Thank you, Mr. Chair.
It's always a pleasure to be here and to support the work of the committee. Hopefully this morning my colleagues and I will be of assistance to the committee as it reviews Bill C-76.
I don't have any written remarks. I would like, though, to briefly touch upon three points before turning to questions.
The first point relates to the importance of this bill, in particular for the next election. The second point touches upon a technical amendment, which I did not bring to the attention of the committee when I last appeared, so I want to bring it to your attention. The third point relates to the work that we need to do to prepare the implementation of this bill and to be ready for the next election, as well as how that fits into the work of this committee, and of the Senate, of course.
On the importance of the bill, again, I don't want to repeat what I've said. Overall this is, in my view, a very strong bill, albeit not a perfect one. I've made some recommendations to improve that bill.
What I would say, though, is that the bill brings some long-term benefits to the electoral process, and it brings some much-needed short-term remedies to some of the concerns that many share regarding the integrity of the electoral process. Of course, that's a very important part of our mandate.
For the next election, given the environment, I very much look forward to having this legislation passed. It includes measures to deal with third parties and foreign influence. It also includes measures to deal with cyber-attacks and disinformation. It is an important piece of legislation from that perspective.
Also, it significantly reinforces the powers of the commissioner in terms of his investigations, so, from an integrity point of view, I think it's important to have this bill passed.
If there is one area where the bill failed, it is privacy. The parties are not subjected to any kind of privacy regime. I have pointed this out in the past and I want to mention it again today. The Privacy Commissioner has talked about it, and we are in agreement on this issue. I simply wanted to reiterate that this morning, without going into detail.
As for the technical amendment I talked about, the committee unanimously approved a recommendation that had been made by my predecessor. The recommendation pertained to situations where, as required under the Parliament of Canada Act, a by-election must be held late in the election cycle, shortly before a fixed-date election. It was agreed that it was inadvisable in such cases to hold a by-election, because these elections are generally cancelled when a general election is held. The committee had unanimously approved that recommendation, and the government agreed.
The bill includes a provision on this matter. Unfortunately, as it is currently drafted, in the case of a vacancy, a government could decide not to hold a by-election during the last nine months of the cycle, and on top of that, there would be an additional period of six months less a day. Thus, there could be a period of 15 months less a day without a by-election to fill a vacancy. I am pretty sure that was not the intention of our recommendation, nor is it what the committee or the government wants.
I noticed the flaw this summer. We brought it to the government's attention, but my role is to report to the committee. If you would like us to propose some new phrasing to correct the problem, I would be happy to do so.
The last point I want to touch upon relates, as I said, to preparation for implementing Bill C-76 and our readiness efforts, and how that fits with the work that Parliament needs to do.
As you know, I would have liked this bill to have been passed last spring. It would have given us more time to work toward its implementation.
When I met this committee, I indicated that we would need to start the summer, first of all, by having a two-track approach to the training and the guidebooks for poll workers so we're prepared. We have prepared guidebooks on the current legislation, as well as the potentially amended legislation. We have not printed that material, of course, and we may adjust it further as the committee and Parliament do their work. However, that's been done.
The other part, and perhaps the more challenging part, relates to the IT systems. The bill would affect, at a minimum, 20 of our IT systems, some in small ways and some in large ways. What I said last spring was that we would spend the summer completing the work that we have to do on our side with our systems, and then start in the fall to look at the coding for the new system changes for Bill C-76. That's largely what we've done.
As you may recall, I indicated that we were then building a new, much more secure data centre, which is really the bedrock of our election delivery. That data centre has been built successfully and we've done the migration. It was scheduled for September 1. We did it on September 15, so it was a two-week delay, which is not bad. We're fine-tuning that, but it's going quite well. We still have a bit of IT work to do, but overall we are progressing well.
We now turn our attention to this bill. We will need a window to do some of that coding and then some of that testing. The coding window is, essentially, between October 1 and early December, when the House rises. That's when we need finality, basically, in terms of how this bill will impact our systems, because after that we go through a very rigorous testing in January, and then we do bug fixing. Then we roll out the systems in a field simulation in March.
That's our timeline to make sure that everything works well for this election. That may be useful for the committee to understand in terms of the time that we need.
I have one more point, which is not directly related to Bill C-76. Perhaps if there's time at the end I'd like to come back to it. That's the issue of electronic poll books, which we have discussed before this committee a number of times. There were some changes just last week in our plans in that regard. If there are questions I'll be happy to answer them, and perhaps at the end, if there's time, I could speak to the changes that we're making to that project.
