Mr. Speaker, one of the concerns I continue to have is the false impression being left by the government in general, with the current minister having to carry the can, apparently. I will not go further than to say that she is responding to questions and others are not.
The first thing is that a distinct impression was intended to be left. That is a very awkward way of putting it, but back in December, for two weeks we were all under the impression that the government had decided not to appeal the Frank case. The whole presentation of Bill C-50 was that we needed this to implement the Frank decision as if we were complying. It was a constitutional judgment, the government realized it did not stand any hope of winning an appeal, so it would no longer fight against enfranchising all these Canadians who had, before now, been disenfranchised, and it would not appeal. That turned out to be totally false. Once we started probing, the government case continued.
There is no actual interest on the part of the government in enfranchising Canadians, and that should inform how we understand what it is trying to do with this bill. When it is forced by the courts to abide by the Frank judgment, this is how it is going to do it, and it is going to do it in a way that makes it exceedingly difficult when compared to what the process used to be for citizens abroad.
It has to be put on the record that the government is appealing the Frank decision. That is part and parcel of why it is seeking to make it more difficult for Canadians to vote through this new bill, and why the government does not want a lot of debate or awareness about the bill at all.
The second thing is that our colleague has made a very good effort to present it in a way that suggests that some streamlining is going on here. The presentation is that a bunch of rules are being cleaned up and the Frank judgment has kind of spurred that analysis of how to make the process of citizens voting from abroad more efficient, secure, fair and everything else. The fact is that of the three or four major changes, the single biggest change in the bill is that those who are abroad cannot begin the process of voting until after the writ drops. Only at that point are they allowed to register. Then there is a whole series of steps involving the mail across the globe, which creates the huge risk that they will never get the vote at all. Therefore, the streamlining subtext of this is absolutely inaccurate.
It is really important to know that both of the points I have made about the Frank judgment, and what is going on with the judgment with respect to my last point, speak to why the government delayed so long in bringing it back for debate: because of the attention it would continue to generate. It now wants almost no attention, which is tied to the fact that the bill is set down for debate tomorrow, Friday, the day when the least attention is paid to bills in the House.