Peter Julian

[Business of Supply, April 10th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I hope to match the eloquence of my friend and colleague, the member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley. I will start by repeating what the member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley said: We will be supporting this motion.

Certainly we welcome the Liberal Party to the issue of the unfair elections act. The Liberal Party has been strongly criticized in civil society groups and community organizations across the country for not having been on this file at all. It is important that the Liberals are now getting involved in what is a pretty fundamental issue.

There is no doubt that what is happening on the unfair elections act is a travesty. We are seeing this every day in the House of Commons. The Leader of the Opposition, the member for Outremont, has time after time raised questions about how the Conservative government has approached trying to ram through these changes through the unfair elections act. Members saw yesterday in the House of Commons the Prime Minister refusing to answer those questions, simply sitting in his chair. That shows a profound lack of responsibility.

Now this has blown up. We have heard from very learned Canadians such as Sheila Fraser who is undoubtedly a Canadian hero. She is a person whom every Canadian stands behind because of her past history of exposing the deplorable Liberal sponsorship scandal. Her name was evoked all the time by Conservatives when she was exposing what was widespread and profound Liberal corruption. She has spoken out and said this is an attack on democracy. The Prime Minister is not even willing to stand in the House and answer questions. His minister is not even willing to evoke the name of Sheila Fraser, to mention her name, and instead condemns her and tries to attack both her and the Chief Electoral Officer.

Therefore, there is no doubt that the travesty of the unfair elections act, now spreading across the country, is something that needs to be dealt with. We need to shut down the attempts by the government to railroad or bulldoze through the bad legislation that would simply allow the Conservatives to try to steal the next election. There is no doubt about that.

That is why we support the principle of the motion overall, though it is so very limiting. It is my concern that we see with the Liberals, unfortunately, an alliance developing with the Conservative government. We have seen it on their use of Standing Order 56.1, which is a very punitive measure. In the 10 years I have been in this House of Commons, there has traditionally been support by all members of the opposition to stop the abusive use of Standing Order 56.1, and yet the Liberals have joined with the Conservatives in that kind of abuse.

We see that as well in the Bureau of Internal Economy. We believe, on this side of the House, that the Bureau of Internal Economy's secretive and partisan decisions are simply not appropriate for a modern democracy. We believe the BOIE should be done away with, and MPs' expenses should be handled independently and impartially. We have also raised the fact that we believe the Auditor General should be monitoring MPs' expenses. Yet we have seen, from the Conservatives and Liberals, systematic blocking of those attempts for real reform that would allow the Auditor General to be brought in.

I am a bit skeptical, because of what we have unfortunately seen from this alliance between Liberals and Conservatives, about the real intent to modify what is undoubtedly an abuse of Parliament. The use of time allocation and closure has been invoked more than 60 times by the current Conservative government. It has often been used to bulldoze and ram through bad legislation, certainly legislation that is not in Canadians' interest, more than 60 times.

I cited just a few minutes ago a 350-page budget implementation bill, and after 25 minutes of debate—the first speaker had not even finished—the government had already given notice of time allocation and closure. That was after 25 minutes, and we are talking about a 350-page bill with more than 500 articles modifying 40 laws.

Every single Conservative said, “That is okay. I do not want to speak up on behalf of my constituents. I do not want to modify this legislation. I do not want my voice, whether it be from Oxford or any other riding, heard. I do not want to speak out on behalf of my constituents. I just want to be silent. I want to vote the way the Prime Minister's Office tells me to vote”.

That is not the principle of representative democracy. That is not the principle of why Canadians send us here. New Democratic Party MPs, the official opposition, take our jobs seriously. We want to scrutinize legislation. That is why these time allocation measures and closure measures are so bad for the Canadian public.

It is because it shuts down the ability of Canadian members of Parliament to do their job. We have seen the result in the last few weeks with two laws that have been rejected by the Supreme Court because they were badly botched by the Conservative government.

Time allocation and, indeed, closure motions do not allow for that proper scrutiny. The government has to then come back in with amendments and change the laws, because it did not do them properly in the first place.

Our opposition to time allocation and our opposition to closure motions is not just based on the theory that it is important for members of Parliament to speak out on important legislation. I include, as the member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley said, members on the government side, dozens of whom have never spoken in this parliamentary session on a single government bill.

They have abdicated their responsibility to speak out. They never speak out on government legislation, and I am sure the voters, come October 19, 2015, will remember that these members have never risen in the House to speak on government legislation, either for or against or to modify.

That is clearly an abuse of Parliament, and I think it is an abuse of the voters.

The Conservatives have used time allocation more than 60 times, but the Liberal Party was worse when it was in power. It used time allocation 75 times. That is appalling. It shows that the Conservatives and Liberals want the same things, which is why Canadians are so impatient to see the kind of change an NDP government would bring in 2015. That is when we will have some real debates in the House.

Even though the Liberals' motion has to do with electoral “deform”, it does not address all of the other bills that need to be addressed. The Official Languages Act, the Supreme Court Act, the Canada Health Act and the Canadian Environmental Protection Act are all fundamental laws. However, the Liberals seem to approve of the government's use of time allocation.

Mr. Speaker, you yourself moved a motion on November 23, 2011, calling for time allocation motions be moved in collaboration with the Speaker of the House. The government must defend its use of time allocation and present appropriate justifications for a time allocation motion to be adopted in the House of Commons.

This would enable members to speak and would also ensure that we avoid the kinds of mistakes this government has made since it came to power. It has introduced bills that do not work and that have been struck down by the Supreme Court. These bills should be subject to a serious verification process to ensure that they are valid.

We moved this motion in 2011 in your name, Mr. Speaker, and we still stand by the principle of holding debates in the House. If the government wants to move a time allocation motion, it must provide a justification and get the consent of the House of Commons. That is an important change. The Liberal motion is just more of the same and does not propose any real change.

The real change will come in 2015, when we can have a government that respects parliamentary and democratic rights.

[Business of Supply, April 10th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the member has stated that it is just used to further the government agenda.

We had a 350-page budget implementation bill with 500 clauses amending more than 40 laws in Canada, and the government brought in time allocation after 25 minutes of debate.

How would the member's constituents react if they knew that that 350-page omnibus bill, amending 40 different laws, was invoked with time allocation and closure after 25 minutes of debate?

[Business of Supply, April 10th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor for bringing forward this motion.

I am curious. This motion on closure and time allocation the member is raising in regard to the Canada Elections Act and the Parliament of Canada Act we certainly support, but the problem has been far more widespread than that. As members know, we have seen omnibus budget implementation that has gutted our environmental assessments and has destroyed the independent ability of the National Energy Board to make independent decisions without being overruled by cabinet decree. We have seen huge bricks brought forward. Even though we are going to spend the whole day on this motion, and we are supporting it, I do not understand why the motion is limited to just two bills.

There is the Official Languages Act, the Canada Health Act, and a whole range of other legislation. There is the continual abuse of Parliament that takes place through the current government's omnibus budget bills. I do not understand why none of that is in the Liberal motion.

Could the member clarify why, when they have the whole day, and certainly we are supportive of putting a close to the abusive nature of time allocation and closure, the Liberal Party is limiting the motion to just two bills?

[Privilege, April 10th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I must say I am rising today with great exasperation and frustration on a question of privilege pursuant to section 48(1) of the Standing Orders, regarding misleading information that the Minister of State for Democratic Reform has provided to the House. I say I am exasperated because members know as well as I do that in the past few months, my colleagues and I from the NDP official opposition caucus have had to stand up many times in the House to denounce misleading comments by members of the opposite side.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to read from a statement you made yesterday in the House: “As has been suggested, the information shared in this House does hold extraordinary value as it forms the basis upon which decisions are made in the House”.

Mr. Speaker, you will recall that we raised a similar question of privilege in March 2012 with regard to the comments made by the then minister of Human Resources and Social Development, who said that there was no quota system for recovering EI payments when in fact there was.

We also raised a similar question of privilege in October 2013, when we brought to the House's attention the Prime Minister's misleading statements concerning his office's involvement in the Wright-Duffy scandal.

We raised a question on the 100% fabricated evidence from the member for Mississauga—Streetsville, who said in this House he had witnessed cases of voter fraud when, in fact, he simply had not.

Finally, just two weeks ago we raised a similar question regarding misleading comments from the minister of state for finance, who manipulated numbers to justify his party's opposition to the NDP's CPP expansion plan.

My colleagues and I do not just raise these questions of privilege for fun, far from it. I would rather not have to rise in the House and waste the precious little time that we are given for debates—which is often cut short by this government—to ask the House to look into misleading comments once again made by a minister.

However, as the opposition House leader, it is my duty to raise these questions and to hold the government responsible for what it tells the House and Canadians.

Therefore, it is with some irritation that I want to present to you today the facts concerning the specific case at hand: the comments made by the Minister of State for Democratic Reform.

During question period in this House on Wednesday, April 2, the Minister of State for Democratic Reform was asked why he was ready to disenfranchise thousands of Canadians by removing voter ID cards as possible forms of identification for voters. This is what the member replied on April 2:

There are regular reports of people receiving multiple cards and using them to vote multiple times. That, too, can be found on the Elections Canada website.

If this were true, it would indeed be concerning. As we all know, voting multiple times is a serious legal offence. That is why the NDP followed up on his statement. We searched Elections Canada's website and we asked witnesses at the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, currently studying Bill C-23, if there were, in fact, cases of people using multiple cards to vote multiple times.

The answer we found is unambiguous. There is only one documented case of this, as we well know, which was a gag by the Quebec TV show Infoman. Therefore, the Minister of State for Democratic Reform is blatantly misleading the House when he said there are “regular reports” of voters voting multiple times.

We tried to give the minister of state a chance to correct the record during question period on April 3, the following day, when the leader of the official opposition, the NDP leader, asked him to give us examples of these “regular reports of people receiving multiple cards and using them to vote multiple times”. At that time, the minister of state actually changed his story.

On April 3, he replied:

In fact, there are documented cases where people received multiple voter information cards. I gave the example, which was documented by the French CBC, where two Montrealers each received two voter information cards and therefore each voted twice.

In his reply, the minister of state could only resort to citing, again, one single example that exists of voters voting multiple times, but he changed his story from “regular reports of people receiving multiple cards and using them to vote multiple times” to “cases where people received multiple voter information cards”.

In his answer on April 2, the Minister of State for Democratic Reform was referring to the reports showing that there are cases of people receiving more than one voter card. However, none of these reports say that the people in question actually used these to vote more than once. The minister of state knew this, and therefore misled the House when he manipulated the information to add, from his own fertile imagination, that people had used their voter cards to vote multiple times.

Mr. Speaker, if you are still not convinced, allow me to tell you about the many witnesses who appeared before the committee and who all told us that there was no evidence of systemic or organized voter fraud.

Harry Neufeld, the former chief electoral officer of British Columbia, said:

“There was no evidence of fraud whatsoever”, in the cases he reviewed, and that he has “only been privy to a handful of cases of voter fraud” in his entire career.

Marc Mayrand, Chief Electoral Officer of Elections Canada, also said that there was no systemic or organized voter fraud.

How, then, can the Minister of State for Democratic Reform claim that Elections Canada has documented multiple cases of voter fraud?

I will not take the time here today to mention all the precedents where it was found that prima facie contempt had occurred when members misled the House. I will spare members in the House from that today, since we have talked about those cases before when other similar incidents occurred, incidents which are unfortunately far too frequent.

Let me simply remind the House that, according to the House of Commons Procedure and Practice, second edition, on page 115, “...Misleading a Minister or a Member has also been considered a form of obstruction and thus a prima facie breach of privilege”.

Moreover, and this is the essence of the matter, the Parliamentary Practice, 22nd edition, by Erskine May states the following on page 63 that “...it is of paramount importance that ministers give accurate and truthful information to Parliament, correcting any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity”.

Mr. Speaker, I see that you are getting tired of this, as are New Democrats, and so are Canadians. Canadians are tired of the misleading comments from the other side. We are tired of the Conservative government’s misleading the House in order to justify its wrong-headed policies.

The opposition to the unfair elections act is mounting and virtually unanimous. Conservatives stand to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters who, by many assessments, are coincidentally not usually Conservative voters. To justify this, the Minister of State for Democratic Reform had to resort to making up stories in the House because he simply could not find real evidence to bring forward. All he has is one single gag by Infoman.

The Minister of State for Democratic Reform has, one, offered misleading statements to the House; two, did so knowingly; and, three, he did so with the deliberate intent to mislead parliamentarians. Therefore, Mr. Speaker, I ask you to find that a prima facie contempt of the House exists in this case.

More than that, Mr. Speaker, since the problem of ministers knowingly misleading the House seems to be becoming endemic in the Conservative government, I would appreciate receiving guidance from you as to how we can put an end to the practice of government benches providing misleading information to parliamentarians and to the Canadian public.

[Points of Order, April 9th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, it was a highly inappropriate gesture, and we believe that the Minister of International Trade owes the member for Churchill an apology.

After the member for Scarborough Southwest spoke, members on the government side completely overreacted.

The member for Kelowna—Lake Country came in through the opposition lobby and attempted to “get at” the member for Scarborough Southwest, who was sitting in the House at the time. I and the member for Sudbury had to escort him out of the House of Commons and back into the opposition lobby.

I had no sooner returned to my seat when I saw the Minister of International Trade, also standing in front of the member for Scarborough Southwest—he had crossed the floor—making what can only be called threatening and intimidating gestures. I also had to escort him across to the government side.

It is highly inappropriate for that minister and that member of Parliament to attempt to intimidate opposition members.

Sadly, today is International Anti-Bullying Day.

This is not the first time that government members have crossed the floor inappropriately. It has to stop. There is no excuse for this behaviour.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to read into the record your statement on decorum in the House that you made on Wednesday, December 12, 2012. You said at that time:

My task as Speaker is to ensure that the intensity of feeling expressed around some issues is contained within the bounds of civility without infringing on the freedom of speech that members enjoy. The Chair tries to ensure that our rules are adhered to in a way that encourages mutual respect.

Mr. Speaker, I want to say to you today: you must ensure that civility.

Therefore, we ask you: how will you ensure that civility and what will you do to stop incidents of this sort from occurring in the House of Commons again?

[Points of Order, April 9th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I am rising on a point of order to denounce the deplorable action by some government members this afternoon.

Mr. Speaker, you will recall that the member for Scarborough Southwest raised a perfectly legitimate point of order on the issue of an inappropriate gesture made by the Minister of International Trade toward the member for Churchill earlier today. The minister has denied the gesture, but given the screen shot and the video that are currently circulating in the media and social media, he may want to revise his response of earlier today.

It was a highly inappropriate gesture—

[Points of Order, April 9th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I found the point of order raised by the member for Malpeque to be very compelling. I did not find the intervention from the government House leader very convincing at all.

We would like to look at the blues, and I will be coming back in short order through the course of the session to provide any additional comments as needed.

[Democratic Reform, April 4th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, Canada's former auditor general, Sheila Fraser, who exposed the Liberal sponsorship scandal, feels that Bill C-23 is an attack on Canadian democracy.

When it came time to go after the Liberals, with good reason, the current Minister of State for Democratic Reform mentioned the former auditor general's name 65 times in the House. Today, he is acting as though she does not even exist.

Will the minister listen to Sheila Fraser and withdraw his bill?

[Democratic Reform, April 4th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the minister should stop attacking Sheila Fraser and chief electoral officers from across the country, and witnesses as well, and he should start listening to Canadians.

The minister has been answering questions about Sheila Fraser's stinging criticism by attacking this trusted public figure. We are seeing this again now. He is trying to demonize Elections Canada and attack the credibility of Sheila Fraser.

Sheila Fraser deserves our country's thanks. She stood up against Liberal corruption, and she is getting shameful treatment by the Conservatives. Will the minister now stand up and apologize to Sheila Fraser for his inappropriate comments?

[Democratic Reform, April 4th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, Sheila Fraser did not pull punches when she was investigating Liberal corruption during the sponsorship scandal. She is a Canadian hero, and she has been clear on the Conservatives' unfair elections act. She calls it an attack on democracy. She is particularly troubled by limitations imposed on the Chief Electoral Officer's independence.

Independent officers of Parliament and the government is now restricting what they can say? It's just so inappropriate.

Does the minister finally understand that his changes are inappropriate and unfair, and will he withdraw his attack on democracy?