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Results: 1 - 5 of 5
View Karen Vecchio Profile
CPC (ON)
Madam Speaker, the minister is probably one of the smoothest speakers I have ever heard in Parliament. Let us be honest. We have been speaking about the bill for about four and a half hours. On Friday, yes, there were Conservative speakers, because at 12:06 p.m., we found out that no Liberals would be speaking.
I recognize all these things. However, we talk about a sunset clause, but it is mentioned only the preamble of the bill. Therefore, a lot of work needs to be done.
Most of all, why did the minister put forward legislation before he got the excellent report that came out of the Standing Committee on Procedures and House Affairs? Why did he go forward with this legislation before taking any of the information that we had provided to him?
View Dominic LeBlanc Profile
Lib. (NB)
View Dominic LeBlanc Profile
2021-05-10 12:15 [p.6940]
Madam Speaker, I suppose I should thank my hon. colleague from Elgin—Middlesex—London for what was surely intended as a compliment.
I share her view that the procedure and House affairs committee did excellent work in studying the report of the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada. We obviously followed the work of the committee very closely. I would note that the legislation largely follows the recommendations made by the Chief Electoral Officer. We just disagreed and thought we should have more potential voting days than simply those on the weekend before what had traditionally been a polling day on Monday.
We introduced this legislation before Christmas because we thought it was important for Parliament to have a chance to consider it over the Christmas break. I talked to a number of colleagues in the House of Commons during that period. When it came back, we called it for debate.
My hon. colleague said that last Friday at 12:06 p.m. she found out there would be no Liberals speaking. That was precisely because we wanted the debate to conclude so Parliament could vote and the committee could begin studying the bill. The Conservatives obviously used that as a chance to filibuster it.
View Peter Kent Profile
CPC (ON)
View Peter Kent Profile
2021-05-10 13:29 [p.6945]
Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to finally have the opportunity to rise to speak to Bill C-19, if in the shadow of time allocation. I will get to aspects of the bill that I consider worthy and a number of provisions that I believe should be amended in committee, in a moment, but first I will address a number of the underlying issues that have affected the way this bill was mismanaged in its creation, as so many other pieces of legislation have been similarly in this Parliament.
The crux of the problem is not the COVID pandemic. The crux of the problem is the arrogance of the current government to approach virtually every practice and procedure as though it won a majority in 2019. The Liberals refuse to recognize the range of realities, most importantly the pragmatic humility a minority government must practise to govern effectively. The current Liberal government, as in the last Parliament, has ignored committee studies, reports and recommendations in the creation of legislation dealing with critically important issues, such as privacy, foreign affairs, the digital charter, regulating the Internet, medical assistance in dying, and now Bill C-19, an amendment to the Canada Elections Act, provisionally, for a possible general election in this pandemic, a pandemic that will last much longer because of the government's inability to properly procure vaccines and to accept Conservative advice when the pandemic first struck and at every stage since.
The Liberals, with selfish impatience, introduced Bill C-19 last December, not waiting for the completion of a long and thorough study on essential amendments to the Canada Elections Act to protect public health and democracy during a possible pandemic election. An interim report by the committee was, at the time, within days of being presented to the government. That report was pre-empted by Bill C-19, ignoring the suggestions of the exhaustive study and disrespecting not only opposition members on the committee and the many expert witnesses who testified during the study, but the Liberal chair and Liberal committee members, who had worked collegially with the opposition to develop comprehensive recommendations for such an important study.
The Liberals clearly intended then to rush the legislation through Parliament, as they have done with so many other flawed pieces of legislation from the beginning of the pandemic, but in this case the rush was not to help Canadians still in the grips of the pandemic, and it was not to prepare a plan for economic recovery to get Canadians back to work; it was in the political self-interest of preparing for the snap election they were thinking they might get away with. In doing so, they not only disregarded the work of parliamentarians, but wasted the valuable time of health officials and elections experts who appeared during the thorough procedure and House affairs committee study.
In doing so, they ignored the reality that an overwhelming majority of Canadians did not want then, and do not want now, a general election in a deepening pandemic crisis. If the Liberals had any doubts, that was surely driven home in the subsequent cycle of spiking infections and death across the country and the provincial elections conducted under pandemic conditions, most notably the profoundly disrupted Newfoundland and Labrador election.
The interim report of the committee contained extensive, reasoned advice based on the testimony of expert witnesses that would have improved Bill C-19 before it was tabled, but the final report of our committee, submitted to the government in February of this year, provided even more important advice. Most important, the committee advised the government and recommended unanimously, every Liberal member on the committee as well, that the federal government commit to not calling a federal election during the pandemic, unless defeated on a vote of confidence.
Further, Conservative members of the committee wrote a supplementary report, which reiterated the recommendation against holding a pandemic election and elaborated, noting that Bill C-19 was uninformed by the extensive content of the committee report and stating very clearly that the government has a moral obligation to refrain from triggering an election or orchestrating its own downfall, as the Prime Minister has already tried to do a number of times.
Because of the government's inability to manage its own legislative agenda, the bill before us has had precious few hours of debate.
A key element of Bill C-19 involves the change of the usual designation of an election day to be an election period of Saturday, Sunday and Monday, rather than just Monday, to provide more time for voting, social distancing and the precautions necessary to provide safe voting places. The bill also provides for the extension of voting hours of polls, if necessary to midnight, on any polling day, but not to exceed 28 hours for the three-day election period.
The bill also changes the maximum writ period to 53 days because of the many challenges anticipated for in-person voting or involving mail-in ballots. With regard to mail-in ballots, the bill allows electronic applications to be made with proper security protocols, of course, for mail-in ballots. They are very detailed provisions, which I believe would secure the safety of those ballots. There are also provisions for the safe casting of votes in institutions, in facilities where seniors and persons with disabilities reside.
I will support all of those provisions in the bill, on the condition that they expire automatically, completely and absolutely six months after the pandemic period is considered to have ended.
However, there are a number of elements in this legislation that I strongly oppose and believe should be amended. I believe they must be amended at committee, our procedure and House affairs committee, which was so ignored and so disrespected by the original tabling of this legislation in December.
First and foremost, there is a provision for counting mail-in ballots after the end of the official three-day election period. Given the new powers granted the Chief Electoral Officer for early mail-in ballots and extended poll hours, there is absolutely no reason, no excuse, for any ballots received after polls close on election day to be counted. Election day must be decision day.
As well, while I accept the extension of pandemic powers to the Chief Electoral Officer, I oppose the provision that would expand his determination of “satisfactory proof of the elector's identity and residence”. Pandemic protocols should not enable greater voter fraud than already exists in non-pandemic elections.
In conclusion, I want to remind all members of this House of the unanimous recommendation of the procedure and House affairs committee, each and every Liberal member included, that the federal government must commit to not calling a federal election during this continuing pandemic, unless it is defeated on a vote of confidence.
View Alain Therrien Profile
BQ (QC)
View Alain Therrien Profile
2021-05-10 19:01 [p.6997]
Mr. Speaker, our institutions are being undermined first by the closure motion and second by the fact that the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs worked on this issue as of October 22 and presented a report entitled “Final Report: Protecting Public Health and Democracy during a Possible Pandemic Election”.
Committee members worked for 24 hours, heard from at least a dozen witnesses and rushed to table a preliminary report to enlighten the government, which needs all the help it can get because it is short-sighted. Committee members submitted their report as soon as possible, in other words on December 11, 2020, but this bunch of Liberals introduced its bill on December 10, 2020. It is an affront to the institutions. I would be embarrassed if I were them. I would make like an ostrich and bury my head in the sand.
The Liberals did not wait for the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs to be done before introducing their bill on December 11, 2020. They did not bring it up again in the House until March 8. Why not wait for the results of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, since the committee members had called professional witnesses, studied the issue, taken the time to do the work and were only too happy to advise the government?
The pandemic is being used as an excuse. It seems to be making the members opposite do all sorts of foolish things. They claim that since we are in a pandemic, they can play with democratic rights. No, that is not how it works.
Here is a clear example of the lack of ethics in this government. Everything this government does is the opposite of what Midas did. Everything Midas touched turned to gold, but the Liberals are Sadim. Midas spelled backwards is Sadim. Everything this government touches turns to dirt.
The Liberals tried to close the borders, but they never managed to. The third wave is their fault. That is a fact. When the rail crisis happened, the government sat on its hands. It took the Liberals 30 days to wake up. While travelling abroad for a week and a half, the Prime Minister said it was the responsibility of the provinces and Quebec. When he returned home after 10 days, he finally got it and said that the Bloc Québécois's idea was a good solution.
This same government, which is incapable of making a decision, is shutting down democracy, thanks in part to the NDP's help. How can I possibly describe what the NDP is doing and still be polite?
The NDP is happy to gag itself. NDP members are stuffing rags in their mouths and saying nothing. They are propping up a government that is trampling on voters' basic rights.
Voters have the right to vote intelligently, and members of Parliament have the right to govern the right to vote through discussion and consensus-building. The Liberals are violating democracy, and they are proud of it. What a government.
View Pat Kelly Profile
CPC (AB)
View Pat Kelly Profile
2021-02-01 13:20 [p.3816]
Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to join this debate. I will declare from the outset that I am not a procedural scholar or a particular expert in the Standing Orders, but I have some strong feelings about a number of ways that this place works. Also, as most other members have pointed out, my views are my own as well.
I want talk a little about the Standing Orders in general and how they have served Canadians since long before Confederation. Some of our Standing Orders go right back to the Assembly House of Lower Canada, which is 230 years old. Dozens of our rules date back from those times. They are a part of how and why our democratic institutions are, in my opinion, extraordinarily successful.
Contained within our Constitution are promises of peace, order and good government. The success we have had in those areas are a function of how we govern ourselves in Parliament. Therefore, changes to the Standing Orders ought not to be taken lightly. I do not support a lot of the changes that have been discussed from time to time.
I certainly opposed the changes the government proposed in the spring of 2016. I do not support the idea of building in programming to bills either by PROC or giving the government the ability to do so. I am not going to talk about tinkering with the sitting calendar or the daily rubric, although I am intrigued by the member for Calgary Shepard's idea on moving question period to the start of the day.
Before I get to my main point about how we debate, I want to talk about the idea of any sort of permanence being added to remote voting or remote debating. I really oppose any type of permanence to these things for a variety of reasons.
I do not have time to really get into all of it, but there is something just inherently critical about being in close proximity to each other in the chamber, being able to gauge emotional response in debate, being together as we vote and bringing members into contact with each other. This is extremely important. Enormous factors will and can isolate colleagues from each other, without adding any type of permanence to remote voting. I do not believe remote voting can do a lot to promote a sense of family friendliness. Eliminating Fridays does not do it either. Yes, it makes travel a bit different, but condensing hours into the other days of the week would create different types of unfriendliness for the work environment and for families.
What I want to get into is how we debate and, if I have time at the end, a little on committees.
With respect to debates, this is a debating chamber and debate is perhaps the most important tool members have to represent their constituents. It is how opposition and governing party backbenchers can influence government. If Canadians watch, or if a member of the public were watching in the Gallery, they would see dull debate that is not particularly informative. The format we have of 10-minute speeches, which are usually read or at least done with significant notes just to put specific points on the record that are generally unsurprising and a regurgitation of known party positions and repeating that over and over again all day, is not the best way to have debate. It is really at the end of these 10-minute sessions, when we have five minutes of questions and comments, that the true debate begins. That is when members and their ideas are tested. It is really where members of the public, never mind other members of Parliament, are most likely to learn some insight into the member's position or to gain better knowledge of the bill.
The member for Calgary Shepard already talked today about the U.K. model. I certainly give tremendous support for the idea of moving in that direction. They have a long tradition of allowing other members to intervene during speeches. In the U.K. Parliament, it is perfectly normal for an MP, or several MPs, to rise while a member is speaking. It is the choice of members whether to yield to another member, and they can have time added back for when they yield for another intervention.
It even takes the Speaker out of it, where the member who has the time slot can manage who speaks. Members can make a speech in three or four minutes, making the main points they want to, and provoke response on the other side. They see other members rise to either rebut a point, to agree with a point or to bring in other information. That is when they really get the back and forth. In their Parliament, it is considered bad form not to yield one's time. Members would be heckled for failing to let other members jump into debate. They can have a seamless transition where there is much back and forth. I would like to see the Canadian Parliament look at how we do that.
Even if we did not go all out that way and adopt the U.K.'s system of interventions within a speech, if nothing else, we could perhaps change the proportion of speech versus questions and comments. Most members could imagine this more easily, to have a speech where they only have five minutes to make the canned points they want to get on the record and then have 10 minutes of questions and comments. This would be a simple change that would not fundamentally change how debate in our chamber is managed, as far as the Speaker and the House leaders go, but it would allow for much more participation and would have a much more edifying and engaged debate.
There are a lot of other ways we could improve debate. Question period itself could be changed to where questions are allotted or when the Speaker recognizes someone to ask a question the member is automatically given two questions, so the questions are always in two-question blocks. That way, the person who is asking the question can automatically then follow up with another question that is related to the response to the first question.
I want to say something about late shows. We could change late shows to go from a 10-minute slot to five minutes. Without even changing the rubric of the daily routine, we could go from three to five late shows, maybe putting that right after question period. That has been discussed today as maybe not a bad idea. At a minimum, we could open it up so maybe it is two, two, one and one rather than four, four, one and one and get more late shows in.
I do not know if I have time to talk much about committees, but I would ask PROC to look into or study the idea of having committee membership be determined by secret ballot. Rather than having whips supply lists of members for committees, have members actively campaign between their own caucus and other caucuses and be chosen for their subject matter expertise and their ability to work with others. The committee reports would carry more weight, they would be less partisan and they would be driven more toward strong reports that a government would be less able to easily ignore.
I wanted to touch on a lot of the things that have already come up today. We want the public to see that their MPs are able to engage in debate, are able to use their voices in Parliament, to be part of committees that are relevant and that produce reports that will have impact with the government. We can make all these changes, but I would not want to make large, whole-scale changes to the Standing Orders which have served Canadians well for centuries.
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