With the amendment from Ms. May having been voted down on the government side, therefore this new procedure....
The Chief Electoral Officer also recommended what Ms. May had put forward. Since that's not going ahead, he then said that we need a technical amendment. On this one, I don't know why I guessed in advance, but the government hasn't put in a technical amendment on this. Basically it would make it workable, apparently, from the perspective of Elections Canada.
The amendment reads as follows:
(1) If the copy of the documents prepared under paragraph 162(i.1) is missing, the returning officer may open the ballot box and the envelope that contains the copy of the documents. (2) The returning officer shall not open an envelope that appears to contain ballots.
I sought legal advice from counsel at Elections Canada, because this is a very technical point. This is exactly the wording they said would accomplish the goal of making sure that when these documents are passed on, if any are missing then they'll know where to go to open an envelope to find them. That's all this is seeking to achieve. I'm going to plead a kind of ignorance in the sense that it's very technical, because I don't understand enough about which envelopes things get put in and which don't.
I'm wondering if the government had looked at it, because it was one that—