Article content

TORONTO — The new Liberal government wants more Canadians to vote in elections and won’t be reviving measures proposed by the former Conservative regime that critics said would have the effect of suppressing voting, the Prime Minister’s Office said Wednesday.

At the same time, a spokesman for the PMO said the government had made no decision on an existing law currently subject of a court battle that effectively disenfranchises expats abroad for more than five years.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Expats may have Harper Tory restrictions on voting dropped, Liberals say Back to video

“We will be able to clarify our intent in the coming months,” Olivier Duchesneau, deputy communications director in the Prime Minister’s Office, said in an email.

“But we believe that more Canadians should have the ability to vote, not the opposite.”

Two expat Canadians in the United States launched a constitutional challenge to rules in the Canada Elections Act that bar them from voting from abroad. They were initially successful in Ontario Superior Court in 2014, but the province’s Court of Appeal sided with the Conservative government in July.