Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak to the bill. It is a very important bill and unfortunately it has not had a lot of attention. If the bill goes through unchanged, it will have a substantial impact on the voting rights of many low income people in Canada, and certainly in my own riding of Vancouver East, which includes the downtown east side.
I would like to begin by laying out the alleged problem we are dealing with. We are told that there is voter fraud and therefore these very significant changes need to be made to the Canada Elections Act to prevent fraud. Yet at committee when the debate first started, I actually asked the Chief Electoral Officer if he felt that there were huge instances of fraud. He basically said that there were a few isolated incidents, but no political party had brought to his attention any systemic things going on, and as far as he was concerned it was not a big issue. I was very curious about that because that was the Chief Electoral Officer who was speaking.
It has been very mystifying and in fact disappointing, as I said earlier, to know that three parties, the Conservatives, the Liberals and the Bloc, are in bed together here to change the Canada Elections Act to deal with an alleged problem. It is like applying a sledgehammer to a fly. The consequences of the bill will have a disastrous impact.
We have heard the parties that are supporting the bill claim that they have put provisions in the bill to ensure that homeless people vote and that there can still be a vouching for somebody. However, if we actually look at what the bill contains, we see that it creates a myriad of bureaucratic procedures which I can guarantee will result in many, many people being disenfranchised.
As it is now, if a person is homeless, on the street, if he or she does not have ID, the person can get a statutory declaration from a lawyer. There can be someone in the community who vouches for people, someone who really does know all kinds of individuals because that person may work at a place like the Carnegie Centre in my riding and can say, “Yes, I know who that person is. Yes, they are who they say they are”. The individual gets the statutory declaration and that individual can vote.
The way it will work now is that somebody can only vouch for one person if they are in the same poll and if that person is on the voters list. It will be like two needles trying to find each other in a haystack. It will create absolute chaos.
I am deeply concerned that the bill is going through with so little attention, other than from the NDP. I want to thank the member for Ottawa Centre who did an incredible job on the committee of pointing out every single clause that was a failure and was basically denying people's rights. Other than the NDP and some of the witnesses who came forward to point out the problems, the bill will apparently sail through.
I want to give one example. In the 2000 election I felt very honoured to accompany Sereena Abotsway to the poll. She voted under the statutory declaration. It was the first time she had ever voted and she voted with a sense of hope. She was becoming more aware of the political system. Because we had a system in place of lawyers who were there to assist, she felt she had the confidence, the reason and the hope to vote. This young woman unfortunately is one of the six murdered women who are now part of the missing women trial that is taking place in Vancouver. It just wrenches my gut to know that there are so many people out there who are so marginalized and disenfranchised by the system that we create on the basis that we are making it all neat and tidy and that it is all about dealing with fraud.
We hear theoretically from the Liberals, the member for Vancouver Quadra who said, “Oh, yes, I believe in fairness. It is about fairness”. The way the system will work will be incredibly unfair. Even in the memory of Sereena Abotsway, to think about her and what happened to her and what happens to other people, I feel terrible that the bill will go through and that people will lose the right to vote.
I am very proud of the fact that the NDP caucus is standing up against the bill and saying that the bill is really quite awful and will deny people the right to vote.
I want to thank some of the lawyers who came forward at the committee and appeared on video conference: Jim Quail, executive director for the B.C. Public Interest Advocacy Centre; Tina-Marie Bradford, a lawyer with the B.C. Government and Service Employees' Union; and Murray Mollard, executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association.
They are knowledgeable people who came forward and told the committee in detail what the system is like now, what works, what does not, and what the impact of these changes will be. They were basically ignored, other than by our member on the committee, the member for Ottawa Centre, who valiantly put forward amendments to try to mitigate the damage in the bill.
These are the lawyers who actually know what this system is about. They are not dealing with it at a theoretical level. They are dealing with it on the ground. Their advice and expertise were basically ignored and turned down. I feel that this is very unfortunate.
I heard the government House leader say that he is in favour of having a system that is as open as possible to maintain the franchise. I heard him say that the Chief Electoral Officer has said that there will be more aggressive enumeration. None of those things are actually going to assist in terms of what takes place in ensuring that a statutory declaration on its own is available and that there can be a proper vouching system to allow it to work.
I feel that the claims being made by the government in pretending that the bill will ensure that people who are at risk still have the right to vote are completely false. Even to say that there will be enumeration in homeless shelters and that the government will make sure it happens, it sounds good on paper, but we know that most people who are in homeless shelters have to leave during the day.
That is the way these places work. In many places, one part of the rules is that the homeless have to leave early in the morning and not go back until late at night, so exactly where are the enumerators going to find people in homeless shelters?
I feel that the rationale being given by the government House leader on this bill is very superficial. Again, the government should have paid attention to the people who really know how the system works in the local community and at each individual poll and polling district and what it is that the bill would do.
I believe that if we were truly addressing the inconsistencies and problems in our electoral system we would be calling for universal enumeration. Again, this is something that was ignored by the government. It is being ignored by the other political parties.
I do not know about other members, but I remember the day when we could go down the street and actually see the voters list on the telephone poles. We could see whether or not we were on the voters list. We actually had an enumerator who went door to door and asked if people in the enumerated household were eligible to vote.
It was a system that worked, but now we have the high tech, centralized system. There is absolutely no question about it, because the evidence is there: as a result of that new system, many people have been left on the margins and their ability to access the system and to get on the voters list has been seriously undermined. That is a reality of what has taken place over the last decade.
Now the government adds insult to injury by taking away the one provision that was left to ensure that someone who was in a very vulnerable situation and did not have the right ID could at least still get to the poll. That would now be taken away with the bill if these particular amendments are not supported.
In closing, I do not think that this is a good day for the House of Commons. We are meant to be here to represent the public interest. The right to vote of all people, whether wealthy or poor, homeless or living in a fancy house, is being seriously undermined by the bill, so it will be a very bad day in the House of Commons if the bill goes through.
