Stephen Owen

[Canada Elections Act, January 31st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, that was part of our discussion in the committee. I think we will need to be very careful to ensure that people who want to vote are not left out and we need to ensure this sort of process works. It is certainly what we had in mind when we were given assurances by the Chief Electoral Officer that electoral officials could actually go into shelters to seek that kind of vouching.

[Canada Elections Act, January 31st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, this is a matter of balance. If we are to have an electoral system with integrity, it needs to have sufficient rigour to give confidence to the general public that fraud cannot be perpetrated.

Having worked in the downtown Vancouver east side as a legal aid lawyer, I know the problems well and I know the despair in which many people live. I think we need to be vigilant, and I know the member for Vancouver East will be, in ensuring that electoral officials do more targeted enumeration in shelters, in single room occupancy hotels and in areas where people, who might otherwise not be able to avail themselves of being registered, get registered. We also need to have special provisions to go into shelters at election time to perhaps make the voting process taken to people in an easier way.

However, the concerns that were raised about sequential and multiple vouching I take as a warning for us to be more vigilant. If that proves to be true, we need to continue being careful that it does not exclude people, but if we find it does, then this is a work in progress and--

[Canada Elections Act, January 31st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, the standard we use in advising other countries in their electoral commissions and their electoral processes and in monitoring those elections is free and fair. Were the elections free and fair? When we say free, we are talking about the right of every adult person to vote, which is a charter right in Canada. The fair side is equally important to the equation of having an election. Fairness means the integrity of the process.

We as legislators have a duty to ensure that there is integrity in the voter process, so that it will be fairly applied and available to Canadians. Hon. members opposite have spoken of marginalized communities. Of course that means they must be given every possible opportunity within the integrity of the system to vote. That is fairness. It is also fairness to ensure that fraud cannot be perpetrated. I suggest that is what this bill is intended to do.

We have had a long series of discussions and processes to get to this point, including the Chief Electoral Officer's report after the January 2006 election to the committee, our committee's report to the House, and the response of the government in Bill C-31.

The bill makes a number of improvements. It improves access for the disabled. There are more convenient locations for advanced polls. There is access for candidates as well as election officials to gated communities. The processes of the electoral office also allow candidate access to malls or privately owned public spaces where often candidates are not allowed to communicate with the public. A former chief electoral officer made it very clear that there will also be an opportunity for electoral officials to go to perhaps seniors houses and shelters, places where people may not be able to get to the polls. I would suggest that we as a committee and we as legislators be immensely vigilant going forward to ensure that marginalized groups are not left out.

We on this side of the House had real concerns with the electoral officials and other witnesses who came before us. We implored the Chief Electoral Officer to be more vigilant and more targeted in areas of low enumeration or voter turnout. That office has taken on that responsibility.

We also asked that in areas, whether it is an intercity or a remote community, an aboriginal community or otherwise, where people in the past have shown an inability to exercise their franchise, that more vigilant and more targeted enumeration takes place.

With the special concern that has been raised with respect to aboriginal communities, remote communities in particular, we put to the Chief Electoral Officer that an acceptable form of government picture identification could be an aboriginal status card, if it had an address on it. If the address is not on it, then there could be a letter from the band office or something else indicating the address of the person together with the card in order to satisfy the requirements.

While we must be extremely vigilant that marginalized groups are not left out of the process, we must also be vigilant and ensure that there is no opportunity for voter fraud, not by those people, but by others who may for unscrupulous reasons, and with many more resources, try to defeat the process and the fairness of the process.

It is the fairness of the process and the belief that Canadians have that it is a fair and honest system that is really one of the major concerns in this country. I would suggest that nothing will cause voter participation to decline faster than if the general public loses its faith in the fairness of the process.

That may sound far-fetched, but we all know what happened in 2000 in Florida with the U.S. presidential election and how flawed that process was even though it was presenting a very elaborate electoral system.

We do need to be vigilant going forward to ensure people are not left out but we also need to take this as a first step in a much broader electoral reform process. In the spring of 2004, the Law Commission of Canada published a paper. It is an independent commission which, I would remind the government, that it has just starved of all of its budget from its actions last fall. However, the Law Commission came up with a paper on electoral reform that is probably based on greater consultation and greater research than any other electoral reform suggestion in the Commonwealth and there was an obligation on our previous government and on the current government for the Minister of Justice to answer that Law Commission report.

The process had begun. Electoral reform, with the agreement of the NDP, was put in the Speech from the Throne of the previous Liberal government. A committee had plans to look into electoral reform but that, for some reason, has now been stopped. I would put it to all members of the House and certainly to the government and the Minister of Justice that there is a responsibility to take up that public review.

I heard last week that the government will be hiring a polling company and a think tank to consult in a few communities across the country. I would ask the Prime Minister and the Attorney General of Canada whether they have ever read that Law Commission report and, if they have, why they think they need an alternative process at this stage and start all over again.

We should have Parliament and the House of Commons in a special committee looking at real electoral reform and then we need a proper response from the government to the Law Commission's report. If we are to have a citizen's assembly, which we had in British Columbia and which is being advanced in Ontario, we need to ensure that the objective is to have an open and comprehensive process and not some slapdash polling process.

[Canada Elections Act, January 31st, 2007]

No, that is fine.

[Canada Elections Act, January 31st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with my hon. colleague, the member for Kitchener Centre.

Let me take a step back and look at Canada's responsibility internationally and the way that it has taken on that responsibility to serve as an advisor and monitor of elections over the last 40 or 50 years in newly democratizing countries around the world or countries coming out of conflict.

In the last two years alone a Canadian team of monitors have been in the Ukraine, the Palestinian Authority and Afghanistan. Electoral officials from Canada were training Iraqi electoral officials in Jordan and right now there is a team of Canadian election monitors, Canada Corps members, in Bangladesh, although unfortunately, because of continuing disputes in that area, its election is being delayed.

I was an election monitor in Nicaragua during the Contra civil war when it was a very dangerous thing for people to expose themselves by voting. I was in the mountains near the Honduras-Nicaraguan border area where the Contra were most effective. People were coming to school--

[Canada Elections Act, January 31st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his presentation and the hard work that he has put in on the committee work on this bill.

He mentioned that he heard no purpose given to us at committee for having dates of birth given not to electoral parties but to electoral officials. Of course, the date of birth information is very valuable. If an electoral official has a doubt about someone's identity, it can connect them to the age. It may be someone with the same name as their parent or child or a same name of two unrelated people. It seems to me that it is a unique identifier available to electoral officials when there is doubt, not to be spread about, but to add confirmation to the person's identity.

[Federal Accountability Act, December 8th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the President of the Treasury Board for his hard work and all of those who have worked with him to bring this legislation to this point.

I just want to deal with a few issues. First, I want to add my congratulations and thanks and that of the official opposition to all of those people who worked so hard behind the lines to make this work and, of course, Susan Cartwright and Rob Walsh, the legislative parliamentary counsels, and Joe Wild from the Department of Justice, who were instrumental in dealing with this highly complex legislation.

I will not repeat but only agree with the hon. President of the Treasury Board with respect to the various members of Parliament, both in the other place as well as the House of Commons, who worked so hard in their respective committees to bring back to the respective Houses improved legislation after extensive consideration, analysis, the hearing of witnesses and the thoughtful creation of amendments.

I have always been a little nervous with the word “cusp”, and I am not sure what we are on the cusp of here, but I hope it does not mean that we are looking over from a high point into a dark and dangerous deep hole. However, I think we should all feel confident that this legislation is taking us forward and it is taking us forward from, not a dark time, although mistakes were clearly made and they concerned us that all of our accountability mechanisms would be tightened up, but a continuation of something that happened through previous Liberal governments over a 10 year period on issues such as political financing.

The former Liberal government's Bill C-24, which the House passed about three years ago, was probably the most dramatic change and constraint on political financing in any democratic country in the world and this accountability act takes it even further. I think that is to the credit of both sets of legislation.

The creation of an independent ethics commissioner by the former Liberal government was also another step on the way to greater accountability. Many people on this side of the House and all sides of the House worked hard to ensure that an independent office was created. Again, this legislation takes us a step further in improving, we hope, the effectiveness of that office.

Thirdly, I would just mention, very briefly, the Gomery inquiry itself, which was probably the most extensive inquiry into the workings of government, the nature of accountability and the nature of responsibility in responsible government in the modern history of Canada. The multiple volumes of that report will remain instructive to all members of the House and all subsequent governments as we go forward to increasingly improve this.

I will quote briefly from the first report of Justice Gomery. This is an important quote for all of us to remember and, more important, it speaks to all Canadians and for Canadians to understand. At the beginning of his first report, Mr. Gomery said that all Canadians must understand that the vast majority of public servants and politicians in Canada are honest, diligent in their work and effective, and emerge from this inquiry without blame.

It is immensely important for us to appreciate that while we vigorously identify and deal with that, through changes to mechanisms of government and accountability or to hold people directly to account and actually have people punished for severe wrongdoings, we remember that our democracy depends on the public's faith in the honest workings of our public service and our Parliament, which is an immensely important thing.

While we accept, if not the rhetoric, at least the direction in which this is further taking us, I think issues, such as calling this the strongest piece of anti-corruption legislation in Canadian history, may have gone over that cusp and transcends the reality. However, these are important problems on which we have all come together. I have been proud to work with members of all parties in the House and with members in the other place to see us come to this day.

I would like to say something about the other place. It has had dozens of days of hearings and has heard numerous expert witnesses on every aspect of this very complex legislation. The senators did their work diligently and thoroughly and have come forward with further amendments to those that were put forward in the House. There are dozens of substantive amendments, as well as some that are more technical, but they all make this a better bill. The amendments allow us, as the President of the Treasury Board said, to diligently and more effectively implement all aspects of this legislation. We owe a great deal of respect and gratitude to the members of the other place for their hard work in bringing this back to us.

As with any piece of legislation, especially one so vast and so complex as this, which affects so many other pieces of legislation, implementation is not always simple. It may be that in the course of implementing this legislation, either through the experience of implementation itself or the change of context of various aspects, we will need to amend this as we go along.

While we in the official opposition did not receive support for all of the amendments we suggested, we do think there are vitally important aspects of the legislation that must be corrected in the future. We look forward to forming government in the very near future to expedite those improvements.

I will just mention three of them very briefly, one being in the access to information aspects of this bill. I regret to add another quote from the previous information commissioner, John Reid, that aspects of the access to information portions of this bill were “retrograde and dangerous”. While that may seem like quite an extreme statement, it certainly puts us on notice that we need to do further work in this area. In fact, the privacy and ethics House committee is working to do that very thing and we will be taking part very vigorously in that further improvement to the access to information legislation.

The next area is conflict of interest. We think some tightening needs to take place around the definition of conflict of interest. We need to add the concepts of potential and apparent conflict of interest and not simply real conflict of interest. Over the last some 15 years in Canada, in the provinces as well as through the federal government jurisprudence in the application of conflict of interest rules, it has become apparent that apparent, as well as potential, conflicts of interest need serious attention.

We also need to tighten up the issue around gifts to public office holders where friends of public office holders, not just close personal friends, which is a much narrower field, as I think we all appreciate, should be caught for the reporting provisions of conflict of interest, gifts that might affect a conflict of interest.

Finally, the whistleblower section needs continual improvement but we will learn more about how this mechanism works through the experience of implementation. The Auditor General has made mention, quite appropriately, that we need good protection for whistleblowers so the public can be properly informed about the types of wrongdoings that might happen or might otherwise go unnoticed through the public administration. However, we also need to ensure that the systems of government work honestly in the first instance so those cases are kept to an absolute minimum.

In particular, when we get to a situation, which we all recognize happens from time to time, where wrongdoing is not discovered, but, through the actions of a so-called whistleblower, which I would put in the category of a dedicated public servant seeing something wrong and wanting to fix it, that person, in his or her brave actions, is not subject to any reprisal from government. The bill does contain a reverse onus provision but, as we go forward, I think we will want to consider whether it is fair to put the burden on the public servant, who blew the whistle, of proving that some action by government was a reprisal.

In conclusion, I will again congratulate all members of the House and the other place who contributed to this further evolution of accountability in government. It is work well done and it has been done at great speed, although I think the government would have wished it had gone more quickly. However, I offer the observation that the amendments are positive, constructive and will make the bill greater and the implementation of it smoother to the benefit of all Canadians.

[Volunteerism, December 5th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, on this International Volunteer Day, I rise to commend all volunteers committed to making a difference in Canada and around the world.

Thirty years ago Canadian University Services Overseas, or CUSO, sent my wife and I to Nigeria where we worked alongside Nigerians for two years, sharing knowledge and skills with each other, building relationships, and supporting community development through education. The experience helped shape our lives and our understanding of the world, and the key role of international development.

With the global crises in AIDS, poverty and environmental degradation, the need for greater international cooperation is clear. Yet, $20 million in shortsighted and ideological cuts by the new Conservative minority government have led to the demise of the Canadian volunteerism initiative and the international youth internship program. Shame.

[Minister of Public Works and Government Services, November 10th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, here are two more broken promises by the minority Conservative Prime Minister.

During the election the Prime Minister promised to accept only people who were elected into his cabinet and then he called for the election of senators. Yet, on his first day in office he appointed Conservative fundraiser Michael Fortier to the Senate and then to cabinet as, get this, Public Works minister.

When will the Prime Minister stop breaking promises to Canadians?

[Petitions, November 9th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, the second petition relates to the national literacy programs and funding that was cut recently by the government. This comes from the citizens of Lethbridge who, I assume, are not pleased with the representation made on this matter by their Conservative member of Parliament.

However, they ask simply that these programs be returned and funded immediately, noticing that adult illiteracy can affect as much as 38% of the population, and has a huge impact on the social and economic development of individuals and their own quality of life as well as that of our country.