Democratic Reform  Mr. Speaker, the Leader of the Opposition could not be further from the truth. In fact, the fair elections act would change section 18 of the Canada Elections Act to shift the advertising function of Elections Canada towards the basics of voting: where, when, and what ID to bring

Democratic Reform  Mr. Speaker, one in six of those cards contains an error, so they are not a secure piece of identification. However, there are 39 other ways for people to identify themselves, including student cards, which is something students have, obviously. We will also require Elections Ca

Democratic Reform  Mr. Speaker, half of young people were not even aware that they could vote before election day. If they were working or studying on the day the vote was held, they did not have a chance to cast a ballot. The fair elections act would require Elections Canada to better inform young

Fair Elections Act  Even me.

Fair Elections Act  Mr. Speaker, of course, all Canadians who want to testify will be welcome to make submissions to the committee, and those submissions will be considered by the members of that committee. I want to address one important section of the fair elections act, clause 7, which would ame

Fair Elections Act  I will answer the simple question, Mr. Speaker. The power that the hon. member is asking for is a power that police officers do not have, even when they are investigating far more heinous crimes than the alleged offences that the member across has listed. My question to him, tho

Fair Elections Act  Mr. Speaker, the member complained that the fair elections act removes vouching as a form of identification. However, she did not address the serious problems that Elections Canada's own commissioned report found with vouching. It found that 25% of cases of vouching had an irregu

Privilege  Mr. Speaker, yesterday, we heard a question of privilege from an NDP member with respect to a briefing that the Privy Council Office gave to members on the fair elections bill. I spoke to my assistants to find out all of the details. The question of privilege was related to the

Democratic Reform  Mr. Speaker, it is quite the contrary. The fair elections act creates new provisions that would require political parties to be subjected to tougher external compliance audits before they can be reimbursed. Furthermore, the CEO has the power to ask parties to provide financial in

Democratic Reform  Mr. Speaker, on the contrary, our bill requires that political parties be subject to independent audits to show that they have obeyed the rules and that every penny is counted. At the same time, the Chief Electoral Officer has the power to ask the parties for more details before

Democratic Reform  Mr. Speaker, the NDP has provided no evidence that Elections Canada ad campaigns work. Where is their data? They have not shown us anything to prove that. I have demonstrated through the publicly available facts that not only are the publicity campaigns of Elections Canada faili

Democratic Reform  Mr. Speaker, the NDP obviously does not know how the Director of Public Prosecutions is named. First of all, there is a committee that has representation from every single recognized party in the House of Commons, including the NDP. Then there are two independent, non-partisan p

Democratic Reform  Mr. Speaker, even police officers investigating the most reprehensible crimes do not have the power the hon. member is referring to. Even for violent crimes, police officers do not have this power. The commissioner already has the same investigative powers as police officers and

Democratic Reform  Mr. Speaker, when we introduced a bill prohibiting the use of other people's names to get around donation limits, the other parties said that this would prevent candidates from launching their own campaigns. We are therefore going to allow candidates to give themselves enough mo

Democratic Reform  Mr. Speaker, the NDP was not even able to run an electronic voting system for a thousand delegates at its convention. It shut down the entire convention for three or four hours. If that were to happen in a national election, imagine what kind of national crisis we would have. Th