Democratic Reform  Mr. Speaker, leading up to the last federal election, in fact, in the years of the Harper government, it spent almost a billion dollars on quasi-partisan government advertising. We changed the advertising policy for the Government of Canada to eliminate that kind of blatant parti

Elections Modernization Act  Mr. Speaker, again, we believe very strongly that having more Canadians active in the political process, including in elections, is really important and vital for our democracy. That really starts with young Canadians. To have a registry of future voters and to engage young Cana

Elections Modernization Act  Mr. Speaker, that is a great question. Again, it is very important to increase flexibility to help voters participate in the electoral process, just as it is very important to protect the integrity of our voting system. To restore vouching, as an example, is one area of flexib

Elections Modernization Act  Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his engagement on the whole area of electoral reform. As he has indicated, he agrees and the NDP members have expressed in principle support for much of what is in this bill, particularly for the components of this bill that reflect the re

Elections Modernization Act  Mr. Speaker, one of the recommendations from Elections Canada, having had the opportunity to analyze the impact of the changes that the previous government made in eliminating vouching and voter information cards, was that we bring back voter information cards. In fact, I mention

Elections Modernization Act  Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his work on the whole area of democratic institutions. One of the first things we did as a government was bring in a new advertising policy. That was in the spring of 2016. That advertising policy, among other things, would ban, and has b

Elections Modernization Act  moved that Bill C-76, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and other Acts and to make certain consequential amendments, be read the second time and referred to a committee. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to begin the debate at second reading of Bill C-76, the elections modernizat

National Defence Act  moved for leave to introduce Bill C-77, an act to amend the National Defence Act and to make related and consequential amendments to other acts. (Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)

Democratic Reform  Mr. Speaker, on the member's opening comments, we dealt with the problem in the last election. We defeated the Harper Conservatives. Beyond that, the Conservatives need to understand that what we are doing with the future voter registry is engaging more young Canadians in the po

Democratic Reform  Mr. Speaker, as I said, the current practice will continue. Under this practice, only the list of actual electors will be shared with political parties. That will not be affected by the establishment of a youth future voting registry, the objective of which is to encourage more

Democratic Reform  Mr. Speaker, as I said earlier, in leading up to the last election, the Conservatives used quasi-partisan advertising tax dollars to pay for government advertising that was highly partisan. That was one of the reasons why we changed our advertising policy to ban this kind of part

Democratic Reform  Mr. Speaker, leading up to the last election, Canadians were justifiably fed up with the Conservative government's misuse of tax dollars for partisan advertising. That is why we moved quickly in 2016 with our new advertising policy to ban partisan government ads and establish thi

Democratic Reform  Mr. Speaker, the biggest challenge for our electoral democracy is not voter fraud, it is voter turnout. Bill C-76 will bring back voter ID cards and vouching, and we are also giving Elections Canada the mandate to promote turnout. In the last Parliament, it was a Conservative MP

Democratic Reform  Mr. Speaker, one of the recommendations of Elections Canada was to restore the voter information cards and vouching to the process. That is one of the reasons why we are doing it. Stats Canada tells us that in the last election 170,000 Canadians did not have the opportunity to vo

Democratic Reform  Mr. Speaker, I am not surprised to hear the Conservatives attacking Stats Canada. They were the ones who gutted Stats Canada and got rid of the long-form census. The reality is that there are reasons why a lot of Canadians did want to vote in the last election. They were very mot