Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise in the House, and I also want to inform my colleagues, and you of course, that I will be sharing my time with the member for Sherbrooke. This just goes to show that this really is not a partisan issue, since the member for Sherbrooke is an NDP member, although a worthy successor to the hon. Jean Charest, who used to be a Conservative leader and minister. This shows we can take a non-partisan approach.
As we gather here in the House today, once again we are witnessing another installment of the Liberal government's blatant improvisation, and on such a delicate and fragile issue as electoral reform.
I would remind the House that, in the throne speech, the Governor General uttered the words that would lead to the exercise that brings us to where we are today. He said that 2015 would be the last election under the old voting system. What are we dealing with today?
I remember clearly when the Governor General made that statement. I was in the Senate lobby with a number of members of the House of Commons. Right next to me was my friend, the hon. member for Beauport—Limoilou, as well as the Minister of Foreign Affairs, with whom I have little in common politically, given the nature of his commitments as compared to ours. However, I have the utmost respect and admiration for his genuine political commitment. For 20 years he has been recognized across Canada as perhaps the leading academic expert on constitutionality, elections, the electoral process, and politics. He earned a doctorate in political science in France, and, as we know, he is the former leader of the Liberal Party. He was quite surprised and quite pleased. In fact, I have that wrong. He was not surprised, but he was pleased to see that the government, through the Governor General, was committed to change.
I need hardly remind the House that the hon. Minister of Foreign Affairs made his own commitment in 2012, when he said that if we wanted to change the electoral system in Canada, then all signs pointed to a referendum, given our Canadian experience.
It was not us, the big bad Conservatives, who said that. It was the current Liberal minister, a senior minister in the current Prime Minister's government. The ball was in his court. We were very surprised to see this commitment because it was a major change.
The Liberals continue to remind everyone that it was an election promise and that more than 60% of people who voted for political parties wanted change. Need I remind them that in the Liberals' 97-page election platform there were three sentences about this promise. It cannot be said that it was a major commitment. There were five televised leaders' debates during the election campaign where the leaders could address the issues they felt were the most important. How many times was this subject raised by the Liberal leader? Zero. Not even once.
The only time this subject was ever raised was by the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands, the leader of the Green Party. The Liberals never made this a major issue. Nevertheless, it is an extremely important one because making changes to our electoral system means changing the most important institution in any democracy, since the electoral system determines who will sit in the House of Commons, who will form the government, and who will rule the state. Every other decision, whether we are talking about the budget, defence, foreign affairs, health, transport, or anything else, stems from the electoral system. As a result, the electoral system is the backbone of any democracy. If by chance the government wants to change the system, we, the Conservatives, like the Minister of Foreign Affairs, believe that it must be done by referendum because we politicians are all in a position of conflict of interest in this regard.
We are all human. Naturally, any time we make a decision we think about how it will affect us personally. For anyone who is involved in politics, there is nothing more personal than the electoral system. That is why we are fundamentally in a position of conflict of interest, and that is why we want to hold a referendum. I will come back to that later.
The Governor General made that announcement, but for six months, the government dragged its feet on telling us what its game plan was. Since we know that it wants to get this done in this term, and that it will take at least two years to change the electoral system, time is running out, and still it took them six months just to announce that a parliamentary committee will be formed to study the issue.
Here is the second piece of evidence of this government's improvisation: under pressure, primarily from the NDP but also the Green Party, the government finally agreed to change the membership of the committee so that it would not be partisan and the government would no longer have a majority. Some folks might say that after what happened with the majority report, perhaps the government would have changed its position if it had known how that was going to turn out, but that is another story.
Now the Liberals are improvising once again by changing the number of members on this parliamentary committee. What did we do? At my leader's invitation, I had the great privilege of sitting on that parliamentary committee, with such eminent and esteemed members as my friend from Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, who is right beside me.
I always have a hard time naming the federal ridings, as some of the names are so long. If we could use the electoral reform as an opportunity to simplify those names, everyone would be happy, myself included.
My 12 colleagues and I spent several months working long and hard on this issue. I would like to say hello to those who are here today: the five Liberal Party members; the official opposition members; the NDP members, with whom I really enjoyed working; the Bloc Québécois member, a former colleague of mine from the National Assembly; and the member forVictoria. We criss-crossed Canada to hear Canadians' thoughts on electoral reform. The results are pretty impressive, as is the amount of work that went into this.
The report that came out last week covered 57 meetings during which we heard from 196 witnesses. Another 567 people participated in the town halls that were held in 18 cities across Canada. The Victoria and Vancouver events were packed. Over 70 people registered. Attendance was not quite as high in other places. I have to admit that, in my hometown, Quebec City, barely 10 people came out. People are interested in this issue, and those who are interested are really very interested, but we have to recognize that not everybody cares about this issue.
The first step of this process consisted in consulting Canadians to see what they think. Nearly 600 people attended 18 town hall meetings from coast to coast to coast. There was even an e-consultation, the central theme of our discussion today. Exactly 22,247 people took part in that. Let us look at the numbers: 567 people attended town hall meetings and 22,000 people engaged in e-consultations.
On the government's suggestion, a number of MPs held kitchen meetings, as we say in Quebec, to see what people thought. There were 172 reports by members, plus two others, for a total of 174. An estimated 12,000 Canadians or more had their say at these meetings. That is great. Again, many people participated, and I would briefly add that some of them may have taken part in every form of this exercise. The bottom line is that a lot of people were engaged in the process. The NDP members also held their own consultations, in which 37,000 people participated online or responded to mailings.
However, we, the Conservatives, asked our fellow Canadians in 59 of our ridings what they thought. We asked them this question: if there were a change, should it be decided by a referendum? How many Canadians answered? With all due respect for previous exercises, it was not 567, nor 22,000, nor 12,000, nor 37,000 Canadians who answered, but 81,000. With all due respect for my colleagues, we had the highest score, as they say in hockey. We reached the most Canadians and obtained their opinions.
What 90% of these Canadians, or 73,740 of them to be precise, told us was that if by chance the government wants to make a change, it should hold a referendum. That is what the committee heard and what it identified in its report, the majority report in which the Conservatives, Bloc Québécois, NDP, and the Green Party asked that a referendum be held. That is the solution because we, the politicians, have a conflict of interest. If we want to change the underpinning of the entire electoral system, the government must ask Canadians what they think.
We submitted this report, and the government tried to play it down it and set it aside, even make a mockery of it, while insulting those who had prepared it. The government apologized, and so much the better.
However, the reality is that if the government ever wants to change anything, it has to go through a referendum and not this new improvised consultation called MyDemocracy.ca. Canadians deserve much better when it comes to electoral reform.