Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to stand in the House to debate the bill before us, Bill C-31, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and the Public Service Employment Act.
I believe the central issue of the bill hinges upon two points of view. One is the protection of privacy of the individual Canadian and the other is an increase the integrity and efficiency of our electoral system.
I believe the amendments from the Senate are appropriate and measured. We are dealing in the minority government situation, but we have a consensus around the amendments to the bill, which I believe will adequately protect the right of individuals privacy and at the same time will go a long way to improve the efficiency of our electoral system by enhancing the voter identification process.
The amendments will remove from the original bill references to the year of birth and to the date of birth, but will include the creation of a unique, randomly generated identifier for each electoral person, which will then be assigned to the Chief Electoral Officer to monitor.
The amendment will allow parties and Canadians to feel confident in our system. They will know that our process will allow for enough transparency in the system. At the same time we will have a reasonable and balanced approach to ensure we have a system about which Canadians can be confident.
During the last election, some issues and concerns were raised in the urban areas in Toronto, I believe it was Trinity—Spadina. Allegations were made that there may have been voter fraud. Some 10,000 Canadians signed up on the day of the election, through a process of serial vouching. People would vouch that the other people were who they believed them to be, then those people could vouch for other people and then those other people could vouch for other people. As this string of serial vouching went along, from a reasonable individual's point of view, there had to be some lapse in the integrity of that string.
I believe the bill tries to deal with those concerns in such a way that one Canadian can vouch for somebody else, but it eliminates the serial process of vouching, which I believe is a good thing.
One of the hon. members earlier in the discussion today raised a concern with respect to the proof of identification. I remember I stood in the House when we originally debated the bill and I talked about the requirement of the acceptability of first nations status cards as proof of who an individual was to allow the person to vote.
The issue we have is a delicate one. We are walking a fine line trying to ensure we are improving the integrity of the system by requiring valid identification from Canadians before they can vote. At the same time, we ensure we open up the process to enough Canadians so we have broad participation in the system.
We have a unique situation. Because we have a minority government, we have parties from both sides of the House agreeing on the amendments to the bill, on the balanced and reasonable nature of the bill and on the enhancement and the transparency of the process. It is a good thing for Canadians that Parliament agree, like we have on this. I look forward to the bill being carried and put into law.