McLeod ‘impressed’ with bill to change voting procedures

NEWS — The Fair Election Act will increase fairness in the federal voting system, says Kamloops-Thompson-Caribo MP Cathy McLeod.

Chief electoral officer Marc Mayrand has been quoted in The Ottawa Citizen as saying the bill would “take the referee off the ice” and make it harder for some voters to cast ballots.

The Conservative government brought the changes forward in answer to the robocalls scandal of 2012.

The law would put an end to “vouching” whereby voters can cast ballots if another elector vouches for them, and would also disallow the use of Elections Canada voter cards as ID at polling stations.

NDP leader Thomas Mulcair has called the bill “an anti-democratic stain.”

Speaking on the controversial legislation in the House Friday, McLeod said she was “impressed” with it.

McLeod spoke in response to NDP MP Libby Davies, who said the bill “is designed to give a government, with its conservative ideology, more control over the electoral process. That is too bad.”

As reported by openparliament.ca, this is what McLeod replied:

“Mr. Speaker, when I first went to the briefing on this piece of legislation,
I was very impressed. I looked at the opportunities to move the issues
around compliance to the Director of Public Prosecutions, which made perfect sense.

“I looked at the issues around robocalls and moving that under the
CRTC. I heard the interview where the former chief electoral officer gave it
an A minus. I want to congratulate my honourable colleague, the Minister of State for Democratic Reform, for the very excellent work he has done on this piece of legislation.

“I think my colleague who just spoke has not looked at the piece of legislation in terms of the whole picture of what it would do for fairness in our system.

“I would like her to talk about the issue of voter fraud and how important it is that we have 29 pieces of ID, I believe, that would be acceptable.

“Could the member speak about the important role that maybe she will have as a member of Parliament, as will I, who perhaps will run in the next election, in partnership with Elections Canada, to let people know where they can vote, how they can vote, and the pieces of identification they will need.”

Davies replied, in part, “I would point out that the former chief electoral officer who gave it an A minus has moved off that now that he has looked at the bill in detail…. When we bring in a sledgehammer and knock out a whole group of people from voting, in effect, then we are not dealing with fraud; we are actually disenfranchising people.”