Mr. Speaker, I am happy to rise to discuss the motions in Group No. 3. Group 3 contains a number of motions and I will try to address all of them in my comments. There are three Reform motions, two Liberal motions and one presented by the Bloc Quebecois.
All these motions deal with the attempt to incorporate provisions in this legislation that would stagger voting hours. We discussed this issue not when we addressed Bill C-63 in the House previously but when we addressed Bill C-307, a private member's bill.
That private member's bill was passed by the House in principle, although it is more than fair to say, based on the record, that Reform Party members indicated our grave reservations about the approach advocated in the bill. We only approved it in principle for the purpose of further discussing the proposal in committee and arriving at a consensus.
We did not arrive at a consensus on these issues. The government chose to go ahead with a proposal that is substantially different from what was passed in Bill C-307. It is substantially different in at least two ways. It altered the hours for voting that were proposed in Bill C-307, moving them up so that not only are we cutting into prime voting hours in British Columbia but in Alberta as well.
The other change made was to reverse hours in the case of the far eastern part of the country. In Atlantic Canada the polls would actually close at earlier local times than they would in central Canada. This was not a proposal the committee heard during deliberations.
These government proposals were not even an option for consideration when the Library of Parliament researcher prepared his report for our discussion. These proposals literally came out of nowhere.
Nothing was proposed in these options that would indicate a premature closing time in Alberta. Never was it proposed in this document that the hours be earlier than 7.30 p.m. in British Columbia; nor was it ever proposed that we would actually reverse the hours in the case of the far east of the country.
We said this set of proposals needed to be studied and on which we needed to come to a consensus, but we did not. On top of that, we discussed items in our preliminary discussion which sparked considerable interest in all the parties represented on the committee and in the chief electoral officer. However, they were then entirely rejected by the government when it tabled its proposal.
The items include not just the hours but the concept of delaying the vote count in some parts of the country as a way of dealing with this problem. There was also a proposal to eliminate the blackout.
We were looking for a proposal that would involve three elements as a way of dealing with the time zone differences across the country: staggering the voting hours, staggering the vote count and a blackout. But when the government presented its proposal the last two elements completely disappeared which was a surprise to us.
More surprising were the comments by some of the government members that it was necessary to arrive at a consensus and this was how they did it. I think I speak for the Bloc and my party when I say that we were left wondering where the consensus was since only one of the parties seemed to agree with this proposal. How could this decision possibly be classified as a consensus?