Mr. Speaker, I want to deal with the item the member mentioned in this intervention and in previous interventions when he stood in questions and comments and suggested that there was no electoral fraud in Canada. The Chief Electoral Officer presented himself to the committee and that was not what he said.
Initially he said, “We will prosecute and we are prosecuting electoral fraud vigorously”. I asked him to tell us how much had actually been done and to send the committee the information. Having been the Chief Electoral Officer for five elections, I asked him how many prosecutions there had been. His answer was that there had been less than one prosecution per election.
I do not think the member is actually suggesting that less than one case of actual fraud occurs in the entire country over the course of more than one election. A more plausible scenario is that basically the way the law is written it is impossible to prosecute electoral fraud. The problem is that it is impossible to hunt down the multiple voting that occurs because there is no record left behind. This is an attempt to deal with that problem.
I want to give an idea of how bad the problem is. In the riding of Trinity—Spadina in the last election we were told that thousands of people turned up on election day who did not have any record of their existence on the voters rolls but were allowed to vote because the choice came down to either allowing them to vote en masse or basically freezing out large numbers.
One man, James DiFiori, said that he voted three times, once for the Liberals, once for the Conservatives and once for the New Democrats. He is the only person being prosecuted by the Chief Electoral Officer after the last election because he was the only one for whom they had any hard evidence whatsoever.
This is an attempt to deal with the fact that there is no evidence by creating a paper trail, by creating ways to allow people to vote legally and preventing others from voting multiple times or illegally when they are not eligible. I wonder if there is a response from the member to this particular problem.