I won't be voting at this committee, when you do your clause-by-clause work. You can speak to my Liberal colleagues to see how they will vote. I have said that, as a representative of the government, if the committee decides to change that date, return the date seven days earlier, that's entirely up to the committee.
The pension consideration was not the consideration in the numerous so-called secret discussions that I would have had with your former colleague, Daniel Blaikie, who stood with me, when we announced this bill, including the date. I would just draw your attention to that.
However, the controversy is such that if people want to change the date, that's fine. I totally agree with you, Ms. Barron, that the Conservatives use that...Again, I was fisheries minister. There's an expression in English, “red herring”. The Conservatives use that as an excuse to ensure that some of the things that the NDP caucus and our government worked on to make voting more accessible....
Do you think the Conservatives, Ms. Barron, want to have campus voting? Of course they don't. Do you think they want to ensure that mail-in ballots are more accessible? No. Everything they have done, when Mr. Poilievre had my job at Democratic Institutions, was to make voting more difficult.
You're right, they'll contourner. They'll frame the argument around a date to distract from what I think—and I don't know if you agree with me—is a desire to ensure that we don't strengthen the elections regime to resist foreign interference, as recommended by the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada, or deal with some of those accessibility issues that all parliamentarians should be interested in.