Mr. Speaker, I have a mild case of attention deficit. Nearby noises bother me.
I will pick up where I left off. I was outlining the serious doubts that we raised over the prospect of preventing constituents from signing more than one nomination paper. This is an important issue. Signing a nomination paper does not oblige constituents to vote for the candidate in question. They are free to watch the election campaign unfold and possibly change their mind along the way. Otherwise, what purpose would election campaigns serve? If we tell constituents that they cannot sign more than one nomination paper, it amounts to telling them that they have to make their choice at the start of the campaign, which would make election campaigns rather pointless. People would be unable to sign a nomination paper for the person they want to vote for because someone else got to them first. The problem with that is obvious.
The other problem is that the vote will be made public. Most people are comfortable with that. I think most people here could guess who I voted for in the last election and in every election of my life. However, some people do not want to reveal who they voted for, and that is fine, because it is all voters' prerogative to keep their vote secret. If a person can sign only one nomination paper, they might as well announce publicly which candidate they will be voting for. We understand how complex this issue is. I myself have gladly signed the nomination papers of certain opponents, because it is important to have an election campaign with diverse candidates and to foster democratic debate. We believe this provision should be removed from the bill. We believe the other measures will be enough to control the very high number of candidates seen in the last election.
I just said that I have signed ballots for certain political opponents, but I will never sign ballots for 48 candidates who are simply there to bog down the electoral system. There are different ways to express disagreement. Fundamentally, I agree with the cause these people are defending. However, I think they are taking the wrong approach. They are disrupting the entire electoral system. Through their actions, they are discouraging citizens from exercising their right to vote.
In large federal ridings, a list can sometimes include as many as 72 candidates, and voters often have to search through them. Take Berthier—Maskinongé, for example, with its 108,000 voters and 37 municipalities. As qualified and important as I believe myself to be, I am well aware that many people in my riding vote primarily for the party. They need to be able to find that choice on the ballot. We therefore agree that this needs to be addressed.
Compromises were found during the recent by-elections, particularly in Terrebonne, where candidates affiliated with recognized parties were placed on the first page. However, requiring voters to write down the name of the candidate increases the degree of difficulty, the duration of the vote, the risk of error and the risk of a challenge. There was no recount this time because there was a clear majority, but in the event of a judicial recount, it is easy to imagine how that could be challenged by lawyers for the other party that is seeking to overturn a vote, particularly if a candidate has a hyphenated last name and the voter only wrote part of the name. This can cause major problems and delays that must be avoided. That said, we agree with most of the measures proposed in the bill.
I hope the government will reconsider preventing people from signing more than one nomination paper, but there is something else we take issue with: Why not take this opportunity to review the issue of political party financing? I will again use Quebec as an example. I know I am always going on about this, but this is another fine example of how Quebec is ahead of Canada. Quebec reformed its electoral law several years ago. Public funding is allocated based on the number of votes obtained, and donors are limited to a donation of $100 per year and $200 in an election year. That limits influence. Let us not forget that, under the previous prime minister's government, Chinese-Canadian businessmen planning to open a bank in Canada attended receptions to gain access to the Prime Minister and donated over $1,700. That is a lot of money. There are not many ordinary citizens who can afford to donate $1,700 to a political party. It is time we sorted this out. These amounts and this way of doing things open the door to the possibility of electoral manipulation. It is never a good thing when money buys access to ministers, so we need to democratize the system.
Public funding of political parties could also prevent some parties from engaging in populism. The parliamentary secretary seems to be listening carefully to my remarks and I am pleased about that. I am sure that he will appreciate what I am saying about some of the more populist parties that post the same slogans or videos repeating the same lines on their social media to try to raise a lot of money. We could perhaps mitigate that by allocating a portion of public funding to the parties. That is something we could work on. Of course, I hope the government will work collaboratively and that the talk we are hearing will be followed by more practical measures than the ones in yesterday's motion.
I mentioned this briefly earlier, but it is also important that we have access to the names and addresses of people who make donations to political parties. Part of the bill raises doubts in that regard, and we have serious concerns about that. Of course, if we allow anonymous donations, it would only further encourage fraud, manipulation and corruption. We want to avoid that.
We also want to avoid foreign interference and the use of AI to send messages. We saw how a lot of messages were sent out to voters to direct them to the wrong polling stations. That is very serious and I hope that significant penalties will be imposed.
I look forward to questions from my colleagues.