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Helena Konanz

Conservative 12:55 p.m.

“I'm glad everyone will work together on this. Canadians are watching. Virtual voting must be very safe before we use it. It is not safe yet.”

Mario Beaulieu

Bloc Québécois 12:55 p.m.

“I think parties should get money from the government based on their votes. We should limit donations to $500. Large donations create the appearance of corruption. Some people do not like this kind of government funding. But the government already gives up some tax money when people donate.”

Helena Konanz

Conservative 12:55 p.m.

“I want to talk about election rules in committee. Some ridings are really big. It is harder to campaign in a big riding. Maybe we should spend more in big ridings.”

Sherry Romanado

Liberal 12:55 p.m.

“I want to know if there is anything in the election bill that the other member wants to change.”

Helena Konanz

Conservative 12:55 p.m.

“I want our party to talk with other parties about this bill. I want to discuss whether someone needs to be a citizen to vote in nominations. I think we should vote on that.”

David Bexte

Conservative 12:55 p.m.

“I'm supposed to stand up for Alberta when something's wrong. Elections are a mess right now - too many candidates, confusing ballots, people's votes not counting. It's shaking confidence in the whole system. Plus foreign interference is undermining trust even more. We need way tougher rules and penalties to fix this. The bill's a start but doesn't go far enough. Let's work on it more in committee.”

Official Hansard

Mr. Speaker, I am standing here today because the people of Alberta expect me to stand up when something is wrong. They expect us to fix it. As members of this House, we are guardians of the Canada Elections Act. This law is one of the foundations of our democracy. It is the contract that ensures power stays where it belongs, in the hands of the Canadian people. Our duty is to ensure that when a citizen marks their ballot, the process is fair, the choice is clear, and the results are beyond reproach. Over the last decade, confidence in Canadian elections has decayed. The very foundations are beginning to crack. Bill C-25 is supposed to patch this up. When a foundation starts to crack, we do not ignore it or paper over it. We shore it up before the whole structure crumbles. The bill would start that work, but it is late, and it does not go far enough. In my maiden speech, I said that the Bow River does not ask Ottawa's permission to flow. Even though obstructions are in the way, it cuts its path. Just across from my riding, my neighbours in Battle River—Crowfoot walked into a by-election and saw what happens when those foundations are neglected. They saw a ballot so broken it barely worked. The longest ballot committee flooded that by-election with 214 candidates. It forced Elections Canada to abandon the normal ballot process, and people had to handwrite their vote on a blank line. They were forced to manually write out names and risk a spoiled ballot just to exercise their basic right. Let us think about that. A senior who has voted for 50 years walks in, ready to do their duty, and suddenly they are asked to reconstruct the ballot from memory. If someone spells a name wrong, their vote could be tossed. If someone writes too fast or writes a name slightly off, their vote could be tossed. The government was warned by the Chief Electoral Officer that these ballots were becoming a barrier for voters with disabilities. This had been done before. It knew the longest ballot scam was threatening our democratic process, and it did nothing. It took something that should have been simple and made it fragile. I have to say, I am most concerned about my Liberal colleagues, because we all saw what happened in the House. One of the Liberals stood up with complete confidence and berated this side of the House about the supposed hockey skills of Irish kickboxer Conor McGregor. We knew he was talking about Alberta's hockey superstar Connor McDavid, but close only counts in horseshoes. We are human, and we all are susceptible to error. That is why we have to have rigid, reliable systems. It can be stressful standing up in the House, especially when the elbows-up PMO has the Liberal caucus on a strict hockey analogy quota. Let us imagine the same moment in a voting booth: Two Connors are in someone's head. They know who they mean to vote for, and they just hope they get it exactly right. That is the system the government forced on people. The longest ballot committee exposed a weakness, not in our underlying system but in the administration of it. It cost this country millions of dollars. It delayed results. Most importantly, it shook confidence. Ultimately, it creates a cascading effect of doubt. If a voter in Bow River sees a circus across the fence in Battle River, they start to wonder if their vote is next or if the whole system is broken. When people see the process break down, they start to wonder what else is not holding. Everyone saw it coming. The warnings were there, and the government did nothing. There is a deeper crack that we need to look at: foreign interference. While people were dealing with a system that was already under strain, foreign actors were pushing on it from the outside. We saw what happened to Kenny Chiu. There were smear campaigns, coordinated messaging and falsehoods designed to turn his own community against him. That pressure does not stay contained. It spreads, and it weakens the trust in the entire structure. My family came to this country, escaping from communist Europe, to build a country where we could speak freely and participate in public life without fear. That belief rests on a democratic system that people can trust. When foreign governments start interfering in who gets elected, they are attacking that trust directly. It does not start on election day either, but far earlier. In the nomination races, we have seen reports of buses of non-residents showing up to tip the scales. That is pressure being applied at the very base of the system. If one can shape who gets on the ballot, one can shape everything that follows. This legislation does nothing to stop it. Non-citizens should have no say in our elections, no say in who gets to be on the ballot, and certainly no say in who gets to stand in this House. There is also the question of privacy, which is another part of the structure that should be solid. Back home, Rocky's Bakery in Strathmore sells some of the best hot cross buns one can ever find. When a customer swipes their credit card, a litany of laws kick in to protect that consumer data. Rocky's Bakery follows the rules. It answers to the law. However, political parties in this country think they are above the law. They collect vast amounts of data on Canadians and operate outside of any oversight. There are gaps in the system like this. These sorts of gaps will not stay small; they will widen. Here is the reality. My neighbours are watching election after election turn into a circus. They have heard of and have seen foreign governments trying to influence outcomes. They know their data is being handled under a different set of rules and they are asking a simple question: Is the system as solid as we were told it is? Can they trust the system? This is what needs to happen. We need real oversight of political party data by the Privacy Commissioner. We need serious penalties for anyone working with foreign actors to interfere in our elections. We need a foreign agent registry. We need to crack down on those who are interfering directly in our elections or from the shadows. We need clear rules to prevent these ballot stunts from ever happening again. We need to protect nomination races, because that is where the foundation is first laid. I think the best place for this bill to go is to committee. I am really encouraged by the notion that we collaborate to get this right. I hope the government listens to constructive criticism and to how we can build a system that is reliable and can stand the test of centuries. Specifically, it needs to go to committee because I do not think it is complete. I think more work needs to be done, most importantly, because my neighbours deserve a system that holds. The country deserves a system that holds, one where every citizen can walk in, mark a ballot and know where it stands, where no foreign government can lean on it. That is what we are here to protect.

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Hon. Kevin Lamoureux

Liberal 1:05 p.m.

“I want to look like I'm listening and working together on this bill. Do you think limiting each voter to nominating only one candidate and each agent to one candidate per riding is enough to fix the ballot problems you talked about?”

Official Hansard

Mr. Speaker, as I indicated to the previous Conservative speaker, it is the government's intent to work collaboratively on this legislation. The member said it well when he said that the foundation of our democracy is something that we should virtually never, ever take for granted. I was interested in his comments in regard to the long ballot. I thought he articulated them quite well. Does he see any changes required to what is currently in the legislation where we are proposing that a voter can only sign one nomination form for a candidate to be on the ballot, and that one can be an official agent outside of that one constituency, but one can only be an official agent for one candidate in that constituency?

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David Bexte

Conservative 1:05 p.m.

“I'm not going to take a firm position on your question. Let's just say it's close to what I want, and send it to committee so more people can weigh in and change it.”

Mario Beaulieu

Bloc Québécois 1:05 p.m.

“You say the bill won't hide donor names and addresses. If it does, I want you on the record saying that's wrong.”

David Bexte

Conservative 1:10 p.m.

“I want this bill studied more. I don't trust what the government says it does. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

Helena Konanz

Conservative 1:10 p.m.

“Do you agree that a financial agent should only work for one party during an election? It's a big job with lots of red tape. It's hard to find agents.”

David Bexte

Conservative 1:10 p.m.

“It's important to have rules for how election money is handled, but it's even more important to have people who know what they're doing and can be trusted. If we spread those people too thin, we'll have problems.”

Scott Reid

Conservative 1:10 p.m.

“I want the bill to pass and I hope the committee makes it even better. The bill does good things like ban anonymous crypto donations and protect ballot integrity from performance art stunts. Too many fake candidates spoil it for real independents and make it impossible for disabled or elderly voters to use mail-in or template ballots. That takes away their right to vote.”

Official Hansard

Mr. Speaker, today I would like to address very briefly two topics and then dwell at greater length on a third. Like many of my colleagues here, I am generally supportive of this legislation. I do think it is good that it will go to committee where it will, one hopes, be open for genuine good-faith amendments to improve it. Since we agree on the substance of the bill, it should be easy for us to find improvements that make sense to all of us. I am very hopeful that will happen. There are three areas that deserve being noted because they are particularly valuable. One is the banning of anonymous contributions through cryptocurrency, which I think removes a loophole on the idea we have had established in Canadian electoral legislation for some time, that we ought to be able to identify all contributors and that all contributions are public contributions. It is also a way of getting around potentially maximum contribution levels for individuals. Dealing with that is useful. The removal of some forms of foreign interference is also beneficial. Then, of course, there is the issue of ballot integrity, which is dealing with the problems introduced by the activities of the longest ballot committee. I want to spend a bit of time talking about that. I had the chance to see this up close in the last federal election, about this time last year, when I spent a considerable amount of time campaigning in the riding of Carleton, where the leader of my party was running. It is the riding that joins my own riding. It was clear that there was a need to get in there and do what we could to help the leader. Ultimately, the efforts that other individuals and I made were insufficient, although we did cause him to experience the highest Conservative vote he had ever had in his entire career, but that was insufficient to win the riding. At the same time that was going on, there was an effort by the longest ballot committee to put many people onto the ballot, ostensibly, in the service of their goal of trying to draw attention to the abandonment, way back in 2017 ,of Justin Trudeau's stated goal of changing the electoral system. We will recall that in 2015, then candidate Trudeau said this would be the last election under first past the post. There was then a series of hearings of a parliamentary committee for this purpose. I served on that committee, and so did my colleague who is nodding. She still looks somewhat exhausted from the experience. We came up with a proposal that, ultimately, he decided was not very satisfactory, so Trudeau stepped away from it. The longest ballot committee felt this would be a way of drawing attention to their concerns with his abandonment and his approach. I think that may be how it started, but as time went on, it went from being a form of political protest to being a kind of performance art. There is nothing wrong, I suppose, with engaging in performance art if it creates no harm, but I think in this case it did create harm. I will, first of all, show how over a period of time, over six different elections, this transformation occurred. In the year 2021, in the riding of St. Boniface—St. Vital, the longest ballot committee put forward 15 candidates. Of those 15 candidates, the maximum number of votes garnered for one candidate was 58 votes. The minimum number received by a longest ballot committee candidate was seven votes. In 2022, there was a by-election in Mississauga—Lakeshore. This time, there were 33 candidates from the longest ballot committee, more than double. The maximum number of votes received by any of them was 48. The third by-election took place in Winnipeg South Centre. It resulted in 42 candidates that time, so it is going up, as we will notice. There was a maximum number of 36 votes for any of those candidates and there was a candidate who received only one vote. The fourth time this happened, when the longest ballot committee weighed in, was in a by-election in 2024 in Toronto—St. Paul's. This time, there were 77 longest ballot committee candidates. For the first time, we saw a candidate who received zero votes, strongly suggesting that the candidate was not a resident of the riding and was not even able to vote for himself or herself. The fifth time this came up was in a by-election in LaSalle—Émard—Verdun in September 2024, with 77 longest ballot candidates again. By the way, I got all this information from Wikipedia. In each of these, as I looked it up, it said that it was a new record-breaking result. It seems that whoever wrote those articles was starting to cover it as a kind of sporting event. There were 77 candidates for the committee. The maximum number of votes achieved was 34, so we notice a gradual downward trend here. Two candidates got zero votes. The next one was in Carleton last year, with 85 candidates, a significant number of whom received zero votes. Finally, last August, in Battle River—Crowfoot, we saw something in the neighbourhood of 200 candidates for the longest ballot committee. The point is that 77 of those candidates got zero votes, and a significant number got one vote each. That was the performance chart. Now, what are the consequences of doing this? In Battle River—Crowfoot, there were two independent candidates, both of whom complained that they had a hard time being taken seriously and drawing independent attention to local issues, which is often what independent candidates are trying to do, because they were being conflated with the people on the longest ballot committee. In fact, the second-place candidate in that by-election was an independent candidate, Bonnie Critchley, and she largely got attention for the issues she was concerned about by criticizing the longest ballot committee and asking, “How can we express our concerns when these guys are hogging all the bandwidth and distracting?” As I said, she came in second. In all fairness, she got only 9.8% of the vote, but that was more than twice what the Liberal candidate got. She was a serious candidate. These other people were not serious candidates. I think that's a legitimate harm they are doing. Perhaps it is not a harm that is a cause to ban them. However, I will point out as well that my step-mother lives in the riding of Carleton. She is quite elderly now and cannot get out to vote, so I looked into getting a ballot for her to participate from home. In these circumstances, it is very difficult to get a mail-in ballot that would be usable by someone in her situation. Likewise, someone who is visually impaired is normally enabled to vote and to participate fully, with a confidential, secret ballot, when there is a normal-length ballot, in the following manner: People are given a ballot and then a template with a series of holes. They can feel which hole is in which spot, while the names of the candidates are read out to them in order, typically in alphabetical order. They identify that they will vote for candidate number three, who is the candidate of their party. They go behind the screen, count down to the third spot and mark their X. It gets put into the ballot box with everybody else's ballot. The result is that they have a secret ballot. Once this is done, that is taken away from them. Taking away the right of a citizen to participate fully and properly in an election is, in my view, a contravention of section 3 of the charter, which guarantees every Canadian the right to vote in a federal election. I am sure that was not the intention, but that is the practical result. The practical proposal being adopted in this legislation is one that eliminates the ability to engage in this kind of frivolous balloting. It is not that independent candidates cannot get on the ballot, real independent candidates like Bonnie Critchley. It is a way of ensuring that candidates who have taken what started off as a legitimate protest and turned it into a form of performance art cannot engage in that performance art at the expense of the constitutional rights of Canadians who have disabilities, who are prohibited by their actions from participating in a full, proper and rights-respecting manner.

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Sherry Romanado

Liberal 1:20 p.m.

“I want to flatter my colleague before I talk. Elections Canada should make people sign a paper saying they really want to be a candidate. I think signing a paper might stop fake candidates.”

Official Hansard

Mr. Speaker, I did, in fact, work with my colleague on the electoral reform committee. I enjoyed working with him on that. I would like to get his opinion on whether we should also be looking at the following, in terms of eliminating the longest ballot. I know that every candidate who wants to present in a federal election has to fill out a nomination paper as a candidate with Elections Canada and make solemn declarations on that form. Could the member provide an opinion on whether one of those declarations should be something along the lines of “I fully intend to represent the citizens in this riding”? The reason why they are using the same auditor is that they are not actually incurring or submitting any expenses, as they have no intention to run. Perhaps a solemn declaration with the actual intent of running is something we could add.

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Scott Reid

Conservative 1:20 p.m.

“I don't think we need those rules. Some good MPs weren't from their riding at first. Let's not make rules that would stop good stories like that.”

Official Hansard

Mr. Speaker, to be honest, I think the measures that have been proposed would actually serve the same purpose, basically eliminating non-serious independent candidates. I do want to say, though, that we have to be a bit careful about what we put in there. I will just throw this out as a thought. In 2011, the New Democrats won a significant number of seats in Quebec, where the candidates were not resident in the riding and had not visited the riding. It appears that the people who voted for them we actually aware of that fact. This was their way of expressing support for Jack Layton and his vision. After some of them got elected, they went to heroic efforts, in some cases, to move to the area. We all remember Ruth Ellen Brosseau, who went to her riding. She did not speak French very well. She learned to speak it better. She moved. She raised her son there. The result was that she was re-elected. I do not ever want to preclude the possibility of that happening again.

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Mario Beaulieu

Bloc Québécois 1:25 p.m.

“I want to protect small parties like mine. Don't make rules that could make it hard for them. Signing papers should mean we support their right to run, not that we endorse them.”

Official Hansard

Mr. Speaker, one of the proposed measures in the bill stipulates that voters may not sign nomination papers for more than one candidate. In other words, they may sign only one paper. However, this could have an unintended consequence, because, up until now, signing a candidate's nomination paper has not necessarily been seen as an endorsement of the candidate, but rather as support for their right to run for office. If we limit this to a single person, it will effectively become an endorsement of the candidate. On the one hand, this raises concerns about ballot secrecy. Voting would no longer be secret. On the other hand, it will somewhat limit emerging parties. Do we really need this measure? We do not think so, and we believe the other measures will be sufficient to address the high number of nomination papers.

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Scott Reid

Conservative 1:25 p.m.

“I'm not worried about it. I signed for someone else before but I still voted for me. People know they can sign papers just because they support the process.”

Burton Bailey

Conservative 1:25 p.m.

“I want to add something. In my riding, a long ballot cost more money and needed more staff. Do you know how hard and expensive that was? People keep saying by-elections cost a lot. Can you say something about that?”

Scott Reid

Conservative 1:25 p.m.

“You're smart enough to comment, but the rules say you can't. I agree there's a problem, but it's not enough for this. The real issue is taking away rights from citizens.”

Elizabeth May

Green 1:25 p.m.

“I want to give a speech on this bill. I don't want debate to end yet.”

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