Mr. Speaker, I must say I am rising today with great exasperation and frustration on a question of privilege pursuant to section 48(1) of the Standing Orders, regarding misleading information that the Minister of State for Democratic Reform has provided to the House. I say I am exasperated because members know as well as I do that in the past few months, my colleagues and I from the NDP official opposition caucus have had to stand up many times in the House to denounce misleading comments by members of the opposite side.
Mr. Speaker, I am going to read from a statement you made yesterday in the House: “As has been suggested, the information shared in this House does hold extraordinary value as it forms the basis upon which decisions are made in the House”.
Mr. Speaker, you will recall that we raised a similar question of privilege in March 2012 with regard to the comments made by the then minister of Human Resources and Social Development, who said that there was no quota system for recovering EI payments when in fact there was.
We also raised a similar question of privilege in October 2013, when we brought to the House's attention the Prime Minister's misleading statements concerning his office's involvement in the Wright-Duffy scandal.
We raised a question on the 100% fabricated evidence from the member for Mississauga—Streetsville, who said in this House he had witnessed cases of voter fraud when, in fact, he simply had not.
Finally, just two weeks ago we raised a similar question regarding misleading comments from the minister of state for finance, who manipulated numbers to justify his party's opposition to the NDP's CPP expansion plan.
My colleagues and I do not just raise these questions of privilege for fun, far from it. I would rather not have to rise in the House and waste the precious little time that we are given for debates—which is often cut short by this government—to ask the House to look into misleading comments once again made by a minister.
However, as the opposition House leader, it is my duty to raise these questions and to hold the government responsible for what it tells the House and Canadians.
Therefore, it is with some irritation that I want to present to you today the facts concerning the specific case at hand: the comments made by the Minister of State for Democratic Reform.
During question period in this House on Wednesday, April 2, the Minister of State for Democratic Reform was asked why he was ready to disenfranchise thousands of Canadians by removing voter ID cards as possible forms of identification for voters. This is what the member replied on April 2:
There are regular reports of people receiving multiple cards and using them to vote multiple times. That, too, can be found on the Elections Canada website.
If this were true, it would indeed be concerning. As we all know, voting multiple times is a serious legal offence. That is why the NDP followed up on his statement. We searched Elections Canada's website and we asked witnesses at the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, currently studying Bill C-23, if there were, in fact, cases of people using multiple cards to vote multiple times.
The answer we found is unambiguous. There is only one documented case of this, as we well know, which was a gag by the Quebec TV show Infoman. Therefore, the Minister of State for Democratic Reform is blatantly misleading the House when he said there are “regular reports” of voters voting multiple times.
We tried to give the minister of state a chance to correct the record during question period on April 3, the following day, when the leader of the official opposition, the NDP leader, asked him to give us examples of these “regular reports of people receiving multiple cards and using them to vote multiple times”. At that time, the minister of state actually changed his story.
On April 3, he replied:
In fact, there are documented cases where people received multiple voter information cards. I gave the example, which was documented by the French CBC, where two Montrealers each received two voter information cards and therefore each voted twice.
In his reply, the minister of state could only resort to citing, again, one single example that exists of voters voting multiple times, but he changed his story from “regular reports of people receiving multiple cards and using them to vote multiple times” to “cases where people received multiple voter information cards”.
In his answer on April 2, the Minister of State for Democratic Reform was referring to the reports showing that there are cases of people receiving more than one voter card. However, none of these reports say that the people in question actually used these to vote more than once. The minister of state knew this, and therefore misled the House when he manipulated the information to add, from his own fertile imagination, that people had used their voter cards to vote multiple times.
Mr. Speaker, if you are still not convinced, allow me to tell you about the many witnesses who appeared before the committee and who all told us that there was no evidence of systemic or organized voter fraud.
Harry Neufeld, the former chief electoral officer of British Columbia, said:
“There was no evidence of fraud whatsoever”, in the cases he reviewed, and that he has “only been privy to a handful of cases of voter fraud” in his entire career.
Marc Mayrand, Chief Electoral Officer of Elections Canada, also said that there was no systemic or organized voter fraud.
How, then, can the Minister of State for Democratic Reform claim that Elections Canada has documented multiple cases of voter fraud?
I will not take the time here today to mention all the precedents where it was found that prima facie contempt had occurred when members misled the House. I will spare members in the House from that today, since we have talked about those cases before when other similar incidents occurred, incidents which are unfortunately far too frequent.
Let me simply remind the House that, according to the House of Commons Procedure and Practice, second edition, on page 115, “...Misleading a Minister or a Member has also been considered a form of obstruction and thus a prima facie breach of privilege”.
Moreover, and this is the essence of the matter, the Parliamentary Practice, 22nd edition, by Erskine May states the following on page 63 that “...it is of paramount importance that ministers give accurate and truthful information to Parliament, correcting any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity”.
Mr. Speaker, I see that you are getting tired of this, as are New Democrats, and so are Canadians. Canadians are tired of the misleading comments from the other side. We are tired of the Conservative government’s misleading the House in order to justify its wrong-headed policies.
The opposition to the unfair elections act is mounting and virtually unanimous. Conservatives stand to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters who, by many assessments, are coincidentally not usually Conservative voters. To justify this, the Minister of State for Democratic Reform had to resort to making up stories in the House because he simply could not find real evidence to bring forward. All he has is one single gag by Infoman.
The Minister of State for Democratic Reform has, one, offered misleading statements to the House; two, did so knowingly; and, three, he did so with the deliberate intent to mislead parliamentarians. Therefore, Mr. Speaker, I ask you to find that a prima facie contempt of the House exists in this case.
More than that, Mr. Speaker, since the problem of ministers knowingly misleading the House seems to be becoming endemic in the Conservative government, I would appreciate receiving guidance from you as to how we can put an end to the practice of government benches providing misleading information to parliamentarians and to the Canadian public.