Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Kelowna.
The term 17 amendment we are debating today offers an opportunity for some MPs to take the position that voting their conscience is appropriate. That was mentioned by the hon. minister who spoke before me. They do that even if it is opposite to the position taken by their constituents. They say they will vote against the amendment for the most part because of the need to protect minority rights and/or entitlements from the tyranny of the majority.
Without those MPs being here, there really would not have been much of a debate so far, so I thank them for that. But as a result of the position they have taken, they are obliged to criticize the term 17 referendums and some unfortunately have been doing so using factually unsupportable material or opinions that they are representing as fact taken from letters from people who were disappointed with the result.
If members had taken the time to call the office of Elections Newfoundland to discuss the mechanics of holding those referendums, they would have found as I did that a lot of the criticisms were completely baseless or were totally inaccurate.
Before sharing some of that information with members, I would first like to remind the House that prior to the first term 17 referendum, seven specific religious groups controlled pretty much all the public schools in the province. Meanwhile Jews, Muslims, Baptists and a whole host of other smaller religions, the true minorities, were deprived of any similar right or access to the public purse.
The voters of Newfoundland appear to have recognized that this situation was unfair and have voted to level the playing field for all religious groups in Newfoundland. They rejected in two referendums an entrenched entitlement of seven major religions to reach their hands into the pockets of taxpayers while the other religions, in fact the minority, had no such right. The changes contained in the term 17 amendment if anything improved the situation for minorities.
Furthermore, in terms of those minority rights, the two referendums on term 17 offered more than enough opportunities for both sides of the argument to make people aware of their interpretation of the effects of the proposed changes. The issue was thoroughly discussed at home, in restaurants, at work, on television, on radio talk shows. It is insulting to the intelligence of voters to suggest that they did not understand what they were voting for or how the rights and entitlements of majorities and minorities would be affected by their vote.
As for the complaints by critics that a mere 32 days was allowed for the actual campaign, 32 days is not an unusually short time for a referendum campaign. The last federal election was only 37 days of campaign and that was to change the entire government of the country with a multitude of issues and complex judgments that went along with it. Besides, the term 17 issue had been floating around under deep public discussion for many years, as has already been mentioned by other members.
The associated complaint that the government failed to inform the public of the text of the amendment until August 25, just two days before the advance poll, also has little relevance in terms of either the mechanics or outcome. The fact is that the vote was on the question and not on the legal wording of the amendment which would enact the question. There was no obligation whatsoever on the government to produce or release the wording of the actual amendment at any time and it is questionable how many voters would have wanted to read it anyway.
To keep this in context, compare the situation to that of placing a clear question to Quebeckers in any new referendum on separation. It would be impossible to have a clear question if you had to put the entire bill on the ballot paper. As I mentioned, in most cases the average voter is not interested in reading those legal mechanics anyway.
In the case of the recent term 17 referendum, the text of the question was released on the very same day the referendum was announced. The minister who spoke before me read the question into the record so I will not do that again, but the referendum related to that question and not to the actual legal wording of the amendment which was subsequently voted on in the House.
Some members will have received letters complaining that the Government of Newfoundland used its resources and finances to support the yes position during the referendum campaign but that opponents had no such resources and should have been given public money to fund their opposition. Opponents were completely free to use their own resources to counter the government position and they did so. There was no limit to how much they could spend on their side of the argument and they did advertise and promote their position very widely just as the government did.
The Newfoundland government said that it spent around $300,000 to promote its position, but the other side to my knowledge has released no figures. In my opinion there is no convincing argument to support the contention that opponents to a government position should be given public funds to counter that position. If we were to approve of such a measure in general, Canada would soon be bankrupt and governments would be paralysed by special interest group activities totally funded from the public purse. Besides, there is absolutely no evidence in any jurisdiction that employs public referendums that the amount of money spent on the issue by one side over the other affects the outcome in any significant way.
For example, in Canada the Charlottetown accord yes side spent 10 times as much as the winning no side and it still lost. In the 1993 election the PC Party spent something like $40 million and had access to huge amounts of free media time but just elected two members. The Reform Party spent a fraction of that amount, had hardly any free media time and elected 52 members.
In Newfoundland, members will be interested to learn, the single most common complaint received by the chief electoral officer during both referendums had nothing to do with spending. It was that too many polling stations were on church property and that religious symbols, statues and materials were being used in attempts to influence the vote.
Some of those upset by the outcome of the two referendums have claimed that the government would not permit scrutineers at the polling stations, but in fact the government had no power to make that decision. The determination that scrutineers were not appropriate was made by the chief electoral officer as authorized by the Newfoundland elections act.
In the absence of clearly identified yes and no organizations, the chief electoral officer determined that scrutineers would not be authorized in the polling stations for either side. He did, however, provide a returning officer, a deputy returning officer and an official witness at each polling station. The job of the official witness was to ensure the security of the vote at each station, and to date there is no evidence whatsoever of any tampering.
Some people have criticized the referendum process on the basis that only 52% of the people voted, that 73% of that 52% voted yes, and that the equivalent of 39% of eligible voters approved the question and therefore the results were not valid.
The voter turnout was within normal ranges for this type of electoral event in Canada. To argue that the result is not valid leads us down a very slippery slope indeed. Many MPs in the House were elected with percentages well below 50 and percentages in the high 30s are not unusual.
The Liberal government won a governing mandate in 1997 with less than 40% of the vote, a situation that many would argue has a significantly greater negative impact than an amendment to term 17. Yet it stands. I have yet to observe any government member arguing that the results of the 1997 election are invalid, even though the majority of voters actually voted against the Liberals.
As a dedicated believer in referendums, even those in the form of an election, I defend the right of taxpayers and voters to make a mistake; to learn that they made a mistake; and to correct that mistake, if indeed it was a mistake, via a subsequent referendum. Such an exercise is in the end far more productive than having arrogant, self-righteous, genuinely well intentioned, biased or badly informed politicians forcing their will upon the people.
As the leader of the Reform Party said earlier today, Newfoundlanders were well aware the issue involved not only educational reform but the difficult subject of extinguishing, granting and balancing majority and minority rights.
Parliament should therefore be very careful in presuming that its judgment on any of these matters is somehow superior to that of the people of Newfoundland. Let us respect their intelligence, their consideration of majority and minority rights, and their right to make decisions about the way their province operates its system of education. Let us make sure they receive from the House an appropriate endorsement of the term 17 amendment.