Craig Scott

[Petitions, April 4th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I have four petitions, but I will be quick. The first is from a variety of citizens, dozens in my riding, who request that the Government of Canada commit to attaining the greenhouse gas emission reduction goals it has supported internationally and contribute its fair share to filling the megatonne gap.

[Democratic Reform, April 4th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the minister truly is delusional. Back in 2004, the Prime Minister said Sheila Fraser's “competence and her courage have shone a bright light on the mismanagement, incompetence and corruption that this Liberal government has been trying to hide for more than a decade”. Almost 10 years later, once again she is shining a bright light on a government gone seriously wrong.

Will the minister acknowledge and accept her critiques of the unfair changes to the act? Will he present a bill that actually promotes democracy, rather than attacking it on multiple fronts?

[Democratic Reform, April 4th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, Sheila Fraser has said that the unfair elections act will exacerbate problems with money in politics, despite the minister's absurd and contradictory rhetoric about this bill somehow taking big money out. Sheila Fraser said that new fundraising exemptions give advantages to some parties, and Conservatives, of course, get the biggest advantage of all.

Ms. Fraser warned about the potential for abuse of these rules. Why will the minister not listen to her? This is not about vouching. Why is he making election fundraising less accountable and less transparent?

[Democratic Reform, April 3rd, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the fact is that the list of those opposing the bill is growing and growing: chief electoral officers, electoral commissioners, experts of every political stripe, and now, Sheila Fraser. Yes, the same person the Conservatives once praised for exposing the Liberal sponsorship scandal is calling out this bill as an “attack on our democracy”.

Would the minister listen to her, Sheila Fraser, or will he act like the Liberals did and start attacking Ms. Fraser for telling the truth?

[Democratic Reform, April 3rd, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, first the Minister of State for Democratic Reform misinterpreted the Neufeld report. Then he ignored all the advice that was offered. Then yesterday he criticized my colleague for quoting the “so-called” experts.

I have a simple question for the minister. If Harry Neufeld, William Corbett, Richard Hasen and Sheila Fraser are “so-called” experts, how can he himself claim to have sufficient knowledge of the subject?

[Instruction to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs Regarding Bill C-23, April 2nd, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I understand I have very limited time.

I do want to assuage my colleague's concerns. I started by saying that this is being moved as an excess of caution because of the complexity of the rules. Quite often we end up being almost bushwhacked in committee by amendments that are not permitted.

We have the same view as the member for Winnipeg North, that an amendment allowing the power to compel would be admissible, would be within the scope of the bill. I personally have no doubt about that, but I worry from past experience about rulings on admissibility that nobody could expect.

This amendment is so important, and I think we agree on this. We want to make it absolutely clear.

If our colleagues across the way actually vote down this motion of instruction, it will have no effect in law. The admissibility clerk will still tell us one way or the other whether it is included, but our colleagues across the way can help ensure, for the sake of a better democratic process, that we are not going to get into admissibility discussions in the committee, that there will be no doubt whatsoever.

[Instruction to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs Regarding Bill C-23, April 2nd, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for the question.

Indeed, that is exactly the case. Yesterday evening, my committee colleagues did not care that expert witnesses were stating very clearly that the Office of the Commissioner must absolutely be kept within Elections Canada.

I do not know exactly how to say this, except that it was as though the witnesses were completely worthless. So why bother? That is what I am wondering.

[Instruction to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs Regarding Bill C-23, April 2nd, 2014]

moved:

That it be an instruction to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs that, during its consideration of Bill C-23, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to other Acts, the Committee be granted the power to expand the scope of the Bill in order to strengthen the role of the Commissioner of Canada Elections by allowing the Commissioner to seek relief through the courts to compel testimony.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by mentioning that I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Louis-Saint-Laurent, who seconded the motion.

The reason for the motion today, just to give some background, is that our attempt to have Bill C-23—the so-called fair elections act, but what New Democrats are calling the unfair elections act—channelled to the committee after first reading, at which time the bill could be more open to amendment, failed. Our attempt in the House did not receive unanimous consent.

There is concern that some areas of the bill that should be subject to amendment may not be because the admissibility rules in the House with respect to committee amendments are a little arcane, to put it mildly. They are complex. The clerks do their best to enforce the rules, but I am not completely certain I am going to get a ruling on admissibility on this point, that the Commissioner of Canada Elections be able to go to court to seek relief to compel testimony of witnesses. Therefore, out of some kind of excess of caution, we are seeking a motion of instruction from the House to permit such an amendment.

All this motion would do is permit the amendment. It does not say the amendment would occur. It would simply allow the committee to consider this kind of matter, and in committee, if the majority declines to adopt the amendment, that will determine it. However, what we do not want to have happen, after all the witnesses who appeared suggesting that the power to compel testimony through a judicial order be included in the bill, is for that to be ruled out of court from the beginning as beyond the scope of the bill. That is the reason I am standing in my place at the moment.

I also want to provide a bit of context.

Last night one of several witnesses, the current Commissioner of Canada Elections, Mr. Côté, appeared, and in no uncertain terms gave support to the Chief Electoral Officer, Mr. Mayrand, and other witnesses, who have said it is absolutely, as he put it last night, “essential to give the Commissioner the ability to seek a court order to compel testimony”. This is something that was in both the commissioner's 2012-13 report and the report entitled “Preventing Deceptive Communications with Electors” by the Chief Electoral Officer, and it comes from painful experience.

The commissioner and the Chief Electoral Officer are all too aware of how difficult it has been to have witnesses, who are themselves not suspect but are members of a political party, actually talk to investigators. The context of the Commissioner of Canada Elections' report is at page 13. Although he is talking in general terms, nobody in the House is under any illusion that he is talking about anything but the investigation into the fraudulent calls that occurred in 2011. He stated:

When investigating matters where the stakes are perceived as significant...investigators often face reluctant witnesses. Frequently, key individuals will simply refuse to be interviewed or they will initially accept, only to later decline. In some cases, they will participate in interviews but will provide only partial information and incomplete answers, often citing a faulty recollection of events or the inability to retrieve key documents. In other cases, a potential witness will profess a complete willingness to cooperate, but the process will take time – resulting in information being provided slowly and in an incomplete fashion.

He goes on to explain why the model in the Competition Act, which is a model very similar to over half of the provincial elections acts, should be adopted by the Canada Elections Act. Basically, it allows for the chief investigative officer within the Canada Elections Act system, the commissioner, to go to court to show that there is a need for witnesses to be forthcoming and to receive a judicial order for witnesses to indeed testify to investigators, with important safeguards.

Three of them were listed in the testimony last night by Mr. Côté, as follows: one, a prior judicial authorization, based on affidavit evidence showing that the person likely has information relevant to an investigation of an offence under the Canada Elections Act; two, the right to be assisted by counsel and to have counsel present at the interview; and three, the right not to have the evidence used against the person—this is obviously very important—who is required to testify. These are basically safeguards taken from the Competition Act.

The commissioner said, “These safeguards would present, in my view, a balanced approach to ensuring more effective enforcement.”

Here is probably the most important and most forceful statement by the Commissioner of Canada Elections last night about the need. He said, “I want to be absolutely clear: if this amendment is not made, investigations will continue to take time, and in some cases a lot of time. And, importantly, some will simply abort due to our inability to get at the facts.”

I grant to the minister that the new voter registry that would be overseen by the CRTC would be beneficial and get us somewhere within the legitimate telecom system, but what has become very clear is that however much that is true, there are all kinds of reasons to know that those who are technologically sophisticated know how to get around the system, effectively setting up proxy servers in their basements or in other countries and not ever having to use the legitimate system.

If that is the case, it is all the more necessary that the investigative powers of the Commissioner of Canada Elections be bolstered in exactly the way that he and the Chief Electoral Officer have requested for the last two or three years in light of their experience of all the recalcitrance and all the resistance they have received investigating the fraudulent calling scheme that undermined the 2011 election.

We only discovered with clarity yesterday, when we were asking questions of witnesses from the CRTC in committee, how important this could be in terms of the internal limits of the voter contact registry. It turns out that although calls are defined as including live voice calls, there is an exclusion for live voice calls from any group or person as long as that group or person is using internal services.

Let us forget about the minister's image of the grandmother at the local level calling with regard to lawn signs. The concern is the national party with its capacity to have internal services for live voice calls. What are live voice calls normally used for? They are usually used for not just getting out the vote and that kind of stuff. They have to be used for fundraising.

There is another exception in the bill. This one would allow for fundraising calls to anybody who has given $20 or more in the last five years to be exempted from the expense ceiling, which basically means that a whole operation has to be set up at the national level to make those phone calls. We have been concerned from the beginning that those calls could be a cloak for all other kinds of pitches to be made under the guise of fundraising requests. What we have found is that such live calls at the national level, using a national phone bank that is part of the internal services of a party, are not part of the CRTC's regime. The CRTC testified that this is an exclusion. Live voice calls coming from external telecom providers would be, but not those from the national party.

We have no problem with making sure there is no red tape for grandmothers helping out at the local level by calling for lawn signs. Our concern is at the national level, with the phone bank problem of live calls using that exemption for fundraising as a Trojan Horse that will be completely unmonitorable because it is not part of the CRTC regime and because the Chief Electoral Officer has already testified that he cannot monitor it.

One of the reasons it is so important to have the power to compel testimony through a judicial order is that the voter contact registry is only going to go so far. It is only going to provide prevention and detection for a certain kind of person who unwittingly uses the system, not the sophisticated rogue who now knows that legitimate telecom operators cannot be used to call perhaps hundreds of thousands of numbers and who would use available technology to skirt that system. The system is not useless, but it would do almost nothing for the knowledgeable, technologically sophisticated rogue, especially using offshore resources, to call into elections.

Therefore the back-end investigation is all the more important, and therefore the power to compel testimony of witnesses through a judicial order is an absolute must as an amendment to Bill C-23. Out of an excess of caution, I am asking the House through this motion for instruction to allow PROC to amend the bill in this respect to give us that authority if the committee agrees in its discussions that it is a valid amendment.

[Democratic Reform, April 2nd, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, section 509 of the act says that the commissioner “...may be removed by the Director of Public Prosecutions for cause”. He cannot not be fired.

It is not only elections commissioners who are concerned by the bill; it is the commissioner for Ontario as well. He is concerned about voter information cards. The minister would have known this if only he had consulted.

Why did he not even bother consulting provincial elections officials who also have expertise in this area?

[Democratic Reform, April 2nd, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, last night former elections commissioner Corbett said that moving electoral investigations into public prosecutions would actually hurt electoral oversight.

It would remove the commissioner's staff from Elections Canada, which is a vital centre of expertise. It would mean the commissioner's staff would no longer work symbiotically with Elections Canada to troubleshoot during election periods.

The minister could have avoided this mess if only he had consulted. Why did he not consult with former commissioners and the current commissioner?