Mr. Speaker, while I realize that the focus of the hon. member's speech was the transmission of election results, we believe that a serious flaw in this legislation is the failure to answer the call of Elections Canada officials for more power to investigate electoral fraud, and in particular, the power to compel witnesses to testify under oath to aid an investigation.
This is a power that resides with the director of competition in a corporate context. One offence under the Competition Act, strangely enough, is deceptive telemarketing. Presumably, the director of competition can compel someone to testify under oath to aid an investigation for deceptive telemarketing. However, if that deceptive telemarketing is an electoral fraud case, that power is not available. Elections Canada has asked for it, but it is not in the act.
I would have thought that the government would be quite interested in giving additional powers, certainly powers equal to those of the director of competition, to find out who the bad people were who got into its database and participated in the robocall scheme. If that is, in fact, the case, why have these powers not been included in the act?