I was a member of the House when the Harper government, with the current Leader of the Opposition as the minister responsible for democratic institutions, proudly introduced legislation that was rather bizarrely named. It pretended to make elections and voting, for example, more accessible. That was the Fair Elections Act. In fact, as shared by a number of academics and civil society members, it included a series of measures, such as around pieces of ID, to make voting harder to access. I have a largely rural riding in New Brunswick. People show up to vote with the card they get in the mail. Everybody at that polling station knows a person is called Mr. So-and-So and where they live, but there were specific requirements around photo ID. In New Brunswick, for example, you don't have a photo on your provincial health card as you do in other provinces.
It was a series of things designed, in our view, to suppress the vote. We were happy that Parliament corrected many of those measures in the “unfair elections act”. The bill we're going to talk about in the next half of this conversation, we think goes even further in strengthening our electoral system and making it accessible and resilient to foreign interference.