Bill C-2 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) Committee on May 9th, 2006

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

None? None at all? Okay, so we've heard a lot of concern about the current system from the other side, about the nature in which third party groups can operate in this country. If there are problems with the system, then, those problems would have existed under the previous government. They are not introduced by the Accountability Act.

[Kathy O'Hara]

That's correct.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

That's right. So if there is this grand threat that third party groups are going to take over our democratic process, it is unfortunate that the previous government, which is now raising the spectre of that threat, did nothing in 13 years to deal with it.

Second, I want to look at the threat that the members of the committee are discussing. For a third party group, they can spend how much in a constituency?

[Kathy O'Hara]

They can spend $3,000.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

It is $3,000. An average constituency has 85,000 voters. That works out to 3¢ per voter, or $3,000 would probably be enough to design and post a website for a given constituency.

How many voters are there in Canada?

[Kathy O'Hara]

I don't know the answer to that question.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

Roughly, just ballpark.

[Kathy O'Hara]

It is 18 million.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

It's 18 million, so $150,000 is the maximum. If I take $150,000 and I divide it by 18 million, we have.... Wow, these groups can spend one-eighth of a cent per voter. I know $150,000 sounds like a spectacular amount of money. How many ads do you think you could run on a prime time network for $150,000 nationally? Can you get maybe five or six spots?

[Kathy O'Hara]

It would be a very small campaign.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

A very small campaign. So maybe we're talking about five or six spots on Canadian Idol. This is the spectacular threat Canadians are faced with. Our democratic system is threatened by the possibility of six or seven spots on a national television show. In fact, that doesn't even include the production costs of a television ad, which by itself would probably be in the tens of thousands of dollars, at least, and if they want to do anything creative, they might spend the $150,000 just producing the ad.

I'm not asking you to comment on any of that, but I'm going to ask a legal question at this point, which is, if you were to ban outright the participation by third party groups, would you expect a constitutional challenge to that kind of ban?

[Kathy O'Hara]

Do you mean ban contributions to third party advertising?

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

That's right.

[Kathy O'Hara]

I personally am not a lawyer, so I would defer to the lawyers, but my policy instinct is that it would present a problem, because third party advertising remains a way for those organizations to contribute to the process.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

Right. And if a union, the CAW, for example, were to host a candidate for Prime Minister at an event during the writ period, would they even be allowed to do something of that sort, given that an event of that kind would cost money and that they're a third party group that theoretically would not be allowed to spend any of it?

[Marc Chénier]

What's regulated in the Canada Elections Act is election advertising. Any activity that's undertaken that's not election advertising is not regulated.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

Okay, I understand.

Just so we're clear, how many groups in Canada spent over $100,000 in, say, the last election?

[Kathy O'Hara]

One reaction is that when the Chief Electoral Officer is here, he's probably in a better position to answer that question, because he actually maintains the records. But my recollection is that it's a pretty small number.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

So this is not the growing phenomenon or threat that some have suggested?

[Kathy O'Hara]

Well, as I say, it's a pretty low limit, $150,000, and it turns out to be a pretty small number of organizations that engage in spending anywhere close to that amount of money.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

So this is really a very marginal practice.

Once again, the national limit allows a group to spend 0.8 cents—less than one penny—per voter, and in a given constituency, about three cents per voter. That's what the current system is. I'll reiterate that this system existed under the previous government; it is not changed by the Accountability Act.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Mr. Owen.

[Stephen Owen, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

All right.

Thank you all for being here and being participants in the machinery of government. You've undertaken a massive job over the last while, and I congratulate you for the intricacy of what you've constructed here for our proposed additional machinery of government.

This isn't a criticism--and I don't mean it that way--of the whole approach, but I would like to get your expert analysis of the impact on the public service of the creation of all these additional parliamentary officers. I say that from a background of having been a parliamentary officer and knowing that sometimes parliamentary officers compete for bureaucratic time as well as parliamentary time and public time and public attention. I think at some stage we have to at least ask the question: are we creating a parallel universe to the executive and Parliament?

Parliamentary officers, of course, are meant to be agents of members of Parliament to assist them with investigative powers, public reporting powers, and so on, to help members of Parliament do their jobs better. Of course, in the old days there was just the Auditor General, and then ombudspersons were added in all provinces. Then, in the last 15 years we've had information and privacy officers, children's officers, advocates; federally we have the official languages commissioner, the environment and sustainable development commissioner, and now we have a procurement officer, a budget officer, an integrity officer, an ethics and conflict of interest commissioner, of course, a chief electoral officer, and we're talking about a director of public prosecutions.

As a parliamentarian looking at the executive of government with the hope that over time the administration of public affairs gets more and more efficient as well as accountable, I'm interested in expert opinion on whether at some point we're going to add so many different officers requiring so much bureaucratic time that public administrators are going to have difficulty doing their work.

I'm not putting this forward as a criticism, but I need to know your opinion of where the tolerance point is in the proliferation of oversight officers, and whether at some point we are going beyond the responsibility of the executive of government to just make the public administration work, as opposed to jobbing out accountability and review and disclosure and evaluation, when these should be within our public administration and should be self-performing—or we should be encouraging public administrators to act in an appropriate way and should have all the regulations, rules, and processes that can achieve or promote that.

So to any of you—

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Mr. Owen, I'm going to allow the question, but you're getting very close to policy, something that could be debated on either side. But please keep that in mind--

[Stephen Owen, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I put it to the master mechanic of government.