Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thanks everyone.
I will be making my presentation in English, but I am certainly prepared to answer any questions in French.
I'd like to thank you all for inviting me. I'm very pleased to have the opportunity to address this committee, and I'm very pleased that the government has decided to move forward in this area.
I think some of you are familiar with the paper I did. It has been referred to. I've looked at the transcripts of some of your previous discussions, so to the extent that I have influenced progress in this area, I'm very pleased.
Obviously I can't deal with the entire issue in five minutes. I hope we have enough time during the give-and-take for other more specific aspects to be raised.
From what I've seen of the discussion and from what I've read of the background papers, my feeling is that some aspect, perhaps the wider aspect, hasn't been given the attention it deserves. Too much attention has been given to the technical constitutional aspect. The real reason why fixed elections are a good idea has disappeared in this discussion, and I'm going to try to emphasize that.
I'm not a constitutionalist. My specialty is comparative politics, looking at institutions and how they work in various countries, including this country, where I teach every year. I come at this from that perspective.
My general feeling is that the Constitution has been used to unnecessarily narrow the proposal both in its content and also in the way it has been presented and discussed. To some extent, at least, the real reason behind moving toward fixed election dates hasn't been given the attention it's due.
I realize there is a constitutional aspect. Some people argue that in order to do anything more than what's in the current bill could require a constitutional amendment. My suspicion is that that's not the case. We've seen movements in Westminster systems—in Canadian provinces, in four Australian states, and in the assemblies of Scotland and Wales.
Frankly, I don't see the need for the escape clause that has been put right at the beginning of this bill, namely that nothing shall affect the powers of the Governor General, which has been interpreted as allowing the Prime Minister, even in a majority situation, to call an election if he or she so chooses. The only constraints, therefore, are not written constraints. But the fact is that since there is an official normal election date in the law, this would place a greater constraint on the ability of a majority Prime Minister to act.
My feeling is that the law should be very explicit about these constraints so that the Prime Minister in question will be more bound by them, and also because it sends out a very important message to the people. Obviously a minority government normally presents unusual circumstances. In a majority government, the normal case is that the election will take place as set by law, and only in unusual or exceptional circumstances could it be otherwise. The law has to be extremely clear on this.
The point I want to make—and this is a very general one—is that the discussion has so much focused on, in Parliament, the concerns of parliamentarians. Elections should not be focused on the concerns of parliamentarians. They should be focused on the concerns of voters.
The basic idea of fixed election dates—and that's why we have them in most countries like Canada—is that the normal voter or anybody involved with the election—journalists, potential candidates, civic education teachers, anybody interested in getting people interested and involved in the electoral process—is able to do so under very simple and clear conditions that cannot be manipulated by politicians. That's the whole principle. The election belongs to the people. One, it should be clear that way, and two, people shouldn't think otherwise. We know how powerful cynicism is about politics, about partisanship getting in the way of what politics should be about, and we shouldn't invite that unnecessarily.
I would argue that the government is taking a step in the right direction. It's moving by certainly announcing that there will be a fixed election on a given date. But the law should be much more explicit in terms of sending out a message to Canadians that this is the normal way we will proceed: under normal circumstances, you can count on elections taking place on this date, and no one is going to change that.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.