leadership contestants’ litigation expenses and personal expenses;
(f) allows Canadian Forces electors access to several methods of voting, while also adopting measures to ensure the integrity of the vote;
(g) removes limitations on public education and information activities conducted by the Chief Electoral Officer;
(h) removes two limitations on voting by non-resident electors: the requirement that they have been residing outside Canada for less than five consecutive years and the requirement that they intend to return to Canada to resume residence in the future; and
(i) extends voting hours on advance polling days.
The enactment also amends the Act to modernize voting services, facilitate enforcement and improve various aspects of the administration of elections and of political financing. Among other things that it does in this regard, the enactment
(a) removes the assignment of specific responsibilities set out in the Act to specific election officers by creating a generic category of election officer to whom all those responsibilities may be assigned;
(b) limits election periods to a maximum of 50 days;
(c) removes administrative barriers in order to facilitate the hiring of election officers;
(d) authorizes the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration to provide the Chief Electoral Officer with information about permanent residents and foreign nationals for the purpose of updating the Register of Electors;
(e) removes the prohibition on the Chief Electoral Officer authorizing the notice of confirmation of registration (commonly known as a “voter information card”) as identification;
(f) replaces, in the context of voter identification, the option of attestation for residence with an option of vouching for identity and residence;
(g) removes the requirement for electors’ signatures during advance polls, changes procedures for the closing of advance polls and allows for counting ballots from advance polls one hour before the regular polls close;
(h) replaces the right or obligation to take an oath with a right or obligation to make a solemn declaration, and streamlines the various declarations that electors may have the right or obligation to make under specific circumstances;
(i) relocates the Commissioner of Canada Elections to within the Office of the Chief Electoral Officer, and provides that the Commissioner is to be appointed by the Chief Electoral Officer, after consultation with the Director of Public Prosecutions, for a non-renewable term of 10 years;
(j) provides the Commissioner of Canada Elections with the authority to impose administrative monetary penalties for contraventions of provisions of Parts 16, 17 and 18 of the Act and certain other provisions of the Act;
(k) provides the Commissioner of Canada Elections with the authority to lay charges;
(l) provides the Commissioner of Canada Elections with the power to apply for a court order requiring testimony or a written return;
(m) clarifies offences relating to
(i) the publishing of false statements,
(ii) participation by non-Canadians in elections, including inducing electors to vote or refrain from voting, and
(iii) impersonation; and
(n) implements a number of measures to harmonize and streamline political financing monitoring and reporting.
The enactment also amends the Act to provide for certain requirements with regard to the protection of personal information for registered parties, eligible parties and political parties that are applying to become registered parties, including the obligation for the party to adopt a policy for the protection of personal information and to publish it on its Internet site.
The enactment also amends the Parliament of Canada Act to prevent the calling of a by-election when a vacancy in the House of Commons occurs within nine months before the day fixed for a general election under the Canada Elections Act.
It also amends the Public Service Employment Act to clarify that the maximum period of employment of casual workers in the Office of the Chief Electoral Officer — 165 working days in one calendar year — applies to those who are appointed by the Commissioner of Canada Elections.
Finally, the enactment contains transitional provisions, makes consequential amendments to other Acts and repeals the Special Voting Rules.
All sorts of information on this bill is available at LEGISinfo, an excellent resource from the Library of Parliament. You can also read the full text of the bill.
Okay, thank you.
Bill C-76 deals with campaign spending limits. It will affect the parties, as well as associations. I wonder if you could provide some more details on this, especially since this is a very hot topic in the bill.
This is the third time. Actually, the last time I appeared officially was regarding this bill. Obviously, when I was appointed, I was asked quite a few questions about Bill C-76. We had already started covering this ground and, a few weeks later, I appeared officially to speak to this bill. So today is the third time.
Linda Lapointe Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, Lib.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I am really happy to be here today. This is the first time I will be asking questions at this committee.
For information purposes, I was wondering how many times you have come to give evidence on Bill C-76.
This is largely a key policy decision, to expand the right to vote. I do not stand against that. This is a matter before the courts as well.
From a logistics point of view, we can handle the regime as it is proposed in Bill C-76, so people would be voting at their former place of residence in Canada. We would no longer require an intention to return to Canada. We would no longer track how long they've been away from Canada.
We do not expect a huge number of voters. We've done a number of different extrapolations, and we'll see how that goes. Our expectation is that there will be roughly 30,000 voters from abroad. We have the capacity to handle much more. If I'm not mistaken, we had 11,000 foreign voters in the last election, and we expect it to reach about 30,000.
Prof. Fenwick McKelvey
I spoke about principally three things that I thought the committee hadn't heard before. The scope of this matter is something that's been quite daunting for anybody in communication studies. It's as though everything is all in one basket all at once, and what are the million different things you've studied over the past 10 years that you might pull out?
We've been trying to move fairly quickly on making recommendations. I think there has been a lot of movement on ads and ad transparency. I certainly think that more inquiry into the ad market is not necessarily hard to do. It's very evident that there's a problem there.
I think the question of other steps is one that has come up in a roundabout way. There's the question of content moderation. One of the fallacies that we have is that social media platforms are unregulated, but really we have a whole host of varying levels of rules that are more or less transparent that are filtering all content. A lot of that is for illegal content, but there have also been concerns about, for example, women's breastfeeding groups on Facebook being censored.
I think one of the steps that I and my colleagues Chris Tenove and Heidi Tworek are talking about is having a social media council, similar to a broadcasting standards council, so that you can start coordinating this kind of grey area of content moderation, which is increasingly what platforms do, and I think is largely an intractable problem. To echo Ben Scott's point, I don't think we're going to solve this thing. I think it's about developing those institutions that can maintain that.
Third, I think this code of conduct is something that really should have been done. There's reluctance by the party to do it. I'm frustrated that there haven't been any takeaways when this is something that we've been talking about for months. At some point it's not my deadline. I would hope there would be some more movement on that.
Finally, there have been discussions about Bill C-76 and privacy, and the government has stated that it's not moving forward on putting political parties under privacy law. I think that's a real shortcoming. I think it's a very easy fix, and we see it being effective in B.C.
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Oh, oh! I may in fact take that quote. That's a good one.
You've recommended, as have we and others—including, I believe, the ethics committee of the House of Commons—that parties fall under the Privacy Act. Bill C-76 would be that opportunity to improve our security and privacy regime when it comes to Canadians.
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Thank you, Chair.
Welcome.
You painted a scenario in the spring, in which delays would restrict what you could implement. In other words, there is some sort of a shopping list that comes out of a bill like C-76, and the longer it takes to be passed, presumably the less you can actually implement for the next election. Is that a fair thing to say?
Elizabeth May Green Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC
Thank you very much. Thanks, John.
I haven't addressed you since your official designation as our Chief Electoral Officer. I want to congratulate you personally. I think you're a wonderful choice.
I'm very worried about timelines. I would have liked to see C-33 move ahead when it was at first reading in December 2016. Now we have C-76. I generally support this legislation. It's in the House. We're going to go to clause-by-clause soon, and then it goes to the Senate and royal assent.
I know you're doing a lot of due diligence preparedness as though this was going to become the law, but I'd like you to give us a sense of when royal assent is necessary so that you can actually be ready for an election in the fall, assuming we stick to our fixed election date under the legislation and don't have a snap election. What's the drop-dead date for royal assent?
I do not, because it does not detract from the rules in the act. It is currently allowed. It provides for mechanisms of crossing names on a list, or writing down names of people who need to register at the polls. Everything that they would be doing using the poll book would be in accordance with the rules, even under the current legislation, notwithstanding Bill C-76.
Stéphane Perrault Chief Electoral Officer, Elections Canada
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
It's always a pleasure to be here and to support the work of the committee. Hopefully this morning my colleagues and I will be of assistance to the committee as it reviews Bill C-76.
I don't have any written remarks. I would like, though, to briefly touch upon three points before turning to questions.
The first point relates to the importance of this bill, in particular for the next election. The second point touches upon a technical amendment, which I did not bring to the attention of the committee when I last appeared, so I want to bring it to your attention. The third point relates to the work that we need to do to prepare the implementation of this bill and to be ready for the next election, as well as how that fits into the work of this committee, and of the Senate, of course.
On the importance of the bill, again, I don't want to repeat what I've said. Overall this is, in my view, a very strong bill, albeit not a perfect one. I've made some recommendations to improve that bill.
What I would say, though, is that the bill brings some long-term benefits to the electoral process, and it brings some much-needed short-term remedies to some of the concerns that many share regarding the integrity of the electoral process. Of course, that's a very important part of our mandate.
For the next election, given the environment, I very much look forward to having this legislation passed. It includes measures to deal with third parties and foreign influence. It also includes measures to deal with cyber-attacks and disinformation. It is an important piece of legislation from that perspective.
Also, it significantly reinforces the powers of the commissioner in terms of his investigations, so, from an integrity point of view, I think it's important to have this bill passed.
If there is one area where the bill failed, it is privacy. The parties are not subjected to any kind of privacy regime. I have pointed this out in the past and I want to mention it again today. The Privacy Commissioner has talked about it, and we are in agreement on this issue. I simply wanted to reiterate that this morning, without going into detail.
As for the technical amendment I talked about, the committee unanimously approved a recommendation that had been made by my predecessor. The recommendation pertained to situations where, as required under the Parliament of Canada Act, a by-election must be held late in the election cycle, shortly before a fixed-date election. It was agreed that it was inadvisable in such cases to hold a by-election, because these elections are generally cancelled when a general election is held. The committee had unanimously approved that recommendation, and the government agreed.
The bill includes a provision on this matter. Unfortunately, as it is currently drafted, in the case of a vacancy, a government could decide not to hold a by-election during the last nine months of the cycle, and on top of that, there would be an additional period of six months less a day. Thus, there could be a period of 15 months less a day without a by-election to fill a vacancy. I am pretty sure that was not the intention of our recommendation, nor is it what the committee or the government wants.
I noticed the flaw this summer. We brought it to the government's attention, but my role is to report to the committee. If you would like us to propose some new phrasing to correct the problem, I would be happy to do so.
The last point I want to touch upon relates, as I said, to preparation for implementing Bill C-76 and our readiness efforts, and how that fits with the work that Parliament needs to do.
As you know, I would have liked this bill to have been passed last spring. It would have given us more time to work toward its implementation.
When I met this committee, I indicated that we would need to start the summer, first of all, by having a two-track approach to the training and the guidebooks for poll workers so we're prepared. We have prepared guidebooks on the current legislation, as well as the potentially amended legislation. We have not printed that material, of course, and we may adjust it further as the committee and Parliament do their work. However, that's been done.
The other part, and perhaps the more challenging part, relates to the IT systems. The bill would affect, at a minimum, 20 of our IT systems, some in small ways and some in large ways. What I said last spring was that we would spend the summer completing the work that we have to do on our side with our systems, and then start in the fall to look at the coding for the new system changes for Bill C-76. That's largely what we've done.
As you may recall, I indicated that we were then building a new, much more secure data centre, which is really the bedrock of our election delivery. That data centre has been built successfully and we've done the migration. It was scheduled for September 1. We did it on September 15, so it was a two-week delay, which is not bad. We're fine-tuning that, but it's going quite well. We still have a bit of IT work to do, but overall we are progressing well.
We now turn our attention to this bill. We will need a window to do some of that coding and then some of that testing. The coding window is, essentially, between October 1 and early December, when the House rises. That's when we need finality, basically, in terms of how this bill will impact our systems, because after that we go through a very rigorous testing in January, and then we do bug fixing. Then we roll out the systems in a field simulation in March.
That's our timeline to make sure that everything works well for this election. That may be useful for the committee to understand in terms of the time that we need.
I have one more point, which is not directly related to Bill C-76. Perhaps if there's time at the end I'd like to come back to it. That's the issue of electronic poll books, which we have discussed before this committee a number of times. There were some changes just last week in our plans in that regard. If there are questions I'll be happy to answer them, and perhaps at the end, if there's time, I could speak to the changes that we're making to that project.
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
Good morning. Welcome to the 118th meeting of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.
Welcome, Mr. Cullen. Welcome, Ms. May. It's great to have you here.
We will continue on Bill C-76, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act and other acts and to make certain consequential amendments.
We're pleased to be joined by Stéphane Perrault, Canada's Chief Electoral Officer. He is accompanied by Anne Lawson, deputy chief electoral officer, regulatory affairs; and Michel Roussel, deputy chief electoral officer, electoral events and innovation.
For the information of members, we invited the Chief Electoral Officer of Ontario to appear today, but he declined due to prior commitments.
Thank you for coming. You probably have better attendance than some of us; you've been here lots of times. It's great to have you back.
Mr. Perrault, we'll let you make some opening remarks, and then we'll go on to some questions.
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
I could have taken more time to read the connecting words. Where do the words “in Bill C-76” occur? Is it at the very beginning?
John Nater Conservative Perth—Wellington, ON
Thank you, Chair.
I appreciate the Liberals, this government, putting out their motion and where they want to see this going.
I would amend the motion by deleting all the words after the words “on Bill C-76”.
I think that a reasonable approach at this point would be to go forward with hearing from the witnesses next week in good faith. I think it's truly acknowledged here that there are discussions and negotiations happening on amendments at levels that aren't currently in this room, so I think providing this change—accepting the witnesses—would be a reasonable compromise and a reasonable ability to move forward on this.
Let's look back a bit at where we've been. The bill itself came forward on April 30, I believe, which was the last day that the Chief Electoral Officer said he could implement something. I haven't seen where the government is willing to amend. I haven't seen where they're willing to accept amendments from the opposition—or the third party for that matter, the NDP.
Before we agree to move into a clause-by-clause situation, I think we need to have some reassurance from the government that what we're looking at and what we really want to see is there. That's the amendment I would move to the motion. Yes, as an opposition we are willing to move forward. We're willing to hear the witnesses and we're willing to have that discussion about going into clause-by-clause once we've heard from the minister on Thursday. At this point, this would be the approach I would take.
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
It's from 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, September 27, 2018, on Bill C-76.