Mr. Speaker, I am rising to support this bill introduced by my colleague from the Bloc. Its principle has been long supported by my party.
As has already been said, we have now what is really a legacy from a political past that has been much too much under the control of partisan decision making. One of the great progressive tendencies since the 19th century, as a matter of fact, not only in Canada but in England and other developed democracies, has been to professionalize a lot of the activity that was once totally under the control of partisan politics.
This, in terms of the administration of our elections, is one of the few remaining anomalies in this democratization process and it is time we got rid of it.
I must say I was surprised by what the parliamentary secretary was saying. I do not know if he was speaking as a private individual or for the government on this matter. He was saying that there is really no need to change because there has not been some colossal fiasco. To say the least, that is not very good reasoning.
We have made all kinds of other changes in the past because we believe that a public function, which should be transparent and accountable, almost by definition has to be devoid of partisan political control. Because if something goes wrong, then it is too easy to blame the fact partisan political activity led to the fault in the first place. It is such an obvious change that is due to be made to our system. The Chief Electoral Officer himself has called for professionalizing this and taking these decisions away from partisan politicians.
As someone who has run in eight elections, seven in my hometown of Oshawa and one more recently here in Ottawa, I have not run into difficulties in the electoral process itself, but as our Bloc colleague has pointed out, with our Conservative colleague following suit, there have been a number of problems associated with a decision making process that is less than fully professionalized.
Even if incompetence has been revealed, it has not been due to the fact that a Liberal has appointed a Liberal or a Conservative has appointed a Conservative but because the person was incompetent. That in itself is reason to professionalize the whole process: to make it public, to have stated criteria for the job, and to have men and women apply for the job and have someone quite independent of the government of the day making the decision about the hiring, and subsequently, if that is necessary, the firing.
I will conclude my brief comments by saying that the New Democrats strongly support this measure. Since his party has talked about the democratic deficit, we remain astonished at this point that our Liberal colleague is not supporting this bill. Three parties in the House have spoken for it. I hope that when the vote takes place a substantial majority of the members of the House of Commons will vote for it.