Mr. Speaker, although I do not wish to delay the business of the House, I would like to revisit the issue raised yesterday in the House by the Minister of State for Democratic Reform in response to the question of privilege I raised on April 10.
I raised that question of privilege based on the fact that the minister made misleading statements in the House. He said that there were multiple reports on the Elections Canada website of people using their voter information cards to vote multiple times.
As you know, Mr. Speaker, yesterday the minister responded to that question of privilege in the House, and I must say, I was troubled by his response, which was nothing more than an attempt to confuse the Canadian public even further on this issue, without offering any kind of real response.
The minister of state decided to respond to my question of privilege by citing seven cases of people voting supposedly multiple times that led to compliance agreements in the 2011 election. I would argue that citing 7 cases of approximately 15 million voters is quite a weak argument to begin with. It gets worse.
Only two of the cases cited by the minister were actually associated with voter information cards. What the minister did not mention was that these two cases were from the TV show Infoman. As we have said many times, these two examples cannot be used as the sole justification for banning the use of voter information cards, since they were taken from a comedy show. Furthermore, the problem is that the minister claims there are many cases, although he can only cite two, which were taken from Infoman.
The minister himself stated that although the voters in question tried to vote a second time by using their voter information card, they were not able to vote. In fact, in both cases, the voters in question were told that they could not use their voter information card because their address had been crossed from the list and transferred to the second polling station they had tried to vote at.
In addition, I would like to point to the fact that only three examples used by the minister even refer to the 2011 election. Two of the examples he used were from 2006 and two were from 2004.
I also noticed that the minister avoided mentioning the names of the voters involved after his first three examples, without saying that the remaining four anonymous cases were not valid. This does raise some questions.
I believe the minister's response to my question of privilege was nothing more than an attempt to confuse Canadians with a quite long-winded statement, citing very few cases, some of which were already well known and which did not address the issue at hand. Even if the two cases from Infoman, where people tried and failed to use voter information cards to vote, are counted, that does not count as regular reports, which, to bring back my original point, is what the minister claimed in the House. I believe the minister might have known that his confusion tactics might not work, which was why he offered us a second argument yesterday, which in my opinion is as flawed as the first.
The minister claimed in his response that in his original statement he was making two separate points: (a) that there were regular reports of people receiving multiple cards; and (b) that there were regular reports of people voting multiple times. Thus, every case of people voting more than once would count as evidence of his original statement, but that is clearly not the case.
What the minister originally said in the House was, “There are regular reports of people receiving multiple cards and using them to vote multiple times”.
It is blatantly obvious, as evidenced by the use of the word “them” in the second clause of this statement, that the minister was not making two separate points. The question the minister was asked when he made this statement was specifically about voter information cards. He clearly claimed in response that there were regular reports of people using voter information cards to vote multiple times.
Yesterday the Minister of State for Democratic Reform attempted to confuse the public and to throw mud on this whole issue instead of apologizing for what clearly appears to be misleading comments to the House. Canadians and the parliamentarians representing them deserve to be told the truth, especially by ministers and especially by the minister responsible for modifying Canada's electoral law.
Mr. Speaker, we look forward to your ruling on this matter. I thank you for the opportunity to respond to the Minister of State for Democratic Reform.