Mr. Speaker, in the 2015 election, I was out, as all my colleagues were on election day, getting voters to the polls. It was 6:30 p.m. in Vancouver, and the polls still had another half hour to go. I was standing at the doorstep of a house and through the living room window, I could see the television. Peter Mansbridge was on The National, and he had called a majority Liberal government. That broadcast to voters in British Columbia, while the polls were still open, the results of the election. The reason that was legal was because the previous Harper government, in 2012, eliminated a law that was put in place in 1938, which had governed every election since then. The law prohibited the early broadcast of election results so people would not know the results of the election prior to the polls closing. By the way, that prohibition was upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada as being constitutional.
All of us in the House know that it completely skews the results for people in one part of the country to know the results of the election while the polls are still open. This was backed up by empirical evidence on the ground where people told me and other candidates that when they turned over the ballot boxes, they could see a clear difference in the way people voted within the last half hour of the balloting.
Why has my hon. colleague's government not restore the ban on broadcasting the election results when it clearly has a corrosive and biassing impact on elections and is so bias against voters in British Columbia and the west?