Mr. Speaker, the member has raised a worthwhile and interesting question, which I myself have raised with the Chief Electoral Officer. I mentioned how frustrated I was that they are opaque at Elections Canada. They now report on prosecutions for people having voted fraudulently; they did not do this formerly.
I had to ask the chief electoral officer of the day, Mr. Kingsley, about prosecutions. When I asked him a few years back about the previous few elections, he provided a list that showed there was less than one prosecution per election. I think there were three prosecutions over the period of five elections at that time. In the elections of 2006 and 2008, in both cases only one person in the entire country was prosecuted for any form of voting fraud. I suppose an argument could be made that no people in the entire country had engaged in electoral fraud except for these two people. They were both convicted after they wrote articles in the Toronto Star explaining how easy it was to vote fraudulently, and both of them did so in response to stories about how there was widespread fraudulent voting going on.
When we see it is impossible to be prosecuted except when one complains that Elections Canada has no security and writes about it, thereby incriminating oneself, I would suggest there is indeed a problem. However, that is not the only problem. It is impossible to confirm after the fact that votes have been cast, whether fraudulently or not, by people who were not eligible. That is a separate and wider question, and it should be resolved to a large degree by the bill.