Mr. Speaker, I will comment on two aspects of the speech by my colleague from the Bloc.
First, I am a little taken aback with the enthusiasm shown by the Liberal Party and the Bloc for the bill. It seems the government has introduced the bill based on the premise that it is necessary to change the part of the Election Acts dealing with voter ID because of widespread fraud.
I went to the website of Elections Canada. In the last federal election one person was charged and prosecuted for having voted incorrectly. The person was not yet a citizen and should not have cast a ballot. In the election in 2004, there was not one incident. In the election prior to that there were three.
First, if we are entering into these fairly draconian measures, which we argue will have the effect of disenfranchising many Canadians who will be unable to produce the extra photo ID contemplated by this, and if we are doing away with the idea of a statutory declaration as being acceptable for identification, why are we taking such heavy-handed measures when there really has not been a pattern of voter fraud? That is the first point I would raise to my colleague from the Bloc.
The second is the date of birth going on the permanent voters list is an appalling recipe for identity theft. We might as well be helping those who would steal identities. All one needs to get a fake credit card is name, address, phone number and date of birth. It is like having a PIN number.
During an election campaign, hundreds of volunteers go in and out of our offices. We cannot stop them from having access to that voters list. I agree it is important for Elections Canada to have dates of birth, but to have dates of birth, that personal, private information, floating around is absolutely dangerous.
My colleague, the hon. member for Ottawa Centre, said that relying on the government to protect one's privacy is like asking a peeping Tom to install one's window blinds. This is the risk that we are running.
I sit on the privacy committee. We are currently in the process of looking at the PIPEDA legislation, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, dealing with just these very issues of people having a right to privacy, which is just as important as many of the other competing rights and privileges.
It gets to be a charter issue. Section 3 of the charter guarantees the right to vote in the elections of members of Parliament or provincial legislatures. We believe the barriers put in place by these new stringent identification rules are a barrier to the point that thousands of people will be disenfranchised and will be denied their charter right.
We just heard a constitutional expert, someone who teaches constitutional law at university, the member for Vancouver Quadra, say that he approves of this legislation. How can he and the member justify what will clearly infringe upon one's right to vote and access to vote from a constitutional and charter point of view?