moved:
Motion No. 6
That Bill C-63, in Clause 2, be amended by replacing line 28 on page 2 with the following:
"polling day in the case of a general election or the forty- seventh day in the case of a by-election."
Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise on Motion No. 6 which stands in my name. The motion concerns the length of a campaign for byelections under the new proposed regime.
Let me reiterate what has been said on the length of the election period. Our party has indicated that we are prepared to support in principle the shortening of an election campaign. I have said that is my preference.
The proposal in this bill is that we move to a 36 day election calendar. That is one of the three main features of Bill C-63. This has been a longstanding proposal in that for a number of years there has been some pressure from the public and from political parties to shorten the election campaign period if possible. In the past, technical difficulties in terms of the ability of Elections Canada to implement a shortened electoral period have prevented the shortening of the period below the current 47 days. Mr. Speaker, you may recall in your political life that the campaign was longer than 47 days.
The Lortie commission heard a lot of submissions on this subject. At that time my party was not particularly supportive of shortening the campaign period although many who made submissions to the commission were. The Lortie commission had suggested it was possible to move to a 40 day election campaign.
What is the origin of the 36 day campaign in this bill? It is the implementation of the computerized register of electors and the ability to implement it prior to the next election by virtue of a pre-election enumeration. Thirty-six days in effect is the shortest campaign that Elections Canada felt could comfortably be executed by the people who run the campaign nationally. It is fair to say that this will cause some problems for some parties. It will certainly be a new experience for most parties but I suspect that most major political parties will be able to adjust.
There are some advantages to the new calendar. However even if one supports a 36 day election campaign there are other problems that are raised by the way it is implemented in this piece of legislation. One was addressed by the hon member for Saanich-Gulf Islands, the expense of running an initial pre-election enumeration to start the register. I will have more to say about that later in this debate.
The government is going about the implementation of this shorter period in a way that in our opinion will actually be much more expensive initially than it needs to be. This is a significant problem. Another significant problem that we raised repeatedly before the bill came to committee and in committee has been the problem of the implementation of a shortened election period for byelection campaigns. That is what this motion addresses.
There have been two kinds of problems with byelections in the past. The first is the problem this motion seeks to address and which we witnessed in this Parliament. That is the sudden calling of a byelection in a riding that was occupied by a sitting member on the government side for which there was no expectation whatsoever of a vacancy but which occurred overnight and then a snap byelection was called to deal with the situation. These have always been in ridings that are very favourable to the government. In the case of this Parliament they have freed up members and freed up ridings to bring in new people and to move other people on to greener pastures, be they appointments, Senate seats or whatever.
There is much to object to in this process. Obviously there is the unnecessary expense, the patronage angle and a number of things that are quite infuriating about this particular practice. It is fair to say that in the case of byelections this does create some considerable difficulty for the opposition parties even under the present calendar.
Last winter byelections were unexpectedly called in safe government ridings. They were also called at a time of the year when nobody was anticipating campaigning, in the dead of winter just at the end of the Christmas period. These situations create serious enough organizational problems as it is without moving to a 36 day campaign.
The other problem with byelections is something the Reform Party has been concerned about for years. It is the opposite problem, that byelections are held off indefinitely and ridings are kept open for extremely long periods of time for other reasons. If the government thinks it will be defeated in a particular riding it does not want to have a byelection and therefore the riding unnecessarily goes unrepresented for months and sometimes for over a year. In the last Parliament the government deliberately called byelections for a date so far into the future that it knew there would be a general election before the byelection ever occurred. There are snap byelections but this is the opposite problem.
The Reform proposal deals only with the problem of a snap byelection and deals with it only in the most peripheral way. What we propose is simply that the new 36 day campaign period would not apply to byelections. Instead the 47 day campaign would remain in effect for byelections.
I should say that our ideal proposal on this particular problem would be quite different. Our ideal proposal would give a a significant period of time between the occurrence of a vacancy and the calling of a byelection on the one hand and on the other hand it would set a maximum period of time within which a byelection must be called.
Frankly the time we have in mind for that would be something in the order of 60 days between the occurrence of a vacancy and the actual holding of a byelection and no more than six months between the occurrence of a vacancy and the holding of a byelection at the other end. The minimum period would provide the opposition parties with some assurance that a byelection will not be
called just to surprise the opposition and return a government supporter. The other provides the reasonable expectation that voters will be represented in Parliament within a reasonable period of time.
The reason we have not proposed it in this amendment is that the actual calling of a byelection as opposed to the campaign period falls under the Parliament of Canada Act rather than the Canada Elections Act. That makes it impossible for us to put forward our ideal proposal in this particular piece of legislation.
It was pointed out during our discussion in committee that technically speaking, because it is in the Parliament of Canada Act, our ideal proposal falls outside the scope of this legislation. It does fall outside the scope of this legislation and the principles of this legislation, but it certainly does not fall outside the subject matter of the legislation because this bill affects the process for byelections in quite an intimate way. However as the legislation is drafted, this falls outside its scope.
I return to the comment I made on Friday which is that this House has not approved this bill in principle. It has only approved it for committee study. The bill went to committee. The purpose of committee study before second reading is supposed to be to examine all aspects of the bill including material that while within the subject matter of the bill may fall outside of its scope.
I am disappointed that this issue was not addressed during the committee hearings. I still hold out some hope that we will consider this issue before we complete our deliberations on this bill here in the House.
I urge the House to support this particular motion which improves the bill in a very small way. It does not force a byelection to be held. It does not even force a byelection to be delayed. It simply says that a byelection campaign should be at least 47 days in length. I put that to the House for its consideration.