Okay. Thank you for that.
“May” has been interpreted in Parliament in several ways. Sometimes governments loathe “may”, and what they actually meant was “shall” and “must”.
There is a second concern that we have. The negotiations that I assume have happened between the government and the Conservative official opposition were primarily around what's included at the very end of Ruby's motion, that there is now a pre-election spending limit of $1.4 million.
I have an inquiry to the government as to what that means for 2019. This is pro-rated to inflation, is it not? “Adjusted to inflation” is the more correct term. It comes out to somewhere near $2 million in a pre-writ period. I'm still seeking to know what that will be in 2023 through inflationary numbers. This is not an insignificant amount of money.
I can't help but reflect—and Ruby will understand why this is interesting or ironic—that at the end of our last efforts at democratic reform, the ERRE committee made negotiations between me, the Greens, the Bloc, and the Conservatives to arrive at a report that we could agree to. The then minister of democratic reform expressed such disappointment with me that we would ever negotiate with Conservatives over anything to do with our elections. I thought that was the point, actually. I thought the point of that exercise was to try to come to some multipartisan agreement.
I have to register this. While I appreciate that there has been whatever back channel negotiations among the parties, if the process required unanimous consent, it would have been a really good idea to contact us more than five minutes before the meeting to understand what was being negotiated. It's hard for us to feel particularly respected or included if a piece of paper is dropped on our desk five minutes before the meeting.
All that being said, as my grandma used to say, a lack of planning on my part didn't make for a crisis on hers. However, here we are, having blown through the Chief Electoral Officer's deadlines on making some reforms. He's told us that he can't do a bunch of things in Bill C-76 because so much time has been lost that it's not going to happen for the next election. There are some really good things actually, if we were to pass them as a committee. That is unfortunate, and that was unnecessary, in my mind.
It seems that the Liberals are okay with increasing the spending limits. Chair, I question that as a principle in terms of the fairness of the election. Parties that have more will do more and be able to influence more.
There is a cap, which is appreciated, but it's a significant cap. To most Canadians, $2 million is a lot of money. To most third party civil society groups, $2 million is an unimaginable amount of money to spend in an election period. They'll never attain that kind of influence.
However, we prefer and favour parties all the time in our legislation, as you know, Chair, over the voices of others. Parties are protected.
The last thing I'll say, and I'll wrap up, is that I hope this is seen—if we support this—as good faith towards some of the amendments we have, around some of the other important things we've heard evidence on from our Chief Electoral Officer, the Privacy Commissioner, and others, about making our elections truly fair. We've tried to only put forward amendments that were based on evidence, and particularly around things like privacy and the intervention of social media.
I don't know if folks are following Cambridge Analytica and what the ethics committee is looking at right now. There was a report on the CBC this morning, on The Current, with a member of that committee. It is incredibly disturbing, and we are incredibly unprepared.
Our British colleagues were unprepared for having a free and fair vote on their Brexit decision, where a Canadian company was receiving what I think were illegal funds to then influence British voters.
We have fewer protections than the British do as the law sits right now. Some of our amendments are attempting to fix those holes, plug those holes, so that our elections, our referenda, are fought fairly, and not with outside money from foreign governments and foreign interference.
All that said, there's a bit of nose holding on this, to see this thing through. But in the larger effort of fixing the damage that was done in the previous Parliament to our ability to vote freely in this country, we're prepared to vote for this. That's with the understanding of some good faith intention as we move forward with further clause-by-clause consideration and the amendments we've brought forward.