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.
Nathaniel Erskine-Smith Liberal Beaches—East York, ON
I'm not technical like Mr. Graham, but I can read Bill C-76 and I have it in front of me.
It's the publication period of the registry that caused your problem. Is that correct?
It's simply because the systems we've deployed in the U.S., the EU and India would not have accommodated the specific requirements in Bill C-76. If we had moved forward with that, we would have actually implemented a similar system.
We actually have had preliminary conversations with Elections Canada with respect to this, but in the end, it just became clear that with Bill C-76 and the specific requirement that each individual publisher had to maintain its own registry, we would have a very difficult time accommodating the requirements.
It's actually a combination of all of the above.
What's happening is that in order to implement the prohibition, we will be updating our ads policies. As I said, there are entire classes of ads where basically we will not accept the ad, such as cannabis advertising. There's another class of ad that goes through registration requirements. That's all governed by our advertising policies.
This decision will be reflected in those ads policies. We will have ads enforcement teams located in various places around the world who will be educated on these ads enforcement policies.
With respect to the specific issues on the use of the ad, every class of ad that you described sounds as though it would likely fall within the ambit of Bill C-76 and fall within the ambit of the prohibition.
We will have actually teams that are trained on that, but also, specifically looking at it from a Canadian perspective, informed by the advice that we have across functional teams located here in Canada.
That was not a calculus that entered into the determinations at all. It was fundamentally down to how we would engage the requirements, whether it was technically feasible for us, given the way our systems currently work, given the time frames and, frankly, our risk tolerance, with respect to what would happen if we ended up getting it wrong. That was entirely it.
It never came down to a calculation of a cost benefit. If anything, it's worthwhile noting, we have opted out of engaging in the only thing elections-related that actually would earn us revenue. Instead, we are investing in things that do not earn us revenue, such as our engagement with Elections Canada on promoting election information through search and knowledge panels, and so forth, with YouTube and in various other measures, not the least of which was a $1-million grant to CJF on news literacy, in advance of the Canadian election.
Essentially, we have doubled down on the non-revenue-earning components of it, to compensate for the fact that we simply could not accommodate the requirements of Bill C-76.
Essentially, the main difference, at the risk of getting slightly technical, is that fair dealing in Canada is an exception to infringement. It is a defence that one raises in response to a claim that you have engaged in an act of infringement, so the way that is managed is very different.
In this instance, Bill C-76 was introducing positive obligations—not only that you had to introduce an ads registry, but about the way it had to be done—that we simply couldn't accommodate in the time frame allowed. That's the main difference in the two.
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
In the case of the copyright system, you are going ahead with a system that doesn't follow Canadian law, but has an appeal system. In the case of Bill C-76, you're saying, “We're not going to do it, because it doesn't make practical sense.”
In the copyright experience, you're not worrying about Canadian law, quite frankly, because if somebody does have a fair-dealing exemption, it shouldn't be incumbent on them to prove they have the right to do something that they absolutely have the right to do.
I'm trying to get my head around why you're going ahead with the copyright, and not following it with Bill C-76. To me, it seems like a difficult but entirely doable system to resolve. As Nate said earlier, if it was the United States, I'm sure it would be fixed already.
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
That leads to my next question. You talk about the technical limitations of implementing C-76, and I'm trying to get my mind around that, as a technical person. I have a fairly good sense of how your systems work, so I'm trying to see where the problem is, in the next five months, with adding the subroutines needed to grok political advertising so that you can actually use it.
If you can help me understand the technical side of things, I will understand it. I'd like to hear what those are.
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
That would be helpful.
Do you oppose the changes we have on C-76, or do you support the bill, from a philosophical point of view?
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Thank you. It's nice to see both of you again.
As you probably know, I'm an early adopter of Google. I've been using Google for a solid 20 years. I think it's a good service, but it's grown massively, and become a very powerful tool. With great power comes great responsibility, so I think it's very important that we have this discussion.
The part of C-76 we're talking about is 208.1, and you want to change 15 words. What were those 15 words?
As we have basically expressed before the Senate committee and elsewhere, and also to the minister's office, we are fully supportive of and aligned with the idea of increasing transparency in political advertising, and we had intended to actually bring the registry to Canada.
There were a certain number of extremely targeted amendments. Basically, I think it was 15 words we actually changed that would have altered Bill C-76 sufficiently, such that we actually could have accommodated the requirements.
My recommendation, if possible, would be for a future Parliament to look at those recommendations, basically look at the challenges the new provisions added—and it's worth noting, as covered by the CBC, many platforms have also similarly announced that they wouldn't be accepting political advertising because of the challenges the specific revisions are introducing—and to revisit them at that time, to see if there are tweaks that can be made to help alleviate the concerns.
That's largely correct. I should also amend the record. We did have one discussion with the minister's office shortly after Bill C-76 was introduced, to discuss the contours of the legislation as it existed at first reading, before any of the online platform provisions were added and before any registry requirements were added. It was a robust discussion, but certainly at the time, we did not contemplate the introduction of the new provisions, so we didn't cover that. Besides that, there wasn't any engagement.
Stephanie Kusie Conservative Calgary Midnapore, AB
To summarize then, you were not included in the drafting stage of Bill C-76. You were not consulted by the minister or her staff as this government went forward with Bill C-76 in an effort to determine electoral reform for Canada.
In short, as I covered in my opening remarks, we have advertising systems that serve advertising to third party publisher sites, but we don't have a means of delivering the ad creative and the requisite information to them in real time, which would be required under Bill C-76. There are also the complications with respect to the real-time registry itself, which is why, even for our owned and operated sites like Google Search or YouTube, we also wouldn't be able to comply—at least we didn't feel comfortable we could commit to that.
Finally, there is the additional complication with respect to the inclusion of issue advertising. To be clear, the registries that we have available in other jurisdictions actually do not include issue advertising because, as I said, it is very difficult to cogently identify. Therefore, we were concerned that we would not be able to identify issue advertising for inclusion.
Stephanie Kusie Conservative Calgary Midnapore, AB
In looking to introduce tools similar to what you have within the U.S., why are you not able to introduce these tools within the Canadian system, and why do they not comply with Bill C-76?
Well certainly, they were aware of the tools that we had introduced in the U.S. mid-terms, and essentially they were hoping that with the introduction of the changes to Bill C-76, we would introduce similar tools in Canada. It was really a matter of going through the details about why the specific provisions in Bill C-76 would make this challenging, which is where we had a back and forth. Essentially, they were looking for us to introduce tools similar to what we had there.