“We need to make sure online voting cannot be tampered with. I do not think Canadians feel safe using it yet, but we will get there eventually.”

“Mr. Speaker, I am so glad that my colleague and the rest of the cohort here are going to be working on this collaboratively. It is very important. Canadians are watching right now. On virtual voting, we would need to make sure that it is fail-safe and that Canadians feel it could not be tampered with. Are we at that point, where they would feel secure with virtual voting? I do not think we are at that point, but I am sure someday soon we will be.”

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“I want the committee to look at how much money candidates can spend in elections. It costs more to run in large, spread-out ridings than in small ones.”

“Mr. Speaker, I think there are a lot of issues we need to talk about in committee concerning elections and making sure they are safe, and donations. There are ridings like mine that are massive. I am given a certain amount to service my communities and the residents, and also for the election, and in donations, but I will say that smaller ridings have it a lot easier. We have to remember that there are many ridings in Canada where the amount we are allowed to spend is pretty difficult when we look at how big some of them are. I think we should discuss this at committee.”

“I want the committee to discuss this bill and work together. We need to talk about whether a person must be a Canadian citizen to vote for a party candidate. This affects our elections, and we should vote on it.”

“Mr. Speaker, I think quite a bit needs to be discussed at the committee level, and I look forward to our party collaborating with all parties on this. I think there should be a discussion, and not everyone agrees with me on this, of course, on whether someone needs to be a citizen to vote in the nomination process. I think it is a really interesting and important issue that should be discussed, and voted on also, because obviously, it does affect elections.”

“I want this bill sent to committee so we can make it stronger. It needs to stop people from flooding ballots with hundreds of fake candidates, stop non-citizens from voting in party nominations, and create a foreign agent registry. It also must force political parties to follow the same privacy rules as businesses.”

“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.”

“A committee should study this issue. We need to hear from experts because running campaigns and handling campaign money takes experience.”

“Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the question from my hon. colleague across the way. I think he touches on an important part. I had, in my words earlier, alluded to some solutions. I think it is close. I think that sort of notion of “once”, but limited perhaps outside of the constituency, because there is a limited pool of people with experience who know how to run things well. Because of the financial aspect of campaigns, it is important we maintain security around that too. I think it is best studied at committee. It seems reasonable to have other perspectives from witnesses and experts to comment on that, to anticipate the unanticipated. That is where this belongs.”

“We need to send this bill to a committee for careful study. We must look closely at how it affects personal privacy and data sharing.”

“Mr. Speaker, this is exactly why it needs to be studied at committee. The sharing of data and the unintended consequences of that, and the impacts of privacy of the individual have to be fully vetted out and compared. It deserves sunlight, the discussion of open debate and thorough study. Our democracy is not necessarily supposed to work fast, but it is supposed to be thorough so it can be effective and stand the test of time.”

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“It is hard to find financial agents because the rules are so complicated. I want to know if the member thinks an agent should be allowed to work for only one party during an election.”

“Mr. Speaker, this is a really important subject. One thing the member touched on, and I just wanted to ask his opinion on this further, is that we are considering changes so that during an election a financial agent could only work for one party at a time. I want to know what he thought about that. It is getting tougher to find financial agents because of the red tape and the complications. It is a really big job to volunteer for. Does the member agree that during an election a financial agent should only work for one party?”

“This bill needs to go to committee. We have to make sure we properly track and audit the money in our elections.”

“Mr. Speaker, this is important, and it may be one of the most important aspects of this legislation. We need to look at how the finances are treated and get it right. The power rests with the people and is enabled by the money. The adage is to always follow the money. We need to have people knowledgeable about how to audit, conduct, measure, tabulate and ledger the expenses, and to do it with honour, discipline and honesty. However, if we have them spread out too much, then it introduces a lot of problems. The bill needs to go to committee.”

“I support this election bill, especially because it stops groups from putting dozens of fake candidates on the ballot. That protest makes ballots too long. It distracts from real independent candidates and makes it almost impossible for blind or elderly people to vote.”

“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.”

“We should be careful with rules that try to stop candidates who are not serious. Sometimes people vote for a candidate who does not live in the area, and that candidate ends up doing a great job. We should not stop that from happening.”

“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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“I do not think this is a real problem. People often sign nomination papers just to support the voting process, not because they support the candidate.”

“Mr. Speaker, to me this is not really a problem. I once signed a nomination paper for a candidate who was running against me. It was the Green Party candidate in my riding. I did vote for myself though. I heard that, in 2011, NDP candidates in Quebec stopped people in the street to sign their nomination papers. That tells me that people are prepared to sign these papers to express their support for the process, not the candidate.”

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“Can you talk about the extra cost and work needed to handle by-elections with huge ballots?”

“Mr. Speaker, I, too, have something in common. My riding is next to Battle River—Crowfoot. One of the things that I learned in August was the expense related to the longest ballot and the extra staff that were required. I wonder if you could comment or know anything more about how difficult it is to make that ballot and the expense that it added. We keep hearing about how these by-elections cost so much money. Can you comment?”

“This is a real problem, but it does not justify this bill. We should not take away Canadians' constitutional rights.”

“Mr. Speaker, you could actually comment very intelligently. It is just that the rules preclude the Speaker from doing so. I think the answer is that it is a real problem, but it is not a problem that would justify this action. I think the stripping away of constitutional rights from other Canadian citizens is the important matter that needs to be addressed here.”