Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in support of this bill, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act and the Referendum Act. I hope I will be allowed to put into perspective the addresses from two colleagues from the other side whom I respect very much for their work on constitutional matters, the hon. member for Bellechasse and the hon. member for Calgary West.
I am a little surprised to hear suggestions that this bill has been rushed through or that not adequate time has been allowed for consideration.
I am reminded of the experience of Lord Eldon who was lord chancellor for 21 years, broken by several periods only when his party was in opposition. He began sitting on a case at the beginning of his tenure and it was still there 21 years later.
I sat on the committee on procedure and House affairs and I remember considering this bill. Then I was moved on to another office and I ceased to be a member of that committee. I returned as a guest two weeks ago when the bill of the hon. member for Vancouver East was being considered.
What we see here is not undue and indecent haste but what Mr. Justice Frankfurter of the United States Supreme Court has called moving with all deliberate speed. This is a relatively modest measure which covers the two issues.
On the establishment of a permanent register, I would have thought there was no room for doubt or argument. Anybody who has experienced permanent registers in other democratic countries comparable to our own will know that it operates easily and effectively. Changes can be made easily enough. It is a much better system than the ad hoc arrangement we go through every time we have an election.
The second issue covered is the shortening of the election campaign period. The minimum period which has been shortened from 47 days to 36 days is surely a self-evident proposition. I say this simply because we do not have, in contrast to other constitutions, much in the way of a statement in our Constitution of the necessary and vital elements in the constitutional processes, that is, on the system of elections and the system of political parties.
As a result of the civil war amendments, the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments were adopted into the United States constitution. This has given rise not only to federal legislation in the implementation of those constitutional amendments, but also to a a massive system of court based jurisprudence, a development on a step by step basis of principles of law fleshing out the large motor principles of the constitution.
It is a fact that the paradigm of modern constitutions, Germany, has been borrowed by the new Russian constitution, the new Republic of South Africa constitution and indeed has been borrowed around the world. The original West German constitution of 1949 has detailed provisions on the constitutional processes, electoral processes, parties and again a very substantial system of court jurisprudence.
By way of comparison, our Constitution only has the section on democratic rights in section three of the charter of rights. I suppose we could also include the preamble to the original Constitution Act, 1867, a designation too particularistic today, a constitution similar in principle to that of the United Kingdom but which was used by the Supreme Court of Canada in one of its most imaginative judgments, the Alberta press case, to develop a constitutional system of civil liberties before we had a charter of rights or even the statutory bill of rights which was Mr. Diefenbaker's later bill.
I am suggesting that this is a measure which perhaps has taken more time than it has needed, I would have said an undue amount of time for the matters covered. However it is an important first step and we welcome it on that basis. It is inevitable that the courts will build on this. They have already begun to so do on a somewhat piecemeal basis in two decisions, one in which I participated as an expert adviser to the court and another more recent case before the Supreme Court of Alberta, which have entered into general jurisprudence in so far as neither the first one nor the second one were appealed by the Attorney General of Canada.
I anticipate that we will develop as vital to the political processes what U.S. Chief Justice Stone called the constituent processes, the starting point of any constitutional system of government. We will develop more legislation in this field. We will have more work before more committees. As Jeremy Bentham has reminded us, we will develop to a very considerable extent the concept of judge and company, of legislators and courts working together to develop in the interstices of specific cases and with regard to specific problems as they arise, new and growing principles of constitutional law on elections.
It is on that basis we should approach the deliberation of this particular amendment. I welcome in that sense the constructive contribution made by my colleague the member for Vancouver East, who against all odds moved to redress what is a matter of considerable grievance to citizens in western Canada and one knows also to those in the western United States.