Stephen Harper Reform Calgary West, AB

Mr. Speaker, I am rising today at third reading of Bill C-63, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act, the Referendum Act and the Parliament of Canada Act.

In speaking on behalf of the Reform Party, I intend to oppose this bill that imposes changes to the federal elections act without the consent of the opposition parties. These changes are not necessary and they are also dangerous to the operation of Canadian democracy.

I also want to note that, in the case of Quebec, it has been decided not to use the data in Quebec's permanent list of electors to establish the computerized federal register. Instead, a last door to door enumeration will take place next spring in Quebec and elsewhere, according to a decision resulting from unfortunate and costly choices made by the government in this bill.

In laying out the Reform position I would like to note that three major parts, three major changes or major initiatives are undertaken in this legislation. First is the establishment of a permanent register of electors. Second is the establishment of a 36-day calendar rather than the present 47-day calendar for the the holding of federal election campaigns. Both of these changes are to be implemented at the time of the next election by way of a pre-election enumeration. Finally, a clause in this bill staggers voting hours across the country.

All three of these changes have been supported in principle by the Reform Party, the Bloc Quebecois and other political parties. The problem is the method of implementation chosen which particularly in the case of the permanent voters' list and the 36-day campaign will prove to be premature and costly in the way they are being implemented. In the case of staggered voting hours, that is being done in a way that requires much broader consultation and consensus to be acceptable to western Canadians.

I should note, in making this observation, that broadly speaking we would support these initiatives if we could come to some kind of agreement. I note there are a number of issues not covered in this legislation.

The Reform Party has favoured for a number of years initiatives which would result in fixed election dates in the country within the context of a parliamentary system, allowing for the provision of a normal time period for the holding of an election which could be violated in exceptional circumstances but not normally. We have supported initiatives that would remove federal political parties from the various subsidies and tax concessions that they now receive. This would get federal political parties out of the tax trough.

These changes are not incorporated in the bill. Neither are similar concerns which have been raised by the Bloc Quebecois and go in a completely different direction. For years the Bloc Quebecois has favoured the public subsidization of political parties and would like to see various provisions of Quebec electoral law implemented at the federal level. These would control the spending and money raising of political parties. As well, the Bloc Quebecois favours restrictions on third party advertising, or the gag law, which the Reform Party opposes and which has been struck down in court.

As well, both the Reform Party and the Bloc Quebecois differ with the government on fundamental issues of representation. For example, the Bloc Quebecois favours a 25 per cent minimum provision of Commons seats for Quebec. In our case, we support Senate reform, a triple E Senate in particular, and regional representation.

None of those things are found in the bill. Obviously there is no consensus on them. I mention them because they are important items and we would like the government and the procedure and House affairs committee to study them. I also mention them to make it clear that, in spite of our very different approaches and opinions on these very contentious issues, they are not the reason we lack unanimous agreement for the bill.

It would be irresponsible for the Reform Party or the Bloc to hold up positive changes to federal election law because some other things are not in the bill. They did not have all party support. We certainly have not done that and we do not intend to do it.

That is not why we object to this legislation. We object to this legislation because of its substantive contents. In our view the principles in the bill are not being properly or well implemented. Just as important, the process followed in developing the bill has been terribly flawed.

The hon. member for Bellechasse laid out those concerns in great detail and at length, and I support almost all of what he said in that regard. My colleague from the New Democratic Party, the hon. member for Winnipeg Transcona, noted that while we did reach all party agreement on some amendments, it should be noted that these

amendments were introduced not only after report stage, but after the application of time allocation on debate, both at report stage and at third reading.

This bill was presented only a month ago. This is the third day it has been debated in the House. Yet after the first day of full debate after its return from committee, the government implemented time allocation. In my view, the procedure of using time allocation for electoral law, doing it quickly and without the consent of the other political parties, is the kind of dangerous application of electoral practices that we are more likely to find in third world countries.

As I have repeatedly said throughout this discussion, that process was completely unnecessary. Every indication that we have had during the debate, in the committee hearings and in the House, has been that with further discussion we would reach an all party consensus on virtually all of the items in the legislation, yet we have ended up rushing the process. Some positive amendments have been made in the process, but they were made in a very scattered and irregular manner.

The hon. member for Bellechasse also mentioned the fact that before the bill was tabled we found out about it through the media. That was also an irregularity which, in our view, should not have occurred. I will have time to speak to that at greater length later in my speech.

The chief electoral officer consulted the committee on preliminary legislation in April of this year. The government waited from April until October before acting. When it finally acted it presented a bill that was different in some critical ways from the principles which had all party agreement in April. That was completely unnecessary and completely irregular.

I observed something different than the hon. member for Bellechasse. He observed that the government did not follow such a practice in the case of the previous electoral legislation, Bill C-69. I do not entirely agree with him on that count. The government has demonstrated a tendency to act unilaterally on election law before.

Let me disagree with him in this regard. It is true that in the case of Bill C-69, unlike this legislation, we did study that legislation for a substantial period of time. We looked at it intensively and we came to all party agreement on most of the particulars of the legislation.

However, the principal purpose and concern of that bill was the scrapping of the electoral boundaries process so that it would not be in place for the 1997 election. That was our very fundamental objection to that legislation. We would have been perfectly prepared to approve it if it would have gone through after the current redistribution had been completed. We all know that ultimately the bill never passed and the redistribution has been completed. That was the reason we opposed the legislation. It was a part of the bill and virtually all of the opposition parties in both Houses of Parliament opposed it for that reason.

It is important that when the bill ultimately failed, the government never passed the things on which we all agreed. That says a lot. We developed a new process that would have been an improvement. Ninety-five per cent of the bill ultimately could have been passed in the House and in the Senate. Yet once the government failed to get the one thing it did not have all party agreement on it chose not to proceed with the bill at all. This says a lot about its practices on previous election legislation.

I have so far not said what the hon. member for Bellechasse has said. In spite of what has occurred in the past six months-especially this past month-we have worked well with individual members of the government. I acknowledge the work of the chief government whip, the member for Stormont-Dundas, and the hon. member for Fundy-Royal, the chairman of the committee, and other members of the government staff who have worked to try to facilitate discussion and agreement on individual items. We acknowledge the importance of this work.

Nevertheless we have been operating within a terribly constricted timetable, a process that has not allowed us to come to a consensus. It was unnecessary because all of this could have been done months ago.

What remains in this legislation after amendment are two basic substantive problems which I will address. The two major problems with this legislation as it is now being passed are, first, the specific proposal to stagger voting hours for the next federal election, and second, the proposal to implement the new register and shortened electoral period through a spring enumeration which will be very costly.

First, the staggered voting hours were not part of this bill when it went to committee before second reading. That is important to mention. Not only has this bill been rushed, but the provision which the Reform Party now objects to most strenuously was not even included in this bill when it was tabled.

That provision came from private member's Bill C-307, tabled by the hon. member for Vancouver East, which was passed by this House some days after Bill C-63 was sent to the procedure and House affairs committee.

Bill C-307, which dealt with staggered voting hours, was passed by the House by unanimous agreement only on the grounds that the issues in it would be studied and we would arrive at a consensus on the specific proposal to be implemented. It is important to note that

the proposal in Bill C-307 and the proposal in Bill C-63 are not the same proposal.

Two basic reasons were given for wanting to alter periods of voting across the country. First was the problem of western alienation. Westerners see the government being chosen before the polls have actually closed in their ridings. Second was the fact that western Canadians through modern communications techniques, particularly the Internet, may increasingly know about the results before they vote.

On the first question it is important to remind the House that the Reform Party rejects staggered voting hours as a serious solution to the problem of western alienation. It is true, Mr. Speaker, and you know this, that westerners say that the government is elected before our votes are even counted.

However, only an extremely naive person or an easterner would say that changing the order of counting the votes is a solution to this problem. Westerners are smart enough to realize that even if we counted the votes in the completely opposite order, governments could still be chosen without any support whatsoever from western Canada.

That is very fundamental. It will probably happen again in the next election. It will happen not because of the order the votes are counted, it will happen because of the functioning of the parliamentary system. Until the government is prepared to study that issue seriously, we will not arrive at a solution to western alienation or the alienation that exists in other parts of the country.

This is not a solution to that problem. Reform has never suggested it is so we reject it out of hand. However, Reform did accept looking at the problem that people may increasingly know the results in other parts of the country before they vote. This may be dangerous in some way to democracy and alter behaviour or affect the results.

The Reform Party said it was willing to study that issue. It is important to realize, and anybody who looks at the transcripts of the committee will see that no convincing evidence was provided to the committee that this is creating a serious problem in the functioning of our democracy.

Specifically, I asked the various witnesses whether there was any documented evidence or any serious academic study on whether knowing the results in other parts of the country had either of two effects: caused people not to vote or it caused them to vote differently than they would vote otherwise. There is precious little evidence that either of these things are true.

The only evidence that was presented in committee was a remark by the chief electoral officer that some studies in the United States indicate that western Americans, knowing the results already from the east, might not turn out at the voting stations in the western United States, which may diminish voting by about 3 per cent.

Three per cent is not large but it is important to realize that the United States has no legal blackout. Information on electoral results flows freely across the country. That environment is very different from ours where we still have a blackout on mainstream media and have very effective control over the flow of information. I believe the impact would be even less. In the United States, without those things, the impact is only 3 per cent. Here it must be substantially less.

As I say, there is no indication today that this is causing a serious problem in terms of how people vote or whether they vote but it could in the future. This tells us that we should be very cautious before playing around with the rules of the game to fix this problem.

The discussion in committee focused on four different elements of a solution. Only one of them was on staggering hours. Another was delaying the vote count in areas of eastern Canada. Another was eliminating the blackout provision in the Atlantic provinces because obviously Atlantic Canada cannot elect the national government, and possibly allowing the count to proceed in eastern Canada at least a half hour before the close of the polls in the west because of the delay in results coming out even once the counting started. Those were the four elements that the committee studied as a way of finding solutions to the problem.

It is important to note that I felt, and possibly other members of the committee would agree, the committee discussion indicated that some combination of these solutions would be the way to proceed. In fact on three of those items, staggering the hours, delaying the count and eliminating the Atlantic Canada blackout, there seemed to be a fair degree of consensus that these were possibilities. On the fourth issue, allowing the count to actually proceed a half hour earlier in Ontario and Quebec, it should be noted that the member for Vancouver East herself, the sponsor of the bill, rejected that as a possible solution.

The solution proposed by the government without the support of the opposition parties is of a completely different nature than the solution which was discussed during the hearings. The government refused to put in delays to the count, did not eliminate the blackout and in fact did provide for the count to begin a half hour earlier in central Canada.

As well the government provided two other elements that had not previously been raised in our discussions. One was the closure of the polls at 7.30 in the province of Alberta, which is now in this bill. The element that we had the most concern about, the early closure of the polls in British Columbia, is now augmented by the

early closure of the polls in Alberta as well, an option which was never discussed in committee.

Also, it is an anomaly that the closure of the polls and the counting under the government proposal will now proceed even earlier in Atlantic Canada than it would have before. The polls will now close up to two and a half hours earlier in Newfoundland than they will in Quebec and Ontario. This was not part of any solution the committee looked at.

Let me put all of this detail in perspective. The bottom line is that the solution to this problem will be based entirely on staggering the hours. The staggering of the hours will occur in such a way that the polls will close at seven o'clock in British Columbia and at 7.30 in Alberta.

According to the government, the solution to the problem of westerners being alienated and also the vote of westerners somehow being affected or devalued because results are being counted already in the east is to cut out prime voting hours in British Columbia and Alberta. In other words, the west will pay for the solution to the problems of the electoral system. This is not a solution for western Canadians; this is trying to solve the west as a problem rather than the problem itself.

This should not proceed without all-party agreement, not just because we lack consensus but because the vast majority of the members of this House representing British Columbia and Alberta will be the very people opposing this legislation. That should raise suspicions in everyone's mind.

People will be very upset when they realize the implications of this. I will say to them, a little bit tongue and cheek, to make sure the government pays for this decision at the polls, if they can get there, and that is an important if.

Let me move on to our second major concern with this bill. The implementation of the permanent register and the shorter electoral period is to occur through a pre-election enumeration to be held in the spring.

In April when the chief electoral officer came to the committee, he outlined two different scenarios under which we could achieve a 36 day period and a permanent register. One was to simply proceed with the next election in the way we have always proceeded: use the 47 day calendar, have the enumeration and then have the enumeration serve as the basis for the permanent register. That would obviously be the simplest solution in technical terms. Another was to have a pre-election enumeration. However, he said at the time that a pre-election enumeration would require a lead time of one year. He said that in order to implement it for a fall 1997 election, the legislative changes had to be in place by the summer of 1996.

That is easy to work out. We are obviously now implementing these changes six months later than was proposed, to be implemented four months earlier than was proposed. How is it that we can we proceed in that manner? We can proceed by dramatically increasing the costs of the process. In our view, this defeats the entire purpose of the legislation. The entire purpose has been to reduce electoral costs.

The assumption has been that a permanent electoral list and the revision of the list through access to various data sources at the federal and provincial levels will prove to be less costly in the long run than a door to door enumeration. This is not only because a permanent register is less costly, not only because we do not have to create a list every single time, but also because the list can be shared by all levels of government: federal, provincial, regional, municipal, and school boards.

However, what we have done here is to ensure that we create the list in a way that is unnecessarily expensive. Let me be very specific about that. Not only are we doing it outside the electoral period which makes it more expensive, but because we are doing it on an accelerated timetable, we minimize our ability to use lists that have already been created in other parts of the country.

In committee we did make a positive change. We got a change through that would require the chief electoral officer to use lists where an enumeration has been conducted within the past year. That would mean that in the case of Alberta which has 26 federal ridings and Prince Edward Island which has four federal ridings we will not need to do an enumeration.

The chief electoral officer feels that those lists can still be implemented in time for the spring and it will save us money. That is 30 ridings out of 301, or only about 10 per cent. Our hope had been that by further delaying the implementation, we would be able to capture enumerations and permanent voters lists created in other parts of the country.

British Columbia has a permanent voters register and we are told that Quebec's register will be ready by May 1. These are the second and third largest provinces in the country. Were we to capture these two provinces in our efforts, as well as a few others such as the Yukon, we would have been able to forgo a door to door enumeration in one-half of the country. It is important to note that this is the major additional cost we are applying to the next election.

The chief electoral officer believes that by proceeding in this manner we will be able to save $30 million in future elections, not in the one coming up, but in future elections. It is important to note that those savings are as yet unrealized. They are in the future and there could be complications. Frankly I would take those as

maximum figures. Let us assume we have a maximum savings of $30 million. We have already seen in British Columbia that its permanent list has proven to be somewhat more expensive than was thought.

What is certain is that because of the process followed by this government, the next election will cost $41 million more. That cost will occur primarily because we are doing a door to door enumeration virtually across the country, except for Alberta and Prince Edward Island, outside of the campaign period. That is a cost of nearly $80 million.

Making every effort to ensure that we could get Quebec, British Columbia and others into this process before the next federal election or before a door to door enumeration is critical to being able to realize real cost savings immediately. However the government has chosen not to do that.

We tabled an amendment yesterday that would have put back the clock not 12 months as the government had originally indicated, but only four months. We put in an amendment to move the clock back just four months and the government rejected it. The government has tabled a positive amendment that will give us some certainty as to when this can be implemented and that in effect is not until the end of April.

By rejecting an amendment to implement this in the fall and by insisting through time allocation and a rush study of this bill that this be implemented by May 1, we have the unprecedented case of a government showing its electoral timetable to the public. For that I am grateful. It will make it much easier for our party to plan the next election. It is very clear to everybody now that the government has created a situation where, barring some kind of PR catastrophe, it will call an election in early May and will have it in mid-June. That is getting to be a fairly obvious option given what the government has done with this bill.

As I say, the government could have delayed it. In the process of delaying it, the government could have made the entire process less expensive. It is important to add that the government could have shortened the electoral period anyway for the next election even without proceeding in this manner.

The Lortie commission said on page 123 of volume two its report, and this is important: "Shorter federal election campaigns do not necessarily depend on introducing a register of voters. A shorter election campaign is feasible even if the current enumeration process is retained. That said, it is improbable that the campaign could be shortened much beyond 40 days". According to the Lortie commission, we could have shortened the electoral period for the next campaign from 47 to 40 days without doing a pre-election enumeration and without imposing the additional costs on taxpayers that are going to be imposed.

The government is proceeding with this for reasons that are obvious only to itself and which are expensive to the taxpayers and ultimately it perceives as in its own interest. Otherwise the government would have reached an agreement with the opposition parties on how to proceed. That said, I will add that in this specific instance exactly how it is implementing this, the government did make some concessions to the opposition parties that are worth noting.

First, the government did provide through amendment at committee a specific timetable as to when the bill can be implemented. It did say that the enumeration process and most of the sections of the bill would become effective April 1 for a 30 day enumeration campaign, making an election call possible under the new calendar effectively at the end of April. The government did do that. It put time lines on various sections of the bill.

The government and all parties also agreed to a motion this morning. It additionally would provide the opposition parties with a one-time provision of the electoral list as soon as that enumeration is completed and it is feasible to transmit the results of the permanent register to the party.

Those two changes do provide some degree of certainty. We said that this is an important issue, that we already know we are going to be surprised with the date so do not surprise us as well with how the timetable is going to be implemented. The government did do that. That does not change our fundamental objection that this should be done in a way that minimizes costs and sticks to a timetable closer to the original consultations it had with the opposition parties in April. However, as I say, it chose for its own reasons to proceed in a different manner.

Those are our two major objections. There were a number of other areas to which we objected in this legislation. However, in the course of studying the bill, both in committee and in the House, some improvements have been made. Let me complete my remarks by going through some of the other provisions of the legislation which are deficient or which have been improved. As I say, these provisions are less important but not by any means unimportant items.

With respect to byelections, one of the specific concerns which the Reform Party has had with this bill has been the provision to call snap byelections. I have said this repeatedly, but already in this Parliament the government has appointed people to patronage positions or to the Senate in order to open up a safe riding for a snap byelection. In the dead of winter, just after Christmas of last year, that occurred. Our concern was that by shortening the electoral period from 47 days to 36 days this process would be further abused.

We called for the creation of a 30 day cooling off period. In other words, the government could not call a byelection for at least 30 days after a vacancy in the House of Commons occurred. The government has provided today, through an amendment, an 11 day cooling off period, which at least provides us with the status quo. It provides us with, in effect, a minimum 47 day election campaign because there will have to be 11 days before the election is called and then 36 days for the campaign itself. That is an important amendment which was brought in by the government this morning. Perhaps it is not as long a period as we wanted, but we are grateful that we could come to an all party agreement on it.

However, it did not address a second concern which we raised, which could have been addressed at the same time, the problem of byelections simply not being held at all. Under the Parliament of Canada Act the government must call an election with 180 days of the occurrence of a vacancy. It is important to note that the election does not have to be held in any particular time period. It has been common in recent years for governments to put off late term byelections. We know that when we get near the end of a term seats open up for all kinds of reasons, retiring MPs are appointed or seek other work or whatever. We know that seats become vacant. What has happened in the recent past is that governments have decided to leave the seats vacant almost indefinitely, putting the date of a byelection well past the next general election. That could have been addressed in this legislation, but the government chose not to.

I only have a short time left, so I am going to go quickly through some of the other things I wanted to draw to the attention of the House.

The government did remove the automatic publication of gender on voters lists. That is something which we had asked for. That was done today. The government has added the date of birth as a mandatory requirement, collected for the register, as the Bloc Quebecois demanded. That was an item which we also supported. However, the government did not agree to delete the automatic provision of the electoral list to political parties annually, as provided for in this act. That is important. We objected to that and we believe the government should have removed the provision.

I would point out what the privacy commissioner said. We agree with him wholeheartedly: "Annual disclosures of the list appears excessive in light of the list's express purpose of conducting elections or referenda. Given that no jurisdiction conducts annual elections, this frequent a disclosure seems more suited to repeated canvassing by political parties, not to the election itself". As I say, that is a deficiency of the legislation which we had hoped to correct.

There are other points I could go on about, a number of more minor matters where there has been some improvement; for

example, the elimination of revising officers, the decision to shorten time off work that employers must provide from four hours to three hours. There has been a number of other improvements we can point to but in the big picture this legislation remains flawed.

It is flawed because we have followed a process that was rushed, undemocratic and unnecessary. With further discussion we would have reached a bill that not only was agreed to by all parties but that was much better for the people of Canada.