Procedure and House Affairs committee  It could do something about it by moving—

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think a coordination type of standard provides more clarity and it's probably also easier to prove in legal terms, so it would be helpful in that sense. The problem is that if you have a rogue foreign actor, there are a bunch of other new offences in the act that get at foreign

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Agreed.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Collusion is already illegal, so this just adds it into the pre-writ period, and then building into some of the other rules on foreigner interference. Bill C-76 doesn't transform what already exists. If you do move to a coordination standard, though, you do end up needing to be

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Right, because if you're having a platform launch, you want to be able to invite stakeholders, right?

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Is election law subtle and important? I'll definitely agree with that. It's what I do every day, so I'm biased.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  There's one other area, which might seem small, but we have a brief period of time. The standard legal language in the act is mainly about preventing collusion between third parties trying to evade the existing rules, or between a third party and a political party. Collusion is a

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Do you mean what is going to be the biggest benefit of the pre-writ period?

Procedure and House Affairs committee  We're talking a lot about problems and how to fill them, but globally Canada has one of the best campaign finance systems in the world. When we look especially to the south, the U.S. campaign finance system is broken. There are enormous amounts of money in the system, and it has

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Is it to what extent it's going to improve transparency...? I think it will go quite a ways to improving it. The period only kicks in on June 30. That's the period we're talking about. We started seeing a lot of third parties advertising in only the unregulated period. They would

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you very much, members of the committee, for having me. I really appreciate the invitation to speak to these important issues. I'm a professor of constitutional law and election law at the University of Ottawa, just down the road. I'm going to focus on what I think are fo

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I will leave it to the honourable members to discuss motive and the political side. I don't think there is a reason to make people wait until the election period. You asked at the beginning of your question whether the system was broken. I don't believe it was. The two proble

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I first became aware of this issue reading the testimony of Mr. Mayrand. I agree, it does cause some confusion. The issue for me is, as a legal matter, we want to avoid disputes after the election. We want to avoid uncertainty at the polls that cause people to have to go to court

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thanks very much for the question. I'm on the record at this committee a couple of years ago speaking on the Fair Representation Act criticizing that 1991 decision from the Supreme Court. I believe we're on the same page that we should have representation by population. In term

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you very much to the committee for having me here to speak on this important bill. I'm a law professor at the University of Ottawa where I teach constitutional law and election law. You're all invited to come and speak to my class, if you'd like, down the road. I'm going t