Robert Aubin

[Public Service, June 13th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, as we applaud all the work done by our public servants during this National Public Service Week, the fact is that things are not so rosy.

According to the latest report from the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, the government has failed to contract out for services effectively. On top of a lack of accountability in the case of some contracts, many good jobs are being lost, while productivity and morale are diminishing among employees. It is all very discouraging.

Will the Liberals show some respect for the public service and limit its use of outside contractors?

[Business of Supply, June 13th, 2016]

Madam Speaker, I have a very simple question. We are not hearing a very firm deadline from the Liberal benches. During the election campaign, they said it would happen rather quickly. Then they said it would take a few months, perhaps it would be in the spring, and some are saying that it might not even happen during this parliament.

If marijuana is to be legalized, there must be an agreement with the provinces on the distribution network. Therefore, is decriminalization not the only way to move forward?

[Business of Supply, June 13th, 2016]

Madam Speaker, I listened very carefully to our justice critic's speech. I would like to lean on his expertise and ask a question to broaden the scope of our discussion.

Before embarking on a political career, which can end who knows when, I spent 25 years as a high school teacher. As we all know, teenagers experience so many different things, some of them only once. It is awful to be saddled with a criminal record at 14 or 15 for succumbing to peer pressure and trying an illegal substance. That can haunt a person for a long time.

In my colleague's view, is it true that it is getting harder and harder to obtain a pardon in Canada, never mind the costs associated with obtaining one?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2016, No. 1, June 8th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, during the election campaign, I think that every single candidate in the country talked about the middle class. The vast majority of my constituents were happy to be heard and to see that something would be done for them.

How can we reconcile that with the tax cuts that will not benefit six out of 10 Canadians? People who earn $200,000 and over will be the ones who benefit the most. I am sick of hearing about the middle class, when the government has no respect for the middle class. Furthermore, the government is telling the six out of 10 people who will not have access to the tax cut to wait, since there is also the Canada child benefit.

Does someone absolutely have to have children to be part of the middle class? Can the member recognize that the choice to have a family and the desire to be part of the middle class are two completely different things?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2016, No. 1, June 7th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, when I go door to door in Trois-Rivières, there is one question I am dying to ask every person I see. I want to know whether they are satisfied with the tax cuts. Most times, people ask me what tax cut I am talking about.

There is a big difference between the definition of middle class that I had in my mind and what we see in the budget.

The median salary in Quebec is around $31,500 a year. As we all know, everyone who earns $45,000 and under will not receive a tax cut.

Is my colleague truly proud of a budget in which the middle class, or those striving to join it, do not have access to the tax cuts? Is he proud of a measure that is supposed to be revenue neutral but that will actually cost hundreds of millions of dollars?

[Committees of the House, June 7th, 2016]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Berthier—Maskinongé for her speech and congratulate her on the expertise she has developed on this matter.

During the election campaign, I visited some farms with my colleague and had the opportunity to meet with dairy producers. On visiting these farms, I came to understand how important the family farm model is to Quebec.

Today's debate is urgent. We already know that there is a problem with people passing their family farms on from one generation to the next.

If our farmers are losing revenue on top of that, will we see more family farms in Quebec being sold? This model is so important to us.

[Business of Supply, June 2nd, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Laurentides—Labelle for his statements.

I admit that I was taken aback at one point, but perhaps I misunderstood. I would like an explanation.

He defined a wasted vote, which is often what many voters feel like in the current electoral system, as a vote that did not go to the elected candidate. It seems to me that a wasted vote is a vote that is not represented in the House of Commons.

Having lost many elections in my life as a voter, my consolation, if it was one, or my disappointment, if it was one, was seeing not only that the candidate that I wanted elected in my riding had lost, but also that my vote was lost by not being represented in the House.

Could my colleague provide a better definition of what he considers a wasted vote?

[Business of Supply, June 2nd, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for his question and for his allusion to Maurice Duplessis, whose offices were just beside the current location of my own.

To respond to his question more seriously, one cannot be from Quebec and be allergic to referendums, for our history is dotted with them.

However, to speak of a referendum at this time would be to put the cart before the horse. There are different ways of consulting the population.

Obviously, I hope that the House has authority over the matter, since we are the representatives of that population. However, there are also ways to set up a citizens’ committee that would be charged with doing parallel work on this reform and could also consult experts and its respective populations.

There are various ways, and if one day we should take the referendum route, which is not allowed by the Constitution at present, I must point out, we will also be able to consider what the subject of the referendum should be.

Should the referendum be on a proposal? If we actually attained this much-coveted broad consensus, could we not introduce this electoral reform and then organize a referendum a few elections on so that we have had the experience and can talk about the subject in full knowledge of the facts?

[Business of Supply, June 2nd, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I admit that even after five years in Parliament, I have preserved my ideals, and it is my hope that we will find the solution together. However that does not mean I wear rose-coloured glasses.

Indeed, many voters have long dreamed of changing the electoral system. However it must be acknowledged that not all of the parties necessarily took a stand on this issue during the election campaign and the parties that did often had differing proposals.

My dearest hope is not that we will arrive at a majority decision on this committee, but that we will succeed in achieving the broadest possible consensus.

Of course, the new makeup of the committee does not allow any one party to hold the majority on its own. However, we will need more than one party plus one vote. We are really looking for the broadest possible consensus, and if the committee does not have this credibility, it will be difficult for it to produce a proposal that the public will find credible.

[Business of Supply, June 2nd, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, opposition days go by so quickly that I will be sharing my time in order to allow as many members as possible to have a say, especially considering that the topic we are discussing today is of capital importance.

As we all know, politicians have a bad habit of overstating the historic nature of what they are discussing. When I look at my short career in politics, this being my fifth year, during this year alone I have spoken to bills on subjects as important as medical assistance in dying and electoral reform.

It is not an exaggeration to say that what we are talking about right now, the future we are trying to carve out for our country, could be historic. I want to qualify that by saying that I will give the process some time to move forward and see how things unfold. However, I must say that I welcome the government's openness this morning to ensuring that the committee is more collegial.

Before I was an NDP member, in my previous career as a teacher I had many discussions with my students about the electoral system and how Canadians are represented in the House.

We obviously know that in direct democracy, we cannot bring together 34 million Canadians and get them to debate. We therefore chose to elect representatives to debate and propose solutions.

We must ensure that the plurality of the ideas presented today, which is reflected by the plurality of the parties present in the House, no longer echoes the era during which everything was either red or blue and was viewed accordingly.

We need to move as quickly as possible to ensure that our representation in the House starts to reflect Canadians and to ensure that all Canadians who go out to vote are assured that their vote will count and that they will be represented in the House. That is less and less evident, and that probably partially explains voter turnout, which is always questionable. Although turnout increased slightly in the last election, it is far below what we should expect from a democratic society that would strive for the involvement of the vast majority of its citizens.

If, at the end of the process, we want to be able to propose a solution that Canadians feel was the result of a job well done, then Canadians need to be included in that process. That is why I thought my colleague's proposal was so well-thought-out. The committee that he is proposing, which would be made up of five Liberals, three Conservatives, two New Democrats, a member of the Bloc Québécois, and a member of the Green Party, is already a step toward the objective that we are trying to reach because it reflects how Canadians voted in the last election.

We have two choices. The first is to stick with tradition in order to keep the structure of the committee as it has always been, where the governing party has a majority. I was going to say that this tradition has been around for thousands of years, but it has not. The other option is to set up the committee in a way that reflects what we are trying to accomplish with the election reform, in other words, representation where there is a place for the ideas of all Canadians and Quebeckers and where everyone can express their opinion.

I am particularly pleased that the minister recognized the Bloc Québécois's and the Green Party's right to vote on this committee. It did not make any sense to me to work together to reform our electoral system in a way that clearly demonstrates how important each vote is, while preventing two parties that were elected by Canadians from voting. That did not make much sense to me, particularly since the representation proposed in the NDP motion reflects the results of the last election quite well.

Just to give you an idea, since the people listening to us may not remember the figures, let us recall that the Liberal government was elected with 39.5% of the vote. It would be somewhat surprising for the government to grab 60% of the votes in a committee that strives to be part of a change. The Conservatives had 31.9% of the vote, while the NDP, the Bloc Québécois and the Green Party had 19.7%, 4.7%, and 3.4% respectively of the vote.

The minister has agreed to this representation on the committee, for which, by the way, I thank her. I think this is a step in the right direction, and it lends credibility to the work that must be done.

If we reach the broadest consensus possible, which is clearly what I would like to see, that will significantly change how the Canadian electorate votes. For many years, we have seen a strong trend in voting to defeat a government. People go to the polls and most often vote against a government, instead of voting for a government that they want to see in power. I think that is a sort of perversion of our democratic system.

If, through an electoral reform, we are able to come up with a solution that has consensus and encourages everyone to go to the polls, having decided that they will vote according to their values and convictions, that may well significantly reduce the so-called strategic voting. Basically, that type of voting always reflects the idea of voting to defeat a government, rather than voting to elect a government that reflects our aspirations.

I hope that the work of the committee and all the consultations with experts, the public, and all those interested in this system will help us reach the broadest possible consensus to show that the direction or change to be proposed to all Canadians seems to us to be clearly the most representative.

Unfortunately, I think time is of the essence. To be able to implement a new electoral system, the Chief Electoral Officer told us that he would have to establish a timeline consistent with the scope of the change. My hope therefore is that the work will proceed smoothly, and that it will start as soon as possible, given that we have already lost some eight months.

I therefore welcome the minister’s response this morning as a breath of fresh air, an opening, but I cannot forget that all this could have been done much sooner. We have to get down to serious work starting today in order to put in place a system that will do away with false majorities. This is in fact the fundamental problem with our first-past-the-post system. Governments elected with around 30%, 38%, or 40% of the vote are being brought to power, legitimately, under the rules of the current system. However they are clearly not representative of the people’s will, since 60% of population is expressing a desire to be led by a party other than the one in government. It seems to me that this statistic alone is sufficient to demonstrate that the electoral system we now have does not reflect the desire of the people of Quebec and Canada to have a system where they can be sure that their vote counts.

There are a few different proposals for getting rid of these distortions. I do not think that preferential balloting, which seems to be the route advocated by the Liberal government, is one of those systems. As I often say, from the shock of ideas the light will shine forth. This is something that the new makeup of the committee will probably make possible. I hope that everyone will report to the committee with their ideas and be able to demonstrate them and that there will also be this open-mindedness to the ideas of others, so that together we can find the best system, one in which Quebeckers and Canadians can see themselves reflected.