I'm not stopping you.
To the point, Chair, we would see a group like the Council of Canadians with Disabilities as a primary, specific group we might look to. They are a national human rights organization of people with disabilities working for an inclusive and accessible Canada. You could almost put those words into another sentence about what Canadians want in their election laws.
The priorities of the Council of Canadians with Disabilities include disability-related supports, poverty alleviation, increased employment for persons with disabilities, promotion of human rights in Canada—the right to vote is that—ratification and implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. I'll just read one or two, Chair. I won't read the whole thing.
They believe, in terms of citizenship, that people with disabilities “have the same rights and responsibilities as Canadians without disabilities.” My first position ever, when I was 22 years old, I was elected chair of the health and safety committee in the little shop that I worked in. That's when it became clear to me with health and safety, if you don't know your rights, you don't have any.
In terms of citizenship, they're specifically concerned that “socially made barriers, which prevent participation and discriminate against people with disabilities must be eliminated.” Again, it would be obvious things like making sure that polling stations are accessible.
Chair, the other thing I wanted to say about learning early on is that all of us are only temporarily able-bodied. Every one of us will be disabled at some point. The only issue is whether it happens sooner or later. That's the only difference. There aren't just the barriers that we tend to think of, those of us who are able-bodied. There is a whole host of challenges that people with disabilities face in Canada. Our motion is here to ensure that the issues that would affect those fellow Canadians are taken into account when we look at Bill C-23.
Do I know what all those issues are? No, but then I doubt anybody else around the table does either. That's why we would invite them. We would invite them as expert witnesses representing a segment of our population, to ensure that those of us entrusted with passing the laws of our nation understand the implications of either changing the law or not adequately addressing challenges and problems that already exist.
That's why we have included in my motion various groups and organizations and points of view to ensure that we get as good a bill as possible. Would it be perfect? No.
As I said, I'm already aware of some clauses and things that we agreed to in our work a couple of years ago that I would already be looking at differently. That comes from experience. That's evolution of thought. Also, there's just having others look at it and give their opinion. That's why you have consultations.
That's why we were so proud to see a country like New Zealand having all kinds of consultation and that it wasn't being led by a political party. It was led by their version of our Elections Canada. That's how much they trust them. They let them lead the consultation. They let them produce the discussion paper and then they went back out again and said, “What do you think about what we've said about what you said?” This was before it even got to the politicians. We are so far away from anything like that.
In our motion we speak of groups that have been active in our society. In fact the actual words, Chair, that we used were “as well as specific groups which have been active in society on election rules.”
The first one we mentioned was Fair Vote Canada. Fair Vote Canada is a grassroots, multi-partisan citizens campaign for voting system reform. They promote the introduction of an element of proportional representation into elections for all levels of government and throughout civil society. The position of our party is that we should be moving to a proportional representation system as a further refinement of good democratic governance, but that's for another day.
It is worth saying, Chair, that one of the criticisms of proportional representation is that it doesn't usually lead to any one party receiving a majority control of the House, and that's seen as a problem. Yet the best example I can point to in the decade that I've been here—