Mr. Speaker, I would like to elaborate a little further, because what we essentially have here, raised under the point of order, is actually a debate as to the issue that is in the legislation.
There are some very important facts, though, that have been omitted from the submission. The first fact that was omitted from the submission, and the wording was used very carefully, was that cards like this were not used by Elections Canada for identification at the time, the implication being that there were no such cards. However, there were voter information cards sent out by Elections Canada to electors at that time. They did receive them. Hence the phone call that the hon. member received.
Having been Minister for Democratic Reform in the period after 2006, I can say that the reason Elections Canada can say with certainty that they were not authorized for use as identification is that we had not yet passed into law the requirement for people to show identification when they voted, so of course they were not used for a provision that did not yet exist in the law.
The fact that they were not used for that purpose is a red herring. It is entirely irrelevant. Everybody knows what the practice was in those days. There was no requirement to show identification. What most people did was walk in, take the card they had received at their home, present it, and say that they were there to vote. There was no inquiry into whether that was who they were or not. Elections officials simply accepted the card, and people voted on that basis.
That is why the action to which the hon. member for Edmonton Centre was referring was one whereby somebody was saying that they knew a way that they could probably achieve fraud. The reason they knew this was that anybody who lived in an apartment and who threw away their card was unlikely to bother showing up to vote, so there was a good chance someone else could show up in their name, present their card, and vote.
When we look at all those facts, it is quite clear that nothing the hon. member for Edmonton Centre said was incorrect or misleading in any way. In fact, if someone is misleading right now, it is the individual who is trying to raise the question of privilege. He is the one who is misleading the House, because he is implying there were voter identification provisions that did not exist in the law at the time and he is implying that Elections Canada did not send out such cards, which at that time they did.
I would say that this is an open-and-shut case. There is no question of privilege here to be presented. This is a very different matter from what was raised earlier in the House.