Mr. Speaker, I would like to wish my friend a merry Christmas, and the best to his family as well.
Here is the strange irony of what we are going through in the final hours of this House of Commons in this place. Of course, the House of Commons will continue, but 400 metres that way.
If we think about all the debates that have happened across this floor, where wars have been debated, Canadians have been interned, terrible things have been discussed and hard debates have happened, at the foundation of all that is our democracy, the way we vote and the way we elect people. As the member said, there are all these laudable pieces of this bill that help people vote and allow for better reporting as to what happens.
However, during his speech, part of me was wondering this. If it is such a wonderful bill, why did it take three years for it to get here, and why did it blow right by Elections Canada's deadline to implement many of the things he talked about? That was entirely the Liberals' own choice. In fact, we were banging on the door after they introduced the first version of this bill two years ago, asking them to bring it to the House so we could debate it and get on with it, so that Elections Canada could do its job.
Therefore, that lack of urgency from the Liberals is weird and troubling, and has caused them a whole bunch of problems. We now have this bill passing through the House under time allocation, which means they are shutting down debate and the ability of this House to do what it was built for.
Here is my question. Come the next election, which is less than a year away, will there be reports coming out that there has been a hack of one of the parties' databases? Will there be some sort of foreign interference in our democratic process, where Canadians will rightly be asking their elected representatives what they have done about it to protect them, to make sure they do not have a Donald Trump-style election or a Brexit-style vote? Will there be interference during the election and then, after the fact, once the votes have all been cast, will it be pulled back so we realize that millions of dollars were spent trying to influence Canadians and how they feel about their country with false information and lies, as that is how it is usually done?
As members know, a lie makes its way around the world many times before the truth is up in the morning, and is very difficult to correct with the social media environment we are in. We know all these things because the privacy and ethics committee, which the Liberals sit on, reported more than a year ago that parties should exist under some kind of privacy laws. With all the evidence we now have, does my friend at least agree that that omission from this bill was more than an oversight, and that it was in fact a grave error made by the government?