Merci, monsieur le président. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee, for the opportunity for the political parties represented in the House of Commons to address your committee this morning.
You've given each party five minutes, Mr. Chair. I'm just going to make a couple of remarks, and then I want Mr. Lepsoe, who is legal counsel to the party, to make a couple of remarks. I'm a lawyer by training as well, so to get two lawyers to combine in five minutes, Mr. Chair, I think is something we should report in The Hill Times.
Basically, I focused on going through Mr. Kingsley's report Completing the Cycle of Electoral Reforms, which was tabled in the last Parliament on September 29. Of course, there are an awful lot of recommendations, and I want to mention just a few that I commend to this committee and to this Parliament.
First, from an administrative side--and this has now been adopted in the province of British Columbia--I really like the idea of nominations before the writ. The writ is called and everyone is scrambling around to find the 100 names. I'm sure Mr. MacKinnon and all the parties have this problem of how they are going to get all 308 candidates nominated by the deadline. So once a candidate has received his party's nomination, I really commend the idea of allowing political parties to be able to file with Elections Canada and having all that paperwork done even before the writ is dropped. I strongly recommend that, and I know that's been Mr. Kingsley's recommendation.
There are a couple of others that I think are very useful. One of the areas where we are finding a great deal of growth is with the use of the special ballot. I think part of the whole purpose of the Canada Elections Act is to make sure--and there are the issues of fraud that you've dealt with--that we maximize the opportunity for legitimate voters, in this busy society of ours, to be able to cast a ballot and not be restricted simply to the advance polls or polling day. So the special ballot I think is something that's working very, very well.
My suggestion would be--and we can get into the details later--that the special ballot be expanded so that any eligible Canadian should be able to attend at the office of any returning officer anywhere in Canada, apply for the special ballot, and cast the ballot right there, rather than necessarily having to mail it back it back to Ottawa. I've raised that already with Mr. Kingsley.
I think the idea of the removal of the five-year limitation for out-of-country voters is very fundamental. If you're a Canadian citizen and you're living abroad for more than five years, you should also be able to cast your ballot. Mr. Kingsley has recommended that, and I would commend that to the committee as well.
The other area, of course, and one I gather you have had a lot of discussion about, is this whole issue of identification at the polling place. Again, I'm not getting into a lot of details about that, but I think everybody agrees that this absolutely has to be tightened up. If you combine that with the problems of the permanent voters list.... For instance, I notice that Mr. Kingsley, in his most recent report on the 39th general election, stated that there were 3.5 million changes to the voters list between the issuance of the preliminary voters list and the final list. That in itself says something about the accuracy of the list.
Those are the key things I think the committee should be focusing on: ID, quality of the list, and the pre-nomination process.
I'm going to ask Mr. Lepsoe to speak for a few moments, if you'll allow him, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you.
