Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the hon. member for Brossard—La Prairie for his question, which will also allow me to complete my response.
In Quebec, the permanent voters list is an extremely important tool. For example, every time a person moves and changes their address on their driver's licence or social insurance card, the address is automatically changed on the voters list. This makes life easier for the Chief Electoral Officer and also for the individual, who will not have to jump through hoops to ensure that their name is on the voters list. This does not solve every problem since some people do not have a driver's licence, although people usually have a health insurance card. Nonetheless, this makes it easier to register voters, who then receive a notice from the Chief Electoral Officer.
The federal Chief Electoral Officer wants to incorporate this permanent list. It has been noted during past elections that this list was quite incomplete and people who honestly thought they were registered on voters lists learned they were not.
At the federal level, rather than address this problem by creating a permanent voters list, they decided to allow voters to be added to the voters list on election day, which sometimes causes problems in terms of identifying the voters and their eligibility to vote. In Quebec, a voter can only be added to the voters list during the period scheduled by law for the revision of the voters list. In my opinion this provides a better guarantee to citizens who have the right to vote and greater fairness for everyone.
The response of the Chief Electoral Officer and Parliament was to create a new gadget to respond to a real problem. I think they should have opted for a real tool like a permanent list. That is precisely the type of suggestion that Bill C-55 proposes. I am not against allowing people to register on election day since the voters list is so poorly managed. However, I think we should address the real problem, and that is the quality of the voters list. We should make it easier for people to register on this list before the election to make sure they are eligible to vote.