Mr. Speaker, it is always a pleasure to participate in a debate when you are in the chair. I will read a clause from C-16.
Clause 1 is one of the most important:
1. The Canada Elections Act is amended by adding the following before the heading “WRITS OF ELECTION” before section 57:
Date of General Election
56.1 (1) Nothing in this section affects the powers of the Governor General, including the power to dissolve Parliament at the Governor General's discretion.
If this bill were to be passed and adopted , it would receive the royal assent of the Governor General, the Right Hon. Michaëlle Jean, at her discretion, during her term of office.
The most important section and the actual core of Bill C-16 is the section that states:
Nothing in this section affects the powers of the Governor General, including the power to dissolve Parliament at the Governor General's discretion.
For those who may be watching TV right now and may not understand what that actually means, under the British North America Act and our Canadian Constitution, the Governor General has full authority, a royal prerogative, to dissolve Parliament at her or his discretion. Tradition calls for the Governor General to do so only at the recommendation of the sitting prime minister.
Therefore, one could pardon the Conservative Party prior to becoming the government, when it was in official opposition, for saying it was talking about fixed elections, but in fact not fixed elections. Now that it actually forms the government, one can no longer excuse that. The government has constitutional experts at its fingertips and knows very well that it cannot institute true fixed election dates without diminishing the discretionary power of the Governor General under our Constitution to dissolve Parliament upon recommendation of the prime minister. This would mean that the Governor General would have absolutely no royal prerogative at her discretion to dissolve Parliament. That requires a constitutional amendment, ladies and gentlemen.
So when the Conservative government, since tabling Bill C-16, has a campaign calling Bill C-16 a bill to create fixed election dates, I would say the government and the bill are clearly duplicitous, because that bill is not about fixed election dates. That bill, by precisely saying in that very paragraph that nothing in it affects the powers of the Governor General, “including the power to dissolve Parliament at the Governor General's discretion”, shows that it is duplicitous.
It has absolutely nothing to do with fixed election dates, because in fact fixed election dates are fixed election dates. One cannot change the date at any time. In order for the Conservative government to bring in legislation with actual, factual and true fixed election dates, its bill would have to diminish the powers of the Governor General to dissolve Parliament at any time as per her or his discretion. In order to do that, the bill would have to amend our Constitution. This bill does not do that.
The Speaker of the House has said that I can say this, so if the government were honest—and that has been deemed parliamentary—the government would in fact say that this bill is not about fixed election dates and that this bill does not in any way diminish the power of the Governor General nor the authority of the Prime Minister at any time, even the day after. If the bill is adopted, goes through all three readings in the House, goes through all three readings in the Senate, becomes legislation and the Elections Canada Act is changed, the very next day the sitting Prime Minister could go to the Governor General and say, “I'm calling an election”, and the Governor General would be able to dissolve Parliament.
So for the Conservative government to claim that Bill C-16 is about fixed election dates is not telling the whole story. The story is what under this we would be talking about for the Prime Minister between the date that Bill C-16 would become law and the third Monday of October in the fourth calendar year following the first general election after this section comes into force, which would be Monday, October 19, 2009. Between the date that this bill comes into effect and Monday, October 19, 2009, the Prime Minister could go to the Governor General at any time on any single day and say, “I am asking and recommend that you dissolve this Parliament”. The Governor General would have the power and the authority under our Constitution to dissolve Parliament and launch a general election.
At the very least, the Conservative government should state in fact that Bill C-16 is not fulfilling its electoral promise to create fixed election dates. What it is doing is simply saying that if the Prime Minister, between the adoption of this bill and Monday, October 19, 2009, has not woken up at any time and decided that he wants an election, then the election will happen on October 19, 2009, but that at any time before that the Prime Minister could recommend to the Governor General to in fact dissolve Parliament. That is the first thing.
When one looks at what is the definition of “fixed election”, I would recommend that my colleagues go to a major study that was done by Henry Milner, “Fixing Canada's Unfixed Election Dates: A Political Season to Reduce the Democratic Deficit”, published by the Institute for Research in Public Policy on December 5, 2005, volume 6, number 6. He actually gives a definition. It is quite interesting. He states that a fixed election date is when there is no possibility of dissolving the assembly, whether it is a national assembly or a parliament, prior to the date that has been fixed by legislation.
In any other system, yes, the Constitution of the country may in fact establish, for instance, that the term of the assembly is three years or four years and actually may lay out the third Monday of the 10th month of the year. There is thus an election every three or four years, but it also allows a mechanism for early dissolution, either because of a non-confidence vote or because there is an issue that the government wishes to plebiscite on. So in fact, that is not a fixed election date. That would be called a fixed flexible date, because while there is supposedly a fixed date, the government or the assembly still has the power and the authority to dissolve prior to the expiry date of the fixed term, whether it is three years, four years or five years.
The very first thing, the very least thing the Conservative government and Prime Minister Harper and his cabinet should say is in fact—