Craig Scott

[Fair Elections Act, February 5th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, although it is difficult to predict these kinds of things with any certainty, I agree that the result will be that youth will be detrimentally affected, to the extent that they are among the sectors of our population who most benefit from the voter ID experiment pilot project and from vouching.

I will give one thing to the minister, although it is not at all clear whether this is intentional in the legislation, because it is so indirectly worded, that if it turns out to be true that the bill would allow for e-registration of voters, and going online to then change an address and everything else, something the Chief Electoral Officer has asked for, then that might help. There is a provision in the bill that seems to suggest that whatever the Chief Electoral Officer deems as an adequate signature for purposes of registration is sufficient. If that is meant to include electronic registration, then that would be a countervailing factor that I would give to the minister as something that might actually help if it sends a message to our youth as a means to get them to register.

[Fair Elections Act, February 5th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the hon. member for the question.

This is not about rejecting amendment 18. We can consider it, as it is worded in the reform, while preserving the rest of the Chief Electoral Officer's mandate in the area of public education. We do not have to choose one or the other. Nor am I saying that the measure presented by the minister to inform young people is not good. I take issue with the exclusion of the rest of the mandate.

[Fair Elections Act, February 5th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, that is a very good point. I think the former chief electoral officer is, unfortunately, an extraordinarily easy grader.

All of Canada knows that the imperative behind this bill eventually appearing and the central challenge was to rein in the kinds of election fraud discovered in 2011. There were the fraudulent election calls and other kinds of fraud that we know occurred in 2006 with what we called the in-and-out affair.

Instead, the Conservatives, through the minister, launched a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland detour by turning this exercise into some kind of indirect and sometimes rather pointed flogging of the institution that has been trying to rein in electoral fraud, against considerable Conservative Party resistance and manipulation. That includes Elections Canada and the Chief Electoral Officer, with his associate, the Commissioner for Elections Canada.

This whole exercise started with the unanimous vote in March 2012, and now that trajectory has either been submerged, or to some extent hijacked, in order for the Conservative Party, through the government, to start to portray itself as a victim of a non-partisan agency. The metaphor of “not wearing a team jersey” was carefully chosen and has been repeated by the minister. We all know what is intended by that. We all know the tarnishing of the institution that was intended by that, for Elections Canada and in particular the Chief Electoral Officer. Marc Mayrand and Elections Canada are being portrayed as non-neutral players on some team versus being the neutral referees that we all know they are. This inversion then drives the so-called logic behind so much of what is in Bill C-23.

On top of that, there is a second, rather topsy-turvy move in Bill C-23. After years of examples of fraud and constant brushes between the law and the Conservative Party—-when I say the law, I mean Elections Canada as the embodiment of seeking to enforce the law—what we get from the minister and the government in the bill is a focus on ordinary Canadians as somehow the main concern when it comes to fraud. The government has removed two means of voter identification.

The first is the voter's ID card, which can be presented along with another piece of identity, which has been developed on a kind of rolling pilot project basis by Elections Canada to enfranchise more Canadian voters. The second one is the practice of vouching, for which there were 100,000 Canadians in the last election. Effectively, the government wants to lure, or to some extent sucker, the press and Canadians into thinking this is somehow about fairness and preventing fraud.

This has to be called what it is: voter suppression. These tactics have been building over the past decade, since around 2006, when changes to the law made it harder and harder to prove one has the right to vote in our country. Colleagues of mine will provide overviews of this trajectory and also examples of real-world impacts and who would be disproportionately excluded by these changes. Voter suppression is the result, but I personally will need to be assured that this is not also, frankly, the intention, an intention informed by the deliberate strategies patented south of the border by the Republican Party.

A third feature of this upside-down world is how the government engages in the kind of night equals day, war equals peace, doublespeak by claiming that it gets big money out of elections with Bill C-23, when there are cumulatively a number of measures that keep big money in play in ways that are likely to benefit one party most. I will leave it to everyone's imagination to know which party I am referring to.

Fourth, Orwell would be smiling now—maybe smiling with a grimace, but smiling—if he were listening to the minister talking about adding “enforcement teeth” to the Canada Elections Act, when the single most important measure requested by both the commissioner and the Chief Electoral Officer, the power to compel testimony in the face of delay and recalcitrant witnesses, was omitted.

Mr. Speaker, let me now turn to more detail on these very general points, all the while noting, and this is important, that my colleagues, in the days and weeks to come, will deeply elaborate on every one of these points. The caucus is extraordinarily engaged with the problems relating to this bill, and a lot of expertise will be brought to bear that I hope the minister will listen to and that will inform the committee stage.

I will first comment on my concern and claim that the result is voter suppression. We have to know of, and put into context, an active effort by Elections Canada, which in the last election used voter identification cards in a number of different contexts to try to increase enfranchisement of people in our society who, as the minister rightly pointed out, tend not to vote in greater numbers than others: aboriginal voters on reserves, youth on campuses, and seniors in residences. The method that is now being abolished, the voter identification cards along with another piece of ID, was used successfully in this experiment with an extraordinary amount of positive feedback.

I will move on to the vouching issue. I think that the minister wants to tap into some intuitive problem Canadians might have with one person vouching for another. However, we live in a society that would not function without certain bonds of trust and a degree of procedural stricture.

What happens with vouching is this. There were 100,000 people vouched for in the last election. A person who is already confirmed as a legitimate voter at the poll in question may vouch for one person. If that vouching is believed by the election-day worker, then that person may vote.

Here is an example. Two parents show up with two teenagers, who in a previous election were aged 16 and 17, but when the last election came, they were missed by the enumeration. That is a process that almost does not exist any more. They show up at the poll and do not have the right kind of ID, or may well have it but have not brought it with them. Each parent can vouch for one of the teenagers, who are at least age 18 at this point in the story, and both teenagers can vote. It happens a lot with seniors, persons with disabilities, and other groups.

The minister wants us to understand that somehow or other vouching, and some of that evidence came out of the Etobicoke Centre case, suggests that irregularities are kissing cousins to some kind of massive fraud, or that there is a serious danger of it. However, there is no evidence of that. Even the 25% figure of irregularities does not come close to proving that the people who were not sworn in properly or for whom the vouching was not done properly did not have the right to vote. The Supreme Court of Canada emphasized exactly that. It will be important for us to hear from expert witnesses on that at committee stage. Indeed, I would love to see any reports, or other information I do not know about, tabled by this minister as real evidence that there is a problem.

Here is an example of why I think there likely is not a problem. In 2006, before we went to the newest system, which requires more ID than ever before, there was a controversy. One party claimed that because 11,000 people had registered to vote on election day in the riding of Trinity—Spadina, it somehow meant that something was amiss, that there had to have been all kinds of problems, and that surely a bunch of those people could not have been valid voters. Elections Canada took that concern seriously. It hired a whole team in order to track every one of the people who had registered on election day through a couple of different methods at the time. By knocking on doors, it found all but two. It found no evidence that anyone had voted who was not entitled to vote.

If that was the case before we got into this system, I am not exactly sure why we should have any serious concern that the methods being taken away now, the voter identification card with another piece of ID and vouching, are somehow tied to the risk of fraud, let alone fraud itself.

This is why I want the minister to understand that the result is voter suppression, and it needs to be looked at in that light in terms of who will be affected. My colleagues will go into more detail on this aspect.

With regard to big money, I am not sure that big money is going to be taken out of this. The biggest problem we have in the bill, and there are three or four other points on the big-money point, is that there is a new head-scratching provision. It basically says, as the minister said in the House, that any money spent through communications, including most email, mail, electronic communications, and phone calls, to raise money from existing donors who have given as little as $20 in the last five years is not an expense during the election period.

Any party that has an extensive database system, has the capacity to phone ad infinitum, and has a huge donor base would benefit from that measure. They would also be able to invest the money up front to pay for that excludable expense. It would also add, de facto, to the overall spending limit, which already is going up 5%, and thereby would also benefit any party that is raising a lot of money.

Here I have a grave concern. This could turn into an end run around the expenses involved in the whole pulling-the-vote exercise. All that might have to happen, in the current wording of this provision, is that a phone call is made, saying “We hope you are still interested in voting for us; we understand that you have indicated that. Do you have any questions? By the way, we know you are a donor; could you possibly also donate $50 more during this thing?” That whole exercise then gets shoved into another expense universe and does not get counted as an election expense. The potential for abuse of this provision is huge.

Also, $5,000 donations by candidates are now permitted. How is that getting big money out? The $1,200 limit on donations has now been increased to $1,500. That may seem small to many people in the House. To average Canadians, $1,200 is already a lot. Adding $300 is a huge amount. Who can afford to do that when there is no consequential amendment increasing the tax credit? The tax credit stays at the level it was before, so that extra $300 is only for people who can afford it without worrying about any portion of it as a tax credit.

I will not get into the problems in bringing forward the old political financing act bill that creates an impediment on getting loans to start up a campaign for somebody who does not have even $5,000 of their own. They would have to go out and get $1,200 or $1,500 guarantees from other people to back any loan that they now can only get from a bank.

I know a conscientious effort was made by the former minister, and I am assuming by the current minister, to try to make the political loans systems as fair as possible, but this also will potentially have a serious detrimental effect on any candidates who do need to borrow versus those candidates who do not need to because of fundraising or because the party transfers money to them.

No new powers to compel testimony is a huge issue. The Competition Act provides a clear example, and that is all that is being asked for by the Commissioner of Elections Canada and by the Chief Electoral Officer: the ability to compel testimony in this regulatory context with safeguards that also include that one cannot be charged for whatever one's testimony is.

This has been ignored and I fail to understand why, when we have a working example with the Competition Act. What is good for clean competition should be good for clean elections. It is really befuddling to me that the single most important change that would allow better investigation of what happened with the fraudulent election calls scandal in 2011, the single most important change that would allow that to be investigated better against all kinds of obstruction that has occurred on behalf of the Conservative Party and indeed even its lawyers, would be this amendment, this reform.

If it were included, it would apply retroactively, because it would be a procedural provision that had nothing to do with any new crimes. There are already enough crimes listed in the Elections Act and in the Criminal Code to cover this. We do not need a new crime of impersonation or obstruction to cover, as my leader said in the House today, under the existing act. Enhancing procedural powers could reach back in time and reinvigorate the Elections Canada investigations that are looking to be stalled.

Finally, one way or the other, whether it is a certain philosophy or antipathy toward the office, this is an attack on the Chief Electoral Officer. The gutting of the public education and promotion of democracy function, especially for disadvantaged sectors of the population, found in section 18 of the current act, and replacing it with a very workmanlike technical role of signalling how to vote, et cetera, is a serious undercutting of the function of the Chief Electoral Officer.

[Fair Elections Act, February 5th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to follow the minister with a reply. I would note that, in some serious respect, the odyssey of the bill began in March 2012 with a motion in this House that was unanimously adopted by all the parties. It was sponsored by the former critic for democratic reform, the member from Hamilton. It was supposed to have produced a bill on the subject matter of the motion, which was heavily focused on better enforcement measures for Elections Canada and measures to combat the kinds of fraud that had become known, through the media, as having occurred in 2011.

That bill was supposed to have been tabled in September 2012. We are now about 16 or 17 months from there. There have been serious delays, and in the course of that time I will acknowledge there have been expansions in the scope of the bill, which unfortunately have let the bill stray well away from what needed to be its core focus and, I also fear, have allowed the injection of an agenda that is very problematic, which I will address.

The minister does like to say that he has talked to this person and that person, but I am not sure how any of the conversations he has had amount to the kind of consultation that is needed on such a fundamental change to such a fundamental law in our country.

The tradition used to be that all parties would be heavily involved at the drafting stage, so that when it hit the House, there would not be any kind of serious problem on key provisions, and at the very least, the Chief Electoral Officer would be intimately involved. We all know that has not been the approach.

That is one reason why I moved and asked for unanimous consent to take this bill, after first reading, to committee, which in our system, would allow a bit more freedom—a lot more freedom, in fact—for Parliament to look at all the elements and not be stuck with the principle of the bill as it has come forward, without consultation.

However, as we all know, the vote went against the motion.

Unfortunately, the way the bill has been rolled out, and I say this with some regret because I do respect the acumen of the minister and the time he has put in since he became minister, it smacks of a “my way or the highway” approach to what is in the bill.

There are good things in it, but I will not be spending my time on the good things. We will hear more about them from different members.

There is absolutely no doubt that there are things in here that nobody is going to have any problem with, that would tighten systems, and that would respond to some of what I call basic reform requests that have come since 2010 from the Chief Electoral Officer around the functioning of the system.

However, “some good points” pale in comparison to what I would actually call “some very awful points”. For that reason, after spending a good part of the last 24 hours reviewing and consulting on the bill, as it was only tabled yesterday, I have come to the conclusion that it is so flawed on these key half dozen points that I will be voting against the bill at second reading, now that the opportunity for an earlier committee process has been rejected.

Allow me to, first, state generally why the bill is, in my view, so deeply problematic before then elaborating a bit further on four or five of the problems.

I would emphasize that if those problems disappeared at third reading, the vote would look different. The problem is that they are there and they are so serious that I cannot recommend to my colleagues that we vote for it.

[Fair Elections Act, February 5th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the minister for an extremely well-prepared speech. It is obvious that in recent days he has also taken this file to heart and that he understands the bill inside and out. However, I would like to challenge him on the question of invoking Mr. Neufeld's report as a reason for getting rid of vouching and also voter IDs. That report said the following:

It should be noted that this decision [the first decision in the Etobicoke Centre case] was made on the basis that important procedural requirements had not been met, and not due to evidence indicating that ineligible voters had been permitted to vote.

This was also emphasized by the Supreme Court when it talked about the problems of disenfranchisement by using irregularities as a reason to annul the election of our colleague from that area.

I want to then ask, why has the minister gone that route rather than taking the Chief Electoral Officer up on his request that the Chief Electoral Officer could now recruit election workers on his own, well in advance of the dropping of the writ, and thereby be able to train workers better, so that what happens on election day does not have irregularities to the same extent that the studies have shown?

[Committees of the House, February 5th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to request the unanimous consent of the House to move the following motion: that, notwithstanding any Standing Order or usual practice of the House, immediately after the reading of the order of the day for second reading of Bill C-23, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to certain Acts, a motion that the said bill be referred forthwith to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs be deemed moved and be subject to provisions of Standing Order 73(1).

[Democratic Reform, February 5th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the Supreme Court said there was no evidence that any of those irregularities occurred with people who did not have the right to vote, so this is an absolute red herring.

On another issue, the elections commissioner is moving to the Director of Public Prosecutions and away from the Chief Electoral Officer. The Chief Electoral Officer is appointed to and is responsible to Parliament, but the DPP is appointed by the Attorney General. Why is the government removing parliamentary oversight from the elections commissioner?

[Democratic Reform, February 5th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, 100,000 people had their votes vouched for in the last campaign. This includes aboriginal citizens, low-income people, new Canadians, students, and people with disabilities.

The question is, why is the government making it harder for these Canadians to exercise their right to vote?

[Democratic Reform, February 4th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, it is clear to all that the minister actually is off to a really rough start.

My bill on fighting electoral fraud proposed fines of up to $500,000. The Chief Electoral Officer proposed up to $250,000. The government's bill limits fines to just $50,000, ten times less than the NDP proposal. Why has the government failed to provide tough punishments for people who commit serious election fraud?

[Democratic Reform, February 4th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday the Minister of State for Democratic Reform claimed that he had consulted the Chief Electoral Officer. The problem is, Elections Canada said he did not. Today, the minister smeared Elections Canada saying, “[They] should not be wearing a team jersey”.

Does the minister really think that misleading the House one day and smearing Elections Canada the next is a really good way to start discussions on amending our elections law?