Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Lethbridge.
The first thing I want to say is that the Conservative Party believes democracy is an important institution. Democracy is important because it is how the people hold the government to account for its decisions. Democracy safeguards citizens' rights, such as the right to freedom of expression, the right to vote, and other democratic rights. Members on this side of the House believe that each and every Canadian should be empowered to exercise their democratic rights.
We also believe that we must protect our democratic institutions by ensuring that foreign entities do not interfere with our elections. As we have seen elsewhere in the world, such as in the United States, foreign entities have tried to interfere with democratic institutions.
The Liberal government's bill does not include a single clause to prevent foreign entities from interfering with our democratic institutions. For example, even if this bill is passed, foreign entities will still be able to send money to Canadian entities before an election, and that money can be used to influence election outcomes.
Last Thursday, I asked the Minister of Democratic Institutions why the government had not included this type of provision in the bill, but she did not answer.
In addition, the Liberals complained that we had proposed too many amendments. Apparently, the Liberals are okay with introducing a mistake-ridden bill of more than 200 pages, but not with us proposing so many amendments. That attitude shows that the Liberals do not take democracy seriously and that they do not want to take the time to follow the parliamentary process properly and ensure that we make the right decisions on this important issue.
When it comes to protecting our democratic institutions, we cannot limit debate. On the contrary, when we debate an issue as important as this, we must have as many amendments as possible and more time to debate them.
Moreover, Elections Canada will not have enough time to implement the changes stipulated by this bill. In fact, on April 24, 2018, the acting Chief Electoral Officer, Stéphane Perrault, said that in order for Elections Canada to have enough time to implement these changes, the bill would need to have royal assent in April. We are now October.
If the Liberals were really serious about addressing this issue, they should have introduced the bill much sooner. That way, we could have examined the bill more thoroughly, and we would have had time to present more amendments and study the amendments.
Instead, the Liberals decided to wait until the last minute before introducing the bill. Now they are trying to make up for their mistake by limiting debate on an incredibly important bill.
We seem to cycle through this process over and over again. The Liberal government tables an incomplete bill and then complains when the Conservatives try to make significant amendments to it.
I hope Canadians are aware of this process and see how the Liberals flout their duty to protect our democratic institutions.
We see with this bill so many problems in terms of the way that the Liberals approached these issues, their hypocrisy and the substantive problems with this legislation. I want to make a number of points in response to some of the things that have been discussed thus far.
First of all, we repeatedly hear this trope from the other side about how Conservatives want lower turnout allegedly and they also say that the changes that were previously made prevented Canadians from voting in the last election.
The government goes on and on about the data and evidence-based policy, though, so let us look objectively at the evidence. Let us look at Canadian elections over the last 60 years. If we consider a 60-year time horizon, a 40-year time horizon and a 25-year time horizon, and compare the elections won by Conservatives and won by Liberals, we will consistently see on average the elections Conservatives win involve higher turnout. As a bright-eyed staffer when I came to Parliament Hill, I was told that Conservatives want more people to vote because it is the right thing when more Canadians vote, but that there is also a practical reason. If we look historically, when more Canadians vote, Conservatives are more likely to win those elections. Anyone who disagrees can look at the numbers and do the averages. It is very clear.
Unfortunately, there is a downward trend in terms of turnout over the last 50 years in Canadian elections, but there are some aberrations to that. What we saw in the last election was actually a significant increase in voter turnout. If the government wants to claim that people were prevented from voting, it would have a hard time making that case since in the last election, after the changes that were made, there was a significant spike in turnout.
When the government says that somehow the Conservatives were trying to disenfranchise people, that people were prevented from voting, I would like to know what evidence it has to support that claim, and if it can find any indication of who those people are and what that situation would be. It talks about the issue of ID, and it does not seem to understand the reality that there are so many different options people can use for ID. What about a student? Maybe a student can use their student card. What about a person who is homeless? A person who is homeless can get a letter from a shelter. What about a senior? A senior using medication can use a prescription label as part of their ID. There are so many different options.
If there are Canadians out there who have none of these ID options available, then I would suggest that a better fix would be for us to look for ways to help those Canadians get access to ID. Even outside of voting, there are many benefits to having identification. There are many things that are very difficult to do if one does not have identification. If the government really thinks there is a population with none of the IDs we have listed, then I welcome a strategy from it on how we can ensure everybody in Canada has some means of ID, some ability to identify themselves. That is a much more logical solution. One listens to the speeches from the government, and it is clear it has a very difficult time identifying who could not have one of the IDs mentioned by Elections Canada. Again, if somebody does not, let us fix that issue rather than calling something ID which very clearly is not. I am referring to the voter information card, which we know is full of errors.
It is important to underline the failure of the government to address the issue of foreign interference in our elections. I am repeatedly frustrated by how naive the government seems to be in terms of its engagement in the world. Top of mind is a recent meeting between this Prime Minister and the leader of Turkey discussing the issue of how journalists can be protected. There are real issues in many countries that need to be addressed, but the pretense now seems to be to pretend the Turkish government is a champion of the rights of journalists, which is obviously pretty far off the mark given the realities happening in Turkey today.
There are so many different countries and actors around the world that want to influence the direction of Canadian policy and are actively trying to do so. This is something I hear about repeatedly when I talk to Canadians in cultural communities. They see and hear about efforts by other governments or by other foreign entities to try to influence the direction of policy in Canada, and yet there are no meaningful measures in this bill to address foreign interference in our elections. The Conservatives proposed those amendments, but unfortunately they were rejected. There are many problems with this bill. The government needed to do better, and we are opposing this legislation on that basis.