Mr. Speaker, the government has given notice of time allocation after only one hour of debate in the House of Commons on something so important as changes to our election laws. This is the very law by which the people who sit in the House of Commons to represent their fellow citizens are elected. That was done after one hour. Does the member feel that is in any way appropriate?
There is a second part to my question. She mentioned at the beginning of her speech that she understood that as a result of the Fair Elections Act, 400,000 people were not able to vote. She said “in the 2011 election”, but I assume she meant the 2015 election, because the Fair Elections Act came after the 2011 election. However, I would like to know her source, because I have never heard that statistic and I am not aware of one single proven documented case of someone who was not able to vote. In fact, the turnout in the last election went up. It was the highest it had been in over two decades.
I know they will stand up and claim it was because voters were looking to get rid of the Harper government, but the point is that they were actually able to go and vote to do that. If that is what they were voting to do, nothing prevented them from doing that.
Because there are no documented cases, I would like to know where this 400,000 figure came from, because I have never heard it before.