Canada Elections Act  The need to prohibit such foreign influence is clear. Canada's former chief elector officer from 1990 to 2007, Jean-Pierre Kingsley, stated unequivocally: We simply cannot allow any kind of money that is not Canadian to find its way into the Canadian electoral system...A general election is a national event, it’s not an international event and foreign interests have no place and for them to have found a back door like this, that is not acceptable to Canadians.

Public Safety committee  Thank you again on behalf of the committee, Mr. Zinger and Ms. Kingsley. I appreciate your contribution to the study of this bill. We will suspend for a few minutes while our next panel comes in.

Public Safety committee  Thank you very much, Dr. Zinger and Madam Kingsley. Thank you for being back with us. In the five minutes I have, I want to focus on the human element of corrections. I think it's pretty fair to say that our corrections system, in a large part, does not generate good mental health outcomes for the population of inmates, and also equally for our women and men who serve as correctional officers.

Public Safety committee  Each one of our senior investigators who visits a penitentiary and meets with offenders also visits the segregation area. Each of these investigators also has the numbers, and will raise those large numbers with the warden and ask for an explanation and/or a review on every single visit, every single time.

Public Safety committee  Have they refused to give the information? No. CSC has to respond to our queries and to our information requests. There can be disagreements. Our recommendations, as you are aware, are not binding, but we do raise the issues, and there is a response provided.

Public Safety committee  Thank you, Chair. Dr. Zinger, thank you for being here again, and Ms. Kingsley. We really appreciate your work in corrections. We talked a lot about oversight. Who do you think should be doing this oversight? The Ontario courts said that if it was someone within CSC who was not reporting to the initial decision-maker, it was okay.

Public Safety committee  We're already under some time constraints. I appreciate Mr. Zinger's patience. We welcome both you and Marie-France Kingsley to the committee. Both of you are very familiar witnesses, so I don't need to give any instruction. We look forward to what you have to say.

Public Safety committee  Thank you for the invitation to appear before your committee. It is a pleasure to be here. I present to you Marie-France Kingsley, executive director of the office. She worked for many years as director of investigations and has a lot of expertise in operations. As correctional investigator, I welcome the intent of Bill C-83, which proposes to eliminate the use of solitary confinement as defined by the United Nations in the newly revised Nelson Mandela rules—that is, less than 22 hours in cell.

Elections Modernization Act  That is the evidence of several chief electoral officers, including Marc Mayrand and Jean-Pierre Kingsley, who both testified to the PROC committee that it was a non-problem. Bill C-23 did a few other things. It took away some of the abilities of our Chief Electoral Officer to speak to us as voters when we needed information.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The politics, I suspect, is what's stopping the government from doing it because these guys—I'm going to take shots at you—do from time to time.... Jean-Pierre Kingsley and other former chief electoral officers on policy have supported this. It seems Melanee Thomas, who appeared in front of the ERRE committee, said it's a democratic way of doing party financing.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It's broadly seen to be a good thing, because the political party is a key institution linking representative institutions and the voting public. Jean-Pierre Kingsley, the former chief electoral officer of Canada, recommends that it be reinstated. Thank you.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I want to raise the issue of the voter information card. I had this discussion many years ago with Jean-Pierre Kingsley, and I pointed out this out to him. The voter information card does provide information on a person. I guess you could falsify one if you wanted to; I don't think that's happening. But it suffers from a certain degree of database error, and these kinds of mistakes indicate it's not necessarily all that helpful.

Elections Modernization Act  During our debates and hearings on the so-called electoral reform that the government promised to make, a renowned and respected former chief electoral officer, Jean-Pierre Kingsley, said that, in the interest of fairness, the government should immediately reinstate the per-vote subsidy. The government claims to want to do things differently, so why then is that not included in the minister's bill?

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Chairman, members of the committee, thank you for this opportunity to testify before you today, and warm greetings from Yangon, Myanmar. My name is Kingsley Abbott, and I am a Senior International Legal Adviser with the International Commission of Jurists, known as the ICJ. The ICJ, established in 1952, is an apolitical international human rights organization composed of 60 eminent judges and lawyers from all regions of the world, including two Canadians, former Supreme Court justice Ian Binnie and Judge Michèle Rivet.

Canada Elections Act  Now everyone has to advertise their little $1,500 fundraising soirées. Mr. Kingsley said that electoral fairness is part and parcel of living in a democratic society. Even a party that does not have 20 or 60 MPs should have the right to a fair hearing in the democratic debate between elections and from the get-go in an election.