Pat Martin

[Committees of the House, February 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for Sackville—Eastern Shore for taking what is a complex issue, bringing it down to earth and relating how it affects Canadian workers.

Part of the problem with the unfair competitive advantage that China enjoys and the reason the WTO has agreed there should be phased in safeguards is the unfair competitive advantage on labour standards, the very issue about which my colleague spoke.

China does not allow unions and free collective bargaining. Chinese businesses and manufacturers manipulate currency in an unfair way that we would never tolerate here. Currency manipulation is a sleazy tactic. The world agrees that China should not be doing it. The WTO, in trying to create a level playing field for global trade, has agreed that if we are to let China in we have to phase in the impact to the domestic market.

The Liberals did not avail themselves of that opportunity. I see the former minister of international trade here. How in God's name could they leave that on the table when everyone else immediately saw the need? China agreed there was a need or else it would devastate the local domestic manufacturing sector. Has anyone ever told the former minister what the rationale could possibly have been on the Liberal's part to not avail themselves of this protection and stand up for Canadian workers and our garment industry?

[Committees of the House, February 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my colleague's concern. The figures are staggering.

Not long ago, this industry, the sixth largest manufacturing industry in Canada, employed 100,000 people across Canada. Winnipeg was the fourth largest centre in North America after Los Angeles, New York and Montreal. By 2004, the number was down to 70,000. By April 2005, that number had dropped to 55,000, which amounts to 45,000 people in the course of about five years. In any other industry that would be deemed to be a crisis and an emergency.

[Committees of the House, February 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, when everything in the world is made in China, it makes me wonder where our kids will work. Why do we need to pay the same price for a brassiere or a piece of fish made in China for $1 an hour that we would need to pay in Canada for $20 an hour? There is no price advantage. Somehow we have been sucked into it.

It is this zealousness, a willingness on the part of Canada to be free traders, but without ensuring any kind of fair trade. We want to be the boy scouts of the world.

When we were told to eliminate our agricultural subsidies because we would all be doing it around the world, Canada said okay. We eliminated ours but nobody else did. Now we subsidize a tonne a wheat by $24 and America subsidizes a tonne of wheat by $124. Why are we so stupid, is the question that comes to mind.

[Committees of the House, February 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Sackville—Eastern Shore is often pointing out that there are deaf ears when it comes to shipbuilding, but there are also deaf ears when it comes to the garment sector. I am frustrated by this and I do not understand it, because in many ways, China's joining the WTO could be the straw that breaks the camel's back for many of the manufacturers in my riding.

When China joined the WTO, China itself admitted and recognized that safeguards in the apparel industry may be necessary in some partner countries. China agreed to limit its flow to 7.5% per year to those countries that asked. A country had to ask; it was not automatic. Other countries were smart enough to ask. The United States, the entire European Union, Turkey, Argentina and Brazil all said, “You are a member of the club now and we are going to have to accept your imports tariff free, but let us phase it in so we do not destroy our domestic industry”. Canada did not avail itself of that opportunity. It was there on the table. All we had to do was sign on and we would not have had this devastating impact of the last couple of years.

It is not too late. Today the Government of Canada can stipulate itself to this agreement, but it chooses not to. I do not know what was going through the Liberal government's mind when it passed on this opportunity, other than the Liberals just wanted to be boy scouts. They wanted to be the international good guys; they did not believe in trades and tariffs. I see there is some acknowledgement of that. What they failed to do was stand up for Canada.

Regarding the Conservative government, the Conservative Party at least, I have a quote here from a colleague who was the official opposition critic for international trade. I do not know his correct title today, but here is a quote from him:

A Conservative government would stand up for Canadian workers and work proactively through international trade policies to ensure Canada competes on a level playing field.

That is a noble and laudable concept and I am honoured to associate myself with those remarks, but we do not see any evidence of standing up for Canada in the garment sector. We are not asking for special handouts. We are not asking for anything other than to avail ourselves of what help is available to us.

I am frustrated by the staggering growth of Chinese imports into this country because it is killing what is left of the garment industry in the riding that I represent. This is all about fairness. It is not about special provisions. The surge in Chinese clothing imports is directly related to illegal and unfair subsidies given to the Chinese producers.

I will say, without hesitation and with no fear of insult to the nation of China, that it benefits from unfair labour practices. It will not allow workers to form unions so they cannot negotiate fair wages. It exploits its workers. There are terrible working conditions and that is the unfair competitive advantage that China enjoys.

China also provides free utilities because some of these are state owned and controlled operations. It gives breaks on shipping, no property taxes, no export tax rebates and it engages in currency manipulation. These are all things that China does, which fair employers, like we have in Canada, do not do. It is an unfair competitive advantage that is devastating. We should not tolerate it. This is not a level playing field. If we really wanted to stand up for Canada and Canadian workers, we would acknowledge that China is eating our lunch in a way that we cannot compete with.

I would put our Winnipeg garment manufacturers against any garment manufacturer in the world on a competitive basis on a level playing field and we would succeed. The evidence of that is that we are still surviving, although struggling, in the face of this unfair competitive advantage.

If we were given a level playing field I think we would clean up. However, we cannot compete against these unfair labour practices of denying basic human rights in terms of the right to organize, free collective bargaining, fair wages and working conditions. We cannot compete against that and we should not have to because that drags us all down to the bottom. It has been said that a rising tide raises all boats. It has not raised the boats of those people. My phrase is that a rising tide raises all yachts and leaves the rowboats behind.

I am proud to join in the debate today and appeal to the Conservative government to do what we must do to protect the Canadian garment industry. It should immediately engage in discussions with the WTO and undertake the second paragraph of this very brief report that states:

The Committee further calls on the Government of Canada to begin bilateral negociations with China, similar to those undertaken by the United States and the European Union, to reach an agreement on imports of clothing and textiles.

My wish and my appeal to the government is that it stand up for Canada, for the Canadian garment industry and for Canadian jobs and that it listen to the will of the House today.

[Committees of the House, February 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to join in the debate on the motion to concur in the committee report.

I will begin by complimenting the House of Commons Standing Committee on International Trade for its fine report and for undertaking the study on this issue, which is critically important to the riding that I represent. I am proud to support this report. I hope the House of Commons will concur in it and send a clear message that it is not only the standing committee that shares these views, that the House of Commons has affirmed and ratified this same opinion. I hope we can do that today.

I cannot overstate how important the garment industry is to the riding that I represent. There are 43 garment manufacturers in the riding I represent, although that could have changed because they have been dropping like flies since this flood of Chinese imports began when China joined the WTO. There used to be many more garment manufacturers, but there are probably a few less even as we speak.

I would like to recognize the efforts that some of them have made, such as the Nygard manufacturing plants that produce TanJay, and Western Glove Works that produces some of the highest quality denim products in North America. All of these companies have hung on, but just by the skin of their teeth. Many of them employed 800 to 1,200 people but are now down to 300 and 400 employees. The job losses have been devastating.

Let me also say how important these jobs are to new Canadians. We view the garment industry in a sense as gateway jobs for a lot of new arrivals in Canada. A lot of people who come to Manitoba come to the inner city area of my riding. They end up working in the garment industry. These are good jobs. Let me state right from the start that these are not sweatshops. These are unionized jobs with decent wages and decent benefits.

Western Glove has one of the best daycare centres in the city, called Kid Gloves, where people can bring their children and know that they are cared for in the factory. These are good jobs. They are the kinds of jobs we should be fighting for to try to protect, but successive governments have shown no interest in trying to protect the garment industry. Other industries make representations, and justifiably so, whether it is the aerospace industry or the auto industry, and the government hears them and the government supports them, except for shipbuilding, for some mysterious reason.

[Committees of the House, February 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I learned a great deal from my colleague's speech.

I would ask him to clarify one point that he raised. He said that the WTO allows member countries to impose limits on the growth of specific categories of Chinese clothing imports. In fact, these imports can be limited to 7.5% growth per year. He cited some startling statistics in his presentation to the House, that certain categories of Chinese imports had increased 200% and 300% per year. A tsunami of Chinese imports is devastating the domestic economy in terms of our textile industry.

Could he verify those figures and comment on them?

[Canada Elections Act, February 16th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Ottawa Centre for the commitment he has shown in taking this struggle on and in the face of formidable adversity and even hostility on that committee.

I am surprised at the reaction this seems to have stirred in some people. It is probably because the member has implied that they are a bunch of fascists. I noticed from the tone that we could almost hear the jackboots slapping together as they approached.

I thought this kind of big brother intrusion into one's privacy was the kind of thing the Conservatives actually bristled about. I thought their reputation was to get government out of our lives, that less government was better and less intrusion into our privacy. Not wanting to share our information used to be, I thought, one of the hallmarks of the Conservative ideology. However, now that they have the grasp of power, it seems that trampling all over an individual's rights to privacy and so on is no longer offensive to their sensibilities.

I would like my colleague's views on how he came to the opinion that this will probably result in a charter challenge under section 3 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

As well, he made reference to the socio-economic implications in considerations of this. I would be interested to know if he agrees with me on this point. It seems that the big players in politics today have assessed that since the bottom 20% socio-economic quintile do not vote, we should not waste any attention on them. The top 20 percentile all vote but we know how they will vote. Everything else seems to be geared toward that middleman, that 60% which is at play. That is the prize.

Therefore, measures like this completely disregard the bottom 20 percentile who do not vote anyway and, therefore, who needs them, why waste our energy on them and when they vote they probably do not vote Conservative.

Does the member think there was a selfish consideration of, “To hell with the bottom 20% because they probably will not vote anyway and, if they do, they will not vote for us at any rate so who cares if they are marginalized and disenfranchised one step further”?

[Canada Elections Act, February 16th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Ottawa Centre raises another very valuable point. Again I thank him for the dedication he has shown in trying to bring an element of reason to this debate.

There is one other thing that we should be addressing today in terms of election law: the rules that allow people to launder money through their children's bank accounts in order to circumvent the donation limits of the Elections Act. That would be time well spent if we could have some of that cleaned up before we go into the next election campaign, because it made most Canadians feel a little bit ill when they saw eleven year olds donating $5,400 each to a leadership race in the last Liberal leadership campaign.

However, when we tried to change that law in Bill C-2, the Conservatives, the Liberals and the Bloc voted against the NDP's efforts to try to make it illegal to shake down kids for their lunch money to run an election campaign. I thought that was appalling. I thought that this would have been an opportunity, because once the Elections Act is opened, every clause can be reviewed, but we have seen fit to allow another election to go by where the donation limits can be circumvented by laundering money through our children, grandmother, neighbour and God knows who.

I think these loans are criminal, but legal, which may be a contradiction. They are certainly criminal to anyone with the sensibilities of most Canadians. As for this idea that we can launder money by funnelling it through our children's bank accounts to circumvent the rules, it should be illegal.

[Canada Elections Act, February 16th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague from Western Arctic for his passionate commitment to this issue and for his very relevant comments on how this affects the people in his riding of Western Arctic.

His question specifically to me was about what the effect would be in an inner city riding like Winnipeg Centre. I know that the voter ID issue is a huge problem, because I have seen the lineups, even under the current rules. People come to the voting station and have to stand in a separate line for an hour, and sometimes an hour and a half, to get registered.

Now the test will be even higher. It used to be that one could bring an envelope, a hydro bill or some printed material with one's ID on it, as well as a driver's licence, for instance. Once people have made the commitment to come and vote and stand in line for that long, if they were turned away and told to go home to get something else or something they did not have at all, that would be it, they would never come back. It is tough enough to get low income people convinced that it is relevant to vote.

If I may, I will suggest some things we could do that would have been relevant. If we made sure the voters' cards were sent in envelopes instead of just in the mail, I think that would add an element of security. This is one of the things that my colleague from Ottawa Centre proposed. I have been in apartment buildings where I have seen the cards loose around a bank of mailboxes.

There is also universal enumeration. There is no substitute for door to door enumeration. The permanent voters list is a flawed document. An army used to be dispatched, sometimes of retired people, sometimes of people from the local legion, to knock on every door to clean up that voters list before an election. That practice should never have been stopped, in my view, especially in transient areas with high turnover, such as the inner cities we represent.

Also, my colleague from Ottawa Centre made the point for allowing people who are not on the voters list the ability to swear in with a statutory declaration, with the voters having to swear in at the polling station verifying who they are. This is reasonable. This has been used in the past. We do not believe it was subject to wanton abuse, as was implied by the Conservative Party members I have heard speaking. We think this is a reasonable consideration.

If the goal is to have more people voting, we should be putting in place measures that will facilitate it. If one is satisfied with the status quo or even can live with fewer people voting, then Bill C-31 is the answer.

It seems to me that we are coming at this the wrong way. The biggest problem we have, like my colleague from Western Arctic says, is the poor voter turnout, not this notion that there is widespread electoral fraud, because there is no evidence to back that up.

[Canada Elections Act, February 16th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to enter into the debate on Bill C-31. I would like to bring the perspective of the good people of Winnipeg Centre into this debate and I will try to accurately portray the views that I am getting from the area that I represent.

Let me say at the outset that we believe this new election law will be bad for voters and bad for the voters in the riding that I represent in a disproportionate way perhaps because it is, and I say this with no sense of pride, the poorest riding in Canada.

Low income people will be disproportionately disadvantaged by the provisions of this law, mark my words. I will make this point today, but I think we will be hearing a lot more about it in subsequent charter challenges. I say that without any hesitation or fear of contradiction. This will be challenged as a Charter of Rights and Freedoms issue.

Let me remind members of Parliament here today that section 3 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms says:

Every citizen of Canada has the right to vote in an election of members of the House of Commons or of a legislative assembly and to be qualified for membership therein.

This is a fundamental basic right and freedom that we established in this country. Persons wiser than I have said that the highest duty bestowed on anyone is that of a citizen in a democracy, and key and integral to that is the right and duty to participate fully in that democracy. That means exercising one's franchise to vote.

My colleague, the hon. member for Ottawa Centre, in his remarks in the House of Commons dealing with Bill C-31, quoted Alfred E. Smith, a former governor of New York, a famous populist and champion of child labour issues, et cetera. His famous quote was, “All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy”. There is no such thing as too much democracy.

Some of us are concerned that perhaps democracy was just a moment in history and in time. There are those of us who believe democracy is the highest achievement of civilization, but it is constantly at risk and under threat. If we are not vigilant and absolutely determined that we will embrace, enhance, protect, develop, promote, and strengthen democracy with everything we do, then it starts to slide. It cannot remain static. It is either improving or deteriorating. I argue without exaggeration that I believe the moves taken within Bill C-31 are detrimental and deleterious to the state of democracy in this country.

Speakers before me have made the point that requiring voter ID, the stringent new rules contemplated by Bill C-31, will have the predictable consequence and effect of less people voting. I would argue that if there is any one single problem with our election system today, poor voter turnout is the biggest problem we have. It is the failure to participate.

Roughly 60% of registered voters went to the polls in the last federal election. That is bad enough. But only about 50% of all eligible voters cast a ballot in the last federal election. If we treasure and value democracy above all else, we should find those figures very troubling.

The new changes contemplated by Bill C-31 will result in fewer people voting and ironically, or perhaps not ironically, and cruelly, the very people who need representation the most will be the most affected by these new rules. They will be disenfranchised and will not be exercising their right to vote.

I heard my colleague, the hon. member for Vancouver East, make some very passionate remarks in the House. I think I can safely argue that no one that I know in the House of Commons or anywhere else in this country makes a greater effort to encourage low income people to exercise their right to vote than the member for Vancouver East. Registration tables were set up in the Vancouver lower east side, some of the most devastated neighbourhoods and postal codes in the country. There was an effort to reach out and encourage people who were otherwise marginalized to participate and vote.

The member sounded the alarm that this bill will have a disastrous effect on the work that she does and will result in fewer people voting.

That is only one part of the bill that we are critical of today, the idea of the much more stringent rules about voter ID. That in itself would be enough to say that the NDP would not support this bill, but there is a second element to it that I find equally troubling.

I am our party's critic for ethics, privacy and access to information and serve as the vice-chair of the committee of the same name. From a privacy point of view in this era of identity theft and increased heightened concerns about the protection of the privacy of one's personal information, how could the government even consider putting the date of birth on the permanent voters list? It boggles the mind. It runs so contrary to everything we are doing, hearing and studying at the privacy committee. It is almost as if the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing in the government. It is sounding the alarm at committee that Canadians have never been so vulnerable to having their personal identity and privacy compromised and used in ways that the information was never intended to be used.

One's date of birth could be considered as one's individual pin number. That is the identifier. When we phone some place to get information about our accounts, the person at the other end will check by saying, “What is your date of birth so I can confirm you are who you say you are”. That is the identifier we use. It is the identifier crooks use too. If they have someone's name, address, phone number and date of birth, it is a recipe for identity theft. They have themselves a credit card under that person's name probably without much difficulty.

We cannot keep that information secure if it is put on a permanent voters list. I think I had 350 volunteers working on my election campaign. During an election campaign we cannot control everyone who does some volunteer phoning or some door knocking. It is not unusual to tear off a sheet of the voters list and tell someone, “Contact these 50 people and ask them to vote for our party”. This stuff will be circulated widely. It will not be controlled.

Our PIPEDA legislation mandates that anyone holding personal information must go through stringent security and privacy measures. Then on the other hand, again it is the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, the government in a cavalier way will spread all over the countryside one's name, address, phone number and date of birth on one convenient database. It is a recipe for disaster in terms of breaching one's privacy and allowing identity theft to take place. It is appalling.

In committee we are currently studying PIPEDA. Ironically, in this chamber the government is giving away the personal privacy protection of ordinary Canadians and in another room in the same building the privacy committee is seized of the issue of PIPEDA trying to enforce ever more stringent rules on the private sector so it will not divulge that information to anyone for our protection. Within the same building under the same roof we have these two competing dynamics going on: one striving to protect Canadians' privacy; the other cavalierly tossing it around the country. This ain't no beach party. This is not funny. It is not a joke.

I cannot believe we are even having this debate. I cannot believe the Liberals and the Bloc are in favour of this. We know where the idea came from, this date of birth business. Bloc members and PQ members in Quebec like to send birthday cards to voters. That is just crazy. If we are going to compromise the privacy and the personal information of every Canadian just so MPs can send birthday cards to try to endear themselves to their voters, we are really being flippant with the interests of Canadians. We are not putting the best interest of Canadians first and foremost, if that is the rationale. I do not know how they got away with it.

I do not know what the vote was like at the committee but I assume only one party voted against this idea at the committee. I think it was the NDP. I may be corrected; perhaps in the questions and comments period someone might want to correct me.

Then we heard from the Liberal Party. A university professor who teaches constitutional law, the member of Parliament for Vancouver Quadra, made a very good speech full of good facts and figures of all the things to be careful about. He raised the caution of the voter ID situation. He raised the caution about the date of birth. Then his party is going to vote in favour of it. I do not understand it. I do not accept that more thorough and comprehensive enumeration will protect the interests of either one of those issues.

I will say there is important work that needs to be done in the Canada Elections Act. I wish we were having a serious debate about cleaning up some of the atrocities that I have witnessed in election campaigns.

One of the favourite tricks of the Liberal Party of Canada is to clear out senior citizens homes, especially in Chinatown in the area I represent, and then at the polling station, as each individual senior gets off the bus, the seniors are handed a piece of paper with the name of the Liberal candidate and a big X beside it. That is illegal. The Liberals think illegal is a sick bird. They do not really have any concept of right and wrong. I have maintained this before. However, if investigations were to take place on the Canada Elections Act, I would love to see that addressed, because where I come from it is illegal.

As far as actual voter fraud goes, we were kind of led to believe that this act is necessary because of the preponderance of voter fraud. In fact, all we can go by is the actual experience. In the 2006 election campaign, one person was charged and convicted of voter fraud. It was a person who voted even though he was not yet a Canadian citizen. He voted for all three parties or something and got 30 days' community service. In the previous election in 2004, there were no cases; not a single person was charged or convicted of voter fraud. In the 2000 election, there were three individuals convicted of voter fraud.

Where is the experience? Where is the empirical evidence that voter fraud is so rampant that we have to take these heavy-handed measures and risk disenfranchising many--I will not say thousands and I will not say millions--possibly disenfranchising a lot of low income people who do not have the economic stability to provide the right kind of ID?

Where do we get off jeopardizing the personal privacy rights of every voter in the country by putting their DOB on the voters list based on that kind of flimsy evidence? If we could have pointed to a thousand cases, I still would have argued that would not warrant the heavy-handed measures of Bill C-31, but the Conservatives can only point to four cases in the last three federal elections.

We know there is funny business going on, but it is not voter fraud. It is not the permanent voters list. It is not people misrepresenting themselves.

The Conservative members have said that it is going on like crazy, that it is going on all over the place, but we just never catch the people. That is not good enough. That kind of reasoning is not justification for changing the legislation. We need hard facts, and the hard facts are that there were four cases in the last three elections out of 24 million votes cast. Mercy. Statistically insignificant would be the way scientists would phrase that percentage. I cannot even figure out how many decimal points of 1% that would be.

I do not agree with Bill C-31. I fundamentally disagree with it.

The one thing I wanted the government to do was clean up the loans issue, if we are to deal with elections at all. Somehow the government left a loophole we could drive a Brinks truck through, or maybe a Mazda, in terms of loans as opposed to donations.

In Bill C-2, the federal accountability act, we severely limited the amount of money that individuals can donate to an election campaign, and we completely banned any union and corporate donations, which was the right thing to do. Get big money out of politics. Nobody should be able to buy an election in this country. However, we left a big loophole where we can lend a candidate any amount of money or we can lend ourselves any amount of money and never pay it back. How is that different from big money buying influence in Canadian politics? Frankly it is a bit of a no-brainer, because if the loan is not paid back, Elections Canada deems it to be a donation in 18 months.

What they did in one famous case on the Liberal side is that 24 hours before that 18 months was up, they took out another loan and paid off the first loan with the second loan, so now another 18 months would go by. Who is ever going to police whether those guys ever pay off their leadership loans in conjunction with the rules? I believe it will be lost in the sands of time and we will have been made fools of, because we will have knowingly and willingly watched those people violate the spirit and the letter of the election financing laws.

If we were going to address any shortcoming or inconsistency in our Canada Elections Act, election financing should have been addressed, especially if we are going into a federal election. Every well-off MP, or any MP that has a big financial backer or corporate sponsor now knows that Elections Canada is completely feckless, completely unable to police, to stop or to do anything about these massive loans.

When is a loan not a loan? If one never pays it back, it is a donation, right? That is the only conclusion I can come to. There are guys lending themselves a quarter of a million dollars. No one person is allowed to donate a quarter of a million dollars to any election campaign, even their own, but they are allowed to lend it to themselves. I cannot do that. Ordinary Canadians cannot do that. The whole idea was to level the playing field so that nobody had a disproportionate competitive advantage because of who they knew or what corporate backer they had or if their daddy was rich. That was the whole idea. Well, that is out the window now. It is making a mockery of the election financing laws.

Our time in the House of Commons would have been better spent trying to get that fixed before the next federal election campaign, because it is going to snowball now. Every Tom, Dick and Harry who has no conscience is going to take advantage of that loophole. Those of us who have morals and ethics I would hope might have a contributing factor in stopping people from doing that, but others who have a paucity of ethics and morality will take advantage of that loophole, and it is perfectly legal, apparently. Elections Canada cannot do anything about it.

The new requirements for voter ID will add further barriers to voting for marginalized people, for low income people, and will seriously undermine the right to vote. I think we are going to see a charter challenge.

I want to acknowledge the work that my colleague from Ottawa Centre has done on both of these issues, the voter ID issue and the amendments that he sought to put in place on Bill C-31, which we debated last week. The amendments made it to the floor of the House of Commons and then they were summarily dispatched to the trash heap of history, but it was a noble effort and he tried his best, given the limited cards he was dealt to do the honourable thing and the right thing with this.

I want to acknowledge my colleague from Western Arctic too, who has been a champion on this issue, because in the northern regions and in first nations communities, the idea of addresses and photo ID is a big problem. There are no street addresses on a lot of first nations reserves and people do not have photo IDs.

I know that this is a matter that my colleague from Ottawa Centre has brought to the Privacy Commissioner. I hope the Privacy Commissioner sees things the way we do. I hope that we can look forward to a favourable ruling from the Privacy Commissioner that will say that the government is wrong, that it is putting the right to privacy and the personal information of Canadians at risk when it has a permanent voters list with names, addresses, dates of birth and phone numbers on it. It is just folly.