Mr. Speaker, I have known my colleague and friend for some years. We have been in this place for a while and have seen a couple of ups and downs. I too share one of the concerns she has raised, which is the participation of young people and the growing sense of cynicism.
I would offer her party and leader this compliment. In the last election, they tapped into that sense of desperation and fear about our elections. A great number of young people supported her and her party with a sense that the current government would be different. Clearly, that was the promise.
When the Prime Minister was a candidate, he made some significant promises around our democracy that were quite captivating, particularly to young and progressive folks. One of them, of course, is the now infamous promise that 2015 would be the last election under first past the post. A number of my colleagues on her side got to share the experience of what that betrayal was like once the government said no.
Specifically on this, in general, a lot of people now get much of their news from social media. That is a leading way of distributing information. One of the risks to politics is the spreading of what is called misinformation and disinformation. We are combining that new power with the power of large, significant and complex databases. That is information that all parties gather on individual voters, not groups of voters, as she well knows, from the 1990s and early 2000s. The information we now have on individual voters, voting preference, voting history, age, telephone number, religious affiliations, sexual orientation, all sorts of incredibly personal information is gathered by political parties, yet there are no rules in place right now that say the parties have to keep any standards in protecting that privacy or what they do with that data. We are combining the great power of social media and being able to target individual voters.
On Bill C-76, the Chief Electoral Officer recommended strengthening privacy rules. The New Democrats put forward amendments to do that and the government rejected all of them. Why?