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Because the bill affects all political parties, Gould said it’s important to work with opposition parties as much as possible to achieve some consensus. However, there’s no guarantee the Conservatives will support the bill, even with Thursday’s concession.

Canadians don't want to be in a perpetual election cycle

In addition to the change on pre-writ spending, the government is proposing other amendments to beef up measures in the bill aimed at preventing foreign interference in Canadian elections.

When the bill was introduced last spring, the government proposed only to prohibit the use of foreign money by third parties during the pre-writ period and during the official campaign period. It is now proposing a blanket ban on the use of foreign funds at any time for the purpose of supporting or opposing a political party or candidate.

It is also proposing another amendment that would require online platforms, such as Facebook and Google, to create a registry of all digital advertisements placed by political parties or third parties during the pre-writ and writ periods of a campaign and to ensure they remain visible to the public for two years.

The bill represents a first stab at grappling with the spectre of social media being abused by bad actors — foreign or domestic — to manipulate the results of an election, exacerbate societal divisions, amplify hate messages or instil distrust in the electoral system. It comes in the wake of scandal over Russian interference in the last American presidential contest and the misuse of personal information of millions of Facebook users during the United Kingdom’s Brexit campaign.

It would also reverse a number of changes wrought by the previous Conservative administration’s widely denounced Fair Elections Act, including restoring the use of voter information cards as a valid form of identification and scrapping measures that critics argued were designed to benefit the Conservatives with their overflowing war chests.

Among other things, C-76 sets a maximum limit of 50 days for an election campaign and does away with the Conservative-introduced measure that allowed parties to increase their spending limits for every day a campaign exceeded the minimum 36 days.