[ Page 3119 ]
Routine Proceedings
Oral Questions
Abortion. Mr. Sihota –– 3119
Mr. Harcourt
Presenting Petitions –– 3121
Tabling Documents –– 3122
Election Amendment Act, 1987 (Bill 28). Second reading
On the amendment
Mr. Gabelmann –– 3122
Hon. L. Hanson –– 3125
Ms. Edwards –– 3126
Mr. Mowat –– 3128
Mr. Skelly –– 3129
Mr. Loenen –– 3131
Mr. Rose –– 3132
Ms. Marzari –– 3136
Mr. Lovick –– 3138
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 1988
The House met at 2:09 p.m.
HON. MR. VEITCH: On the floor of the House today we have a very outstanding Canadian. This distinguished gentleman served as Minister of Communications in the government of Canada; he was a former chairman of the CRTC; he's now president of Radio Canada, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I would like the House to welcome the Hon. Pierre Juneau.
Accompanying Mr. Juneau today is the regional director of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for British Columbia, Mr. Eric Moncur, and I would ask the House to welcome Eric as well.
MR. ROSE: Mr. Speaker, on behalf of the loyal opposition, I too would like to add my word of welcome to Pierre Juneau. Bienvenue, Pierre Juneau. I consider him an old friend. I certainly am an admirer of his. I've always considered him to be urbane, intelligent, and of course fluently bilingual, and alongside him I feel rural, sometimes thick, and almost monosyllabic. But he's done a great job for Canada. He's been, I think, a credit to our nation, and certainly given outstanding work in public service. Certainly he'll stand up as one of the great Canadians. We're very pleased to have him here in la Colombie-Britannique.
HON. MR. SAVAGE: It gives me a great deal of pleasure today to rise in the House to introduce Mr. Gerald Geen, president of the B.C. Fruit Growers' Association, and three members of the executive. Would this House please make them welcome.
MR. BARNES: I'd like to ask the House to join me in welcoming Mr. Bill Duncan, who is a long-time friend of mine and a former American who some 35 years ago became a dedicated public servant, most recently at the Kitsilano Neighbourhood House. He's now retired and in Victoria to experience the activities for the afternoon. I'd like the House to make him welcome.
MR. BRUCE: In the House today is a friend of mine, the federal representative for the riding of Cowichan-Malahat–The Islands. We may not be of the same political persuasion, but we do work for the same people of the Cowichan Valley area. I'd ask that the House bid Mr. Jim Manly a warm welcome.
MR. G. HANSON: In the gallery today is a constituent, Mr. Naunihal Singh Sandhu. His brother from India is visiting, Capt. Klaushal Singh Sandhu. Would the House give them a warm welcome.
MR. KEMPF: In the gallery with us this afternoon is Mr. Russell Brown, who originally hails from Bums Lake. He was a former member for Omineca in the B.C. Youth Parliament and will be entering the internship program soon, in fact on Monday morning, in the NDP caucus. I hope that isn't a shade of things to come in Omineca.
MR. SIHOTA: In furtherance of the comments made bv my good friend the member for Cowichan-Malahat, I would also like to take this opportunity on behalf of myself and my colleagues from Nanaimo to introduce our common Member of Parliament, Mr. Manly. Joining him in the gallery today is a dedicated worker on behalf of the New Democratic Party, one whom I got to know in the course of my last election campaign because she worked actively on my campaign. Would the House join me in welcoming both Jim Manly and Eve Elman to the House today.
[2:15]
HON. MR. STRACHAN: In the gallery today is a noted educator in the field of native Indian education from the native Indian teacher education program, formerly of UBC and now of the College of New Caledonia in Prince George. Would the House please welcome Angie Todd-Dennis.
MR. GABELMANN: This afternoon I'd like to make an introduction on behalf of my secretary, Judy McCallum. Visiting in the gallery this afternoon are her sister-in-law and her aunt, Sheri Ridout from Victoria and Hazel Fisher from Winnipeg.
HON. MR. RICHMOND: In the gallery today is an old friend and a good supporter of both me and the second member for Kamloops (Mr. S.D. Smith). I'd like the House to please welcome Mr. Dennis Coates, QC, to Victoria.
MR. CASHORE: I too would like to join in welcoming Angie Todd-Dennis, who is working in the native Indian teacher education program in Prince George. I've known Angie since our days at the University of British Columbia. She was involved in founding the first organization there for native Indian students. She has been a distinguished member of the native Indian communitv and a leader as such, and has been a founder of the native women's professional organization.
MR. MILLER: I join with my colleague the member for Coquitlam-Moody (Mr. Rose) in welcoming officials from the CBC to the floor of the Legislature. I will also be in Prince Rupert to welcome them on March 11 at the hearing, and I hope they pay close attention to me and my colleague Mr. Fulton, and retain the services of the CBC in Prince Rupert.
Oral Questions
ABORTION
MR. SIHOTA: A question to the Attorney-General. The Supreme Court of Canada decision on abortion, the Morgentaler decision, determined that it was an intrusion on a woman's individual liberty to have her go in front of a committee to seek approval for an abortion. Rape and incest victims now are required to seek funding approval through the criminal injury compensation fund. Does the Attorney-General not agree that that policy is contrary to the spirit and intent of the Supreme Court of Canada decision?
HON. B.R. SMITH: No, that's a very artful series of propositions strung together. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that abortion should be decriminalized, that because of the process set up under the Criminal Code as an excuse for abortion, which required committees in accredited hospitals, it did not provide equal access to women all over Canada. Therefore the whole section of the Criminal Code was struck
[ Page 3120 ]
down. It does not provide a right to anything. It simply provides that you cannot criminalize something as a result of that sort of procedure. In fact, if you read the decision of Mr. Justice Beetz, it suggests that a different, fairer procedure would have been okay and would have upheld that law. Maybe the Canadian Parliament, when it's looking at this, will re-enact it in some other form with a fairer procedure. That is open to them.
But the procedure you're talking about under the criminal injury compensation fund is neither a protracted nor a degrading one. It's one that victims of crime in this province have availed themselves of for many years. That legislation was passed in 1972. It's only in recent years that it's been administered by a committee of the board, but how it works is that a victim of crime can make immediate interim application for funding. That funding can be provided in advance of a medical or surgical procedure. It doesn't require somebody to be brought in the dock; it doesn't require a conviction; it doesn't require a person even to be charged.
What it does require is a genuine case of a criminal offence to be alleged, and it would have to be something that a victim had reported to the police and there was some independent corroboration. It wouldn't just be someone going in and saying: "I'm a victim; this has happened to me." There has to be some police support for it. But it is not a degrading system and it is not a protracted system. So the member is wrong.
MR. SIHOTA: I see that we have our own artful dodger here in the form of the Attorney-General. The Attorney-General certainly has no sensitivity to the trauma of a rape or incest victim in asking them to go through this procedure.
More importantly, the Attorney-General hasn't read the decision, and I want to quote from the decision very quickly before I ask my question. The decision says: "Liberty in a free and democratic society does not require the state to approve such decisions, but it does require the state to respect them." In light of that view, does the Attorney-General not agree that the government's policy with respect to rape and incest victims is contrary to the spirit of the decision?
HON. B.R. SMITH: No.
MR. SIHOTA: Well then, let's take a look at the government's general policy. The decision goes on to state that the interests of a woman "take precedence over the interest of prohibiting abortions, including the interest of the state in the protection of the fetus." Does the Attorney-General not agree that the government's general policy on abortion requiring compulsory pregnancy — which is what it is — offends that provision of the decision?
HON. B.R. SMITH: No.
MR. SIHOTA: I see that the Attorney-General has been rehearsing his answers.
I want to ask the Attorney-General this question then. Can the Attorney-General truthfully tell this House that he does not have in his possession a legal opinion which advises him that the government's policy on abortion is contrary to the Charter of Rights?
HON. B.R. SMITH: Legal opinions are given to the government; they are not given to the member in question period. Legal opinions are always a matter that are transmitted to the executive council, and that's where they will be transmitted. They will not be transmitted to the Legislature, and they will not be revealed, whether they are for the proposition of the member or against the proposition of the member. He knows that.
MR. SIHOTA: I will ask the Attorney-General directly again: will he confirm that he has in his possession a legal opinion which indicates that the government's policy on abortion is unconstitutional and contrary to the Charter. Yes or no. No artful dodging in this case, Mr. Attorney.
HON. B.R. SMITH: I have absolutely no intention of confirming or denying any such thing. If I had such an opinion, I might have it the other way, and it would not help the member one bit, because he would pay no attention to either opinion anyway. He would give his own interpretation in here, as he is with the Supreme Court decision that applies to a criminal law provision, and try to suggest that that's some kind of bill of rights in Canada for abortion — which it isn't.
MR. SIHOTA: The Attorney-General is taking the old courtroom tactic of going on the offensive when he has no defence at all.
Let me ask the Attorney-General this question then. The Canada Health Act states: "...Canadian health care policy should be designed and administered, to facilitate reasonable access to health services without undue financial or other barriers." Given that provision, does the Attorney-General not agree that the government policy of requiring women to pay for abortions offends the provisions of the Canada Health Act?
HON. B.R. SMITH: It is either before, or about to be before, the courts, Mr. Speaker. I'm not going to try to answer that.
MR. SIHOTA: Mr. Speaker, it is evident that the Attorney-General has, first of all, a legal opinion which indicates that his policies are unconstitutional. His policies fly in the face of the Supreme Court of Canada decision. They offend the provisions of the Canada Health Act. If the Attorney-General is so confident of the government's policies on abortion, will he agree now to refer the matter to the Court of Appeal in this province for a constitutional determination?
HON. B.R. SMITH: I can't think of a case getting on faster in this province than the Civil Liberties petition did this week. As I recall, it was only filed late last week, and we agreed to it being argued on Tuesday of this week. We will also agree to and facilitate any other such matters that might arise, whether it's under the Charter or the Canada Health Act or whatever, because I do believe that these matters should be determined swiftly.
We have cooperated in having that first challenge brought on, and we will continue to do so if there are other challenges. But to take a whole series of matters away from the trial court and try to refer them to the Court of Appeal I don't think would produce a faster result or a faster resolve. I really don't. I've often looked at that route as a way of resolving matters that were in dispute or contentious. It's not as fast a route as it may seem. The fastest route is to get before a judge, which is what we did in the case of the petition for the
[ Page 3121 ]
Civil Liberties Association, and we'll have a decision on that very shortly.
MR. HARCOURT: I was hoping to ask some questions of the Minister of Health. He seems to be indisposed, possibly having his fifth pregnancy, so I will ask the Attorney-General a question or two. We do have a decision already about a ridiculous, seditious conspiracy decision, and I would hope that we would have the Attorney-General's word that we would have....
My question. If you are prepared to facilitate the referral to the courts of law of the regulations and the bureaucrats who are going to make those bureaucratic decisions about abortions in life-threatening situations, will you, Mr. Attorney-General, finally instruct your government to obey the law and get a quick referral of the Canada Health Act on the question of universality and reasonable and quick access to medical services, and on section 4 of the Hospital Act, that hospitals cannot refuse service to an indigent person? Will you make a commitment here and now to have those two matters speedily before a judge immediately?
HON. B.R. SMITH: The Leader of the Opposition doesn't listen to the usually well-presented questions of the member for Esquimalt–Port Renfrew (Mr. Sihota). I was asked that question, and I indicated that we would facilitate other attacks under other legislation if they were forthcoming. But, Mr. Speaker, if all these matters were before a tribunal promptly, there's another matter that has to be before another tribunal, and that is that the Parliament of Canada has to wrestle with this question and bring about some national resolution to the whole question of therapeutic abortion. The criminal law is passed by parliament; it is not passed by this Legislature. And the Canada Health Act is a federal piece of legislation, so maybe the Leader of the Opposition would urge the Parliament of Canada to take some action and assume its responsibilities as we have done.
MR. HARCOURT: I would hope that the Attorney-General would stop acting as the minister of defence for this indefensible government policy and be a minister of justice. I am asking a very simple question of the Attorney-General. The Hospital Act is within your jurisdiction. Sir, through you, Mr. Speaker, I'm asking you to save citizens the time and the money and the aggravation. You've got the resources of the people of British Columbia to act for a direct referral. I would urge the Attorney-General to show some political courage and conviction and to have the taxpayers of this province, instead of citizens having to band together to protect themselves from this government.... Mr. Speaker, I would urge....
Interjection.
MR. HARCOURT: I heard very clearly what you said, and I don't think it's up to citizens to have to do that.
I am asking the Attorney-General here and now if he will instruct his officials for direct referral to the courts to see their position on the Hospital Act, and if he would ask the Attorney-General of Canada, the Minister of Justice, to join him in referring the Canada Health Act on a question of universality, access to poor and rich and in terms of geography — would refer those to the courts immediately so more women don't have to suffer.
[2:30]
HON. B.R. SMITH: No, and I will not set up a national health seminar on the matter either, which is what the Leader of the Opposition is proposing. I do not understand, Mr. Speaker, how this member can try to suggest that a court application filed on a Thursday or Friday and argued and heard by the Chief Justice on a Tuesday isn't an absolutely responsible and expeditious way of dealing with the challenge. It certainly is, and we will give the same accommodation if there are other challenges.
MR. SIHOTA: I want to return to something the Attorney-General said about the federal government: waiting for the federal government to take the leadership on this issue. The federal government has passed a statute. It's called the Canada Health Act. It tells this province what it has to do in the case of providing these types of medical services. Now this government doesn't apply the life-threatening test to all other medical services it is required to provide under the Canada Health Act. It doesn't apply the life-threatening test to tubal ligation, vasectomies, breaking a leg or scratching an eye. But they do on abortion.
Given this government's obligation to fulfil the terms of the Canada Health Act, and given the fact that the Charter demands equality of treatment, does the Attorney-General not agree that his government's policies offend both the Canada Health Act and the Charter of Rights?
HON. B.R. SMITH: No, Mr. Speaker, I do not, because the proposition that is being put forward is that the Charter requires eternal funding of every service that the member alleges is provided for under the Canada Health Act. We have no indication that our policy is in violation of the Canada Health Act. If in fact it is, and if a court rules it is, then naturally we'll abide by that order. But we have no such indication, and the member knows that. We are proceeding quickly to the courts if any challenges of that kind are forthcoming.
Presenting Petitions
MS. EDWARDS: Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present a petition to the Legislature and to table with it some 270 letters supporting the import of the petition. The petition says:
"To the hon. the Legislative Assembly of the Province of British Columbia in legislature assembled:
"The petition of the undersigned of the Elk Valley Health and Safety Protection Committee and the residents of the Elk Valley state that the proposed Chevron Mansfield C-72-d sour gas well presents a potential danger and risk to the health and safety of many Elk Valley residents. Your petitioners respectfully request that the hon. House rescind the permit which allows Chevron to drill the proposed Mansfield C-72-d sour gas well until medical research which is currently being done by Dr. Hulbert of the University of Alberta is completed, so that the results can be included in the consideration of granting the permit for Chevron to drill this well."
[ Page 3122 ]
This petition comes with more than 270 letters addressed to the Premier and to the Minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources (Hon. Mr. Davis); similar letters too, more than 900, have been sent with the same message, Mr. Speaker.
Hon. L. Hanson tabled the annual report of the Ministry of Labour and Consumer Services for the year ending March 31, 1987.
Orders of the Day
HON. MR. STRACHAN: I call adjourned debate on the amendment to second reading of Bill 28.
ELECTION AMENDMENT ACT, 1987
(continued)
On the amendment.
MR. GABELMANN: This afternoon in the debate on the amendments to the Election Act, I intend to make two points and two points only. My concerns with this legislation revolve around one issue. That issue is the right of a citizen in a free and democratic society to vote. The issue has been canvassed for some hours now in this Legislature, but I am not certain that all members of this House have understood fully what it is that these amendments will do.
Before getting to the details of that, I want to make my first point, and that is this: governments are elected every three or four years to govern and are given a mandate by voters to do that governing. Governments are not elected to set the rules by which they will be elected. That is the reason why we normally have independent electoral commissions to determine constituency boundaries — a principle that is well established in most provincial jurisdictions and certainly well established nationally and now appears to have been established properly here in British Columbia with the full authority of the Fisher commission to examine into those boundaries.
The other side of the question in respect to elections is the rules which govern those elections. The reason why we on this side of the House are arguing for a hoist — a six-month delay — is so that the government can consider not necessarily amendments to this bill or withdrawing the bill altogether, but can consider the principles upon which legislation of this kind should be introduced.
It is my contention that as with electoral boundary commissions and the determination of constituency boundaries, so too should election law be determined by a neutral independent body to be referred to this Legislature and enacted upon by this Legislature. It is inappropriate for elected politicians of whatever stripe to write the rules that govern their election, in the same way as it is inappropriate for elected officials to draw constituency boundaries on their own. I think that point has not been fully understood by many members of this Legislature and, from all accounts, not by the minister.
We are a small percentage of the people who were contestants in the last election campaign. We are obviously an even smaller percentage of the society which exercises its rights in those election campaigns. We do not have a right in this Legislature by partisan, political decision to set up the rules which govern our re-election or other members' election in the next campaign and in subsequent campaigns. That process, as I said, should be done in the same way as the redrawing of constituency boundaries is done — by an independent commission. It can be the same commission, or it can be a different commission; that's not a concern of mine at the moment. The principle, however, of the decision that establishes the rules of the game being made in a partisan manner I think is the fundamental question.
My second point deals more specifically with.... And we have to deal with the legislation. I don't like the fact that we have to deal with it in this way. I'd rather it came from a commission, but we have to deal with it. It deals with the simple point that we are denying some of our citizens — a small percentage of them, no doubt — the right to vote. Let me tell you why. But before I tell you why, let me say that unlike the intimations of some members on the government side, if not all, we are not talking here about a privilege. Voting is not a privilege in our society. Voting is a right. I don't want to take the time to get into a lecture about the differences between privileges and rights. We members of this House understand the differences. There are issues where we would disagree about the line between rights and privileges, but I can't believe for a moment that any citizen in our society nor any member of this House would argue for a minute that in a free and democratic society the most fundamental right is the right to vote. It is not a privilege.
If it's a right, then everyone should have access to it. "We do," interjects the minister responsible for the bill. Some of us in this House may have read last year an extensive report done by Southam News on literacy in this country and may have been appalled by the findings of that report in which it was discovered that incredible numbers of Canadians are in fact functionally illiterate — cannot read or write in many instances. That's an astounding fact. It was astounding to me when I read that particular survey. I think most of us in this House would have been surprised by the extent of that functional illiteracy, but we have not passed nor should we ever pass a law in this province or this country which says that if you're functionally illiterate you do not have the right to vote. We don't have that. Everybody has the right to vote, given certain reasonable rules: reaching the age of 19 in this province — it should be 18, but it's 19 — and being a citizen and a variety of other reasonable provisions. Everyone has the right to vote. Whether or not they understand what an election is, whether or not they understand what democracy is or what a parliament is, they have the right to vote.
Included among our citizens are people who do not understand this process as we do. Obviously, members of this House fully understand that there is an Election Act, there are elections, there is such a thing as dropping the writ and there is such a thing as a voters list. We understand that; a majority of British Columbians understand that. But there are tens upon tens of thousands of British Columbians who do not know anything about that, who do not understand that, who do not pay the same kind of attention to election campaigns as we do.
Some of those people, when they are canvassed or enumerated in a federal election, think they're on a voters list. They are. Some of those people, when they are put on or get themselves on — or they own property, so they're automatically on a municipal voters list — think they're on a voters list. Many of those people do not distinguish one voters list from another. There isn't a member of this House, I am
[ Page 3123 ]
convinced, who has participated in election campaigns as an organizer or candidate, who hasn't on election day run into otherwise qualified people at the polling station or when taking people to the polling station when they phone in for a ride or for whatever reason, who come to the polling station and discover their name is not on the list. When you as a worker in the campaign or as a candidate or something say to them,"Did you not register...? Every one of us who has worked in a campaign will be able to recount from memory dozens and dozens of cases where people will say: "Well, I registered. I remember when they came around and enumerated me." Then when you question them and ask,"Are you sure it was the provincial enumeration?" they say: "Well, I don't know the difference. They came around, and I signed up, and I'm on a voters list." You ask them: "Was it a federal list?" "Well, I don't know. How long ago was it? Well, it was sometime in the last few years." In fact, it may have been the previous provincial election in another community they used to live in, outside their current riding. It may have been the federal campaign; it may have had something to do with municipal voting. People don't remember.
So you find dozens of people in every community — I'm not going to say dozens in every poll; to do that might exaggerate the point, but many in every poll — who honestly believe that they're on the list and make no effort to find out about that until they go in to vote, because they don't know they need to find out about it. They just go in to vote. They know they have a right to vote. They're old enough. They're citizens. They know they were registered or enumerated or that they're on a list somewhere. They voted in the last election, they say. You ask them what the last election was. They can't remember whether it was municipal, federal or provincial. They go into the polling station, and they can't vote because they're not on the list.
[2:45]
That's why election acts in most provinces in this country allow for those people to vote on election day. They believe they are eligible; they are, by all criteria. They have a right to vote, so they go to vote, but they get tricked. I don't mean "trick" in the sense that anybody is out to try to deliberately trick that person individually, but they get tricked by the system.
It is a complicated, convoluted process to people who are not interested in or concerned about politics, or who are not functionally literate. They may not be able to read the newspaper ads, so they listen to the radio ads and the television ads that come from the chief electoral officer. The ad will say that in order to vote in the next election you have to be on the list, and the person will say: "I'm on the list; I voted last time." They can't remember how long ago last time was. They can't remember whether it was municipal, provincial or federal, and they can't remember whether it was on the list in the community where they live or where they used to live.
In a province like ours, which is as transient as it is, especially in some constituencies, that is a common problem. If you do not have a provision by which people can arrive at the polling station and, in the course of discovering that they're not on the list and that in fact they were enumerated in a different election, have a right to get on the list right then.... What's wrong with that?
The government argument seems to me to have two elements. One is that people might.... I heard the Minister of Tourism, Recreation and Culture (Hon. Mr. Reid) talk about busing from one riding to another. He interjected that....
HON. MR. REID: I didn't say that. I said "busing," but I didn't say "from one to the other." There's a big difference.
MR. GABELMANN: I assume if you're being bused you're being bused from point A to point B, right? Anyway, I'm silly to involve myself in a debate of this kind.
The government argument appears to be twofold. One is that people may shift the location of their voting. For example, I guess the scenario goes this way: if you are a certain political adherent, you might live in a constituency where you either win overwhelmingly or lose overwhelmingly. Your vote is perceived to be of less value, therefore you go to a neighbouring constituency where you can find a way of being registered, and you vote there. Nobody wants that. That's the argument I've mostly heard in reference to Point Grey, in terms of students who in many cases have a legitimate difficulty in determining which constituency they are properly to vote in.
HON. MR. VEITCH: All they have to do is read the act.
MR. GABELMANN: There are times when the act isn't clear; I can think of situations, but we won't go into that.
What we heard was that people in that category, students particularly, could have the choice of voting, say, in Prince George or in Point Grey. So an argument is made that maybe they make the choice. They don't have that choice; the minister agrees. The act is clear. The rules are precise: you vote where you ordinarily live.
Interjection.
MR. GABELMANN: That's right. If you intend to return. You may be in the second-last month of your university term. You don't know whether you're going back to Prince George to your parents' home, because you don't know where your job is going to be for the summer. So it gets complicated.
But that's not the issue. We realize that there are clear and specific rules. There needs to be no legislation, as we've done with this bill, which prevents people from manipulating the clause about where they live. The minister agrees: you can't manipulate it. The rules are clear. If you violate the rules, you can be charged. There's no problem; we agree, it seems, with that particular provision.
What, then, is the problem? What is the government arguing? What goes wrong on election day? It's not that people vote in the wrong riding, or that they move into another riding, because that's covered by other sections. What's the government's argument? There isn't an argument. When you go through and try to sort out why it is that people who are not on the list on election day can't vote, what we really come down to is one issue, and one issue only: some political parties are better equipped in some ridings to organize those people to get out to vote — those people who are not on the list. And there's a concern.
Interjection.
MR. GABELMANN: No. People who are not on the list, period. People who are on the list elsewhere? Let's just go
[ Page 3124 ]
back to that. I thought I had dealt with that, but let's go back to that.
The person who is on a voters list.... With those changes, in the third year after the election they register, and like many people in my constituency they work six weeks in this community and six weeks in that community and then two months in the next one, so they have moved four or five times since the last time they got on a voters list. If they remember to get on each time, presumably the mechanism will get them off the previous one. But people don't go into the.... You get a job in a construction project in a particular community; you don't go down to the registrar of voters to change where you're living. It just doesn't happen. People don't do that.
The election is in the fourth year. So it's a year after you've been enumerated. Say you were enumerated, and you're living in the third or fourth or fifth different community and different riding since then. What do you do? Do you go and get registered? "No," you say, "I am registered. I remember getting registered, but I don't remember where." You can't remember that kind of thing, because people don't pay much attention. The government is saying that those people who are on a list will not be able to vote. Look at the combination of section 80 and section 80.1 now, and section 117 and 118, and those people are not going to be able to vote, because they no longer live where they were registered. They can't vote where they don't live. But they normally live in this new place. We'll get to this more effectively in committee stage.
My point is that there are people who, for a variety of reasons — because they moved, because they're functionally illiterate, because they don't pay much attention to politics like we do — don't get themselves in a position to be on the list.
I guess it comes down to the basic point that if they have the right to vote, then they have the right to vote, period. Your right to vote is not subject to a responsibility to get on the list. There is a right to vote. Rights cannot be abrogated; rights cannot be made smaller; rights cannot be reduced by mechanistic, bureaucratic devices to limit the right. And I think the courts will decide eventually that that's what the Charter of Rights means. But that's to be determined.
I don't see why any self-respecting believer in a democratic society wouldn't make it possible for every single individual to vote as a matter of right, not as a matter of responsibility to go and get himself on the list. And anybody who says an enumeration conducted in the fall of the third year or whenever it's conducted is going to get everybody is a fool or is fooling himself. Because the enumeration last time, which was supposed to be a thorough enumeration, missed probably 10 to 15 percent of the people of British Columbia, or a number higher than that, as some people allege. Otherwise, why were there fewer voters registered in 1986 than in 1982-83? And why were there 150,000-odd people going in to vote who weren't on the list? And many, many thousands of others who didn't go in to vote who weren't on the list? That was following a full enumeration.
AN HON. MEMBER: A tiny percentage.
MR. GABELMANN: The percentage doesn't matter. It's like the old joke about paying for a particular service — the price doesn't matter; if you pay, you pay. It doesn't matter if the percent is 50 percent or 0.0000000001 percent. The principle is what counts in a democratic society about the right to vote, and if one citizen who is otherwise eligible to vote is denied a vote because of bureaucratic, mechanistic, legislative impediments, then the whole of our society is demeaned by that person's not having a right to vote. And when I say they don't have a right to vote I'm talking about an effective right to vote, because if they don't know the procedure, don't understand how it works, don't get themselves on the list or think they're on the list and discover they're not, they can't vote.
[Mrs. Gran in the chair.]
Now the minister might argue.... He won't do it successfully, but he might argue that they can vote; under 80.1 they can go in and say: "I think I'm on the list; therefore I get a ballot." But that ballot won't be counted if they didn't get themselves on the list prior to three days before. A ballot that's not counted, even though it's been cast, does not mean that person has had a right to vote. What we have to do, if legislators are making this law, which I argued initially they shouldn't be.... It should be independent from partisan political decision. However, if we are going to be making this decision, it should be based on one premise and one premise only: that is, to ensure that every citizen who chooses to vote votes. Period. That does not exist with this amendment.
I thought I would talk for five minutes, and it has been almost 25 now. The point is so basic and so simple and so singular that it is difficult to find different ways of making the argument in order to try to get through into people's minds that this bill, in a significant way, takes away from some of our citizens their right to vote. The minister shakes his head. It takes away from those of our citizens who do not understand the process, who are confused by the process, who believed that certain things happened, their right to vote. Why would a parliament be designing and passing laws that would restrict an individual's opportunity to cast their vote? There can only be two answers to that. Is it because the bureaucracy in the chief electoral officer's office is frustrated by the mechanisms; they don't like it, they find it untidy, difficult? If it's a bureaucratically driven legislative initiative, it should be tossed out without any further debate, much less a six-month hoist. If a bureaucratic frustration with the section 80 process — which requires some difficulty, extra staff, extra checking, the possible charging of people who might violate the one person, one vote rule — is what has driven these amendments, then it should be thrown out, because no bureaucratic reason is good enough to deny people an opportunity and a right to vote, and it should not be accepted.
[3:00]
I assume — I can only do that — that the government is bringing this in not driven by the bureaucracy but rather driven by the political side. It's one or the other: either the government has brought it in because the bureaucrats say we need it to make the machinery smoother, or it's driven by a political decision of cabinet that we need it for some other purpose. And what's the other purpose? What else could it possibly be, if it's not bureaucratically driven, other than politics? I can't think of any other alternative that might exist as to why this particular legislation is in front of us. It's either politically driven or bureaucratically driven. In either case it's wrong.
If it's politically driven, it's inappropriate in a free society, because even if it didn't affect the results of the next
[ Page 3125 ]
election, it can be perceived to have an impact on the next election. Who in our society most often don't get themselves on the list? Poor people, transients, less educated people. Often — not always, but often — it's people who work for a living in a variety of jobs and who travel. Many of those people often happen to be New Democratic Party supporters. That leads to a conclusion on the part of some of our members, quite justifiably, that this is politically driven, that there is a desire to weed out some of those voters cleverly, masking it in all these trappings of alleged democracy.
The minister says no, that's not what it is. Therefore it must have come out of the bureaucracy: that there is a feeling there that the mechanisms don't work. There is no justification in our society to tamper with, to affect in any way the rights of people to vote, simply because bureaucrats find the process difficult or cumbersome or problematic.
So what are we left with? Why are we debating this bill? Why aren't we in fact making amendments, if they're necessary, to ensure that every citizen who wants to vote votes on election day? If any one of those citizens votes twice, they should be charged and the full force of the law applied against them. Everybody in this House would support that. If any one of those voters manipulates the residency requirements, they too should be charged.
HON. MR. VEITCH: We'll be charging from now till sundown.
MR. GABELMANN: The minister says: "We'll be charging from now till sundown." Well, that's only until about 5 o'clock, so three hours' worth of charges are not bad, to have a democracy in our society. But let me say that you won't be charging from now till sundown, because it doesn't happen. People don't vote twice. People don't cheat. People want an honest opportunity to vote. If people did cheat, there would have been some charges. If people did cheat, there would have at least been some allegations made and some names dropped. There have not been any, because it doesn't happen. It might happen in the odd isolated case, but I guarantee you it didn't happen in North Island. There wasn't a single allegation or suggestion that I heard of or that anyone else that I know of might have heard of in that constituency of people voting twice or manipulating the requirements of residency. Yet some 1,500 people, if I remember correctly, voted under section 80 in that constituency.
What you do, if you believe that people have the right to vote, is allow them to vote, and you do not impose educational or other impediments simply because they do not follow politics like we do and do not understand the rules or perhaps are not functionally literate. You do not impose rules which prevent those people from having the right to exercise their right to vote.
It's for that reason that we on this side of the House are proposing that there be a six-month hoist: not so that it can be brought back in six months, but so that the government and the minister can rethink how it is these laws are derived, who actually constructs those laws, and what their purpose is. I suggest that the process should be independent and neutral and the goal should be that every single citizen has the right to vote in an election.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: The Minister of Labour has 30 minutes.
HON. L. HANSON: Thirty minutes. That's a long time.
AN HON. MEMBER: We'll give you more time tomorrow.
HON. L. HANSON: Will you? I never fail to be amazed at your generosity.
In any case, I speak against the hoist motion. That surprises the members for the opposition. I would imagine. It's interesting to hear the rhetoric that goes on, the claims that democracy is being totally alienated by the section 80 vote change. There seems to be a suggestion that democracy is truly only predicated on people not having any requirement other than to be able to register on the day of the election.
Bill 28 does provide some extra days — in fact, a number of extra days. I believe the opposition House Leader was suggesting that it restricted the registration time, and if I remember correctly, he said to 14 days before the election date.
AN HON. MEMBER: The Leader of the Opposition.
HON. L. HANSON: I'm sorry, the Leader of the Opposition. My apologies, Mr. House Leader.
The facts are that I believe registration is allowed up to within three days before the election. I know that there were a number of presentations by the opposition that the ability to vote is a right, and I certainly agree with that right. I think that all rights do have some obligations. We, in our society today, are obligated to do certain things before we're permitted to do certain things, even though they may be our right. We're obligated to submit our income tax by a certain date, and we're subject to some penalties if we don't. I think it's only fair and reasonable that people have a requirement to do a responsible act to entitle them to do certain things.
I don't see that the right to register on the day of voting, as has been suggested by the members opposite, is the first step towards the discontinuance, if you will, of democratic voting procedures to elect our governments. I think the remark was made that it was the first step to doing away with elections completely. I really would spend an awful lot of time reading that act to determine in any way where that act says or even intimates that there is an intention to do away with democratic elections.
I think the Leader of the Opposition was suggesting something about the Jansen report on the liquor review; I think he said it was an indication that this government had a report done and then totally ignored it. I would just like to place on the record that over 80 of the 99 recommendations of that review have already been adopted by government. And I wouldn't even raise that in the debate on Bill 28 except that it was raised by the Leader of the Opposition.
It's interesting also to note that most of the political parties in Canada have a requirement to become a member before you have a right to vote, and certainly you are not allowed to become a member on the day of a nomination vote. I grant you that it does have some differences, but I believe in your very own party there's a 60-day requirement. In Okanagan North there's a 30-day requirement. That is in the Social Credit Party, not in the New Democratic Party.
In any case, I have some difficulty in accepting the criticisms that are being levelled at Bill 28 by the members on the opposite side. I believe we are facing a by-election, maybe more than one, in the very near future, and I urge this
[ Page 3126 ]
House to defeat the hoist motion and get on with the adoption of Bill 28 for the betterment of the voting procedures in British Columbia.
MS. EDWARDS: It's my pleasure to stand up and support the motion to hoist this bill for six months, and I do it basically by suggesting that there are some by-elections coming up, that the reason that the minister proposes this bill is.... Perhaps his goals could be obtained in a different way and they could be obtained if he tried some proposals that we have in the by-election, at least one that is coming up.
I think in order to do that we need to look at what the goal of this legislation is. The Provincial Secretary says that he recognizes that the fundamental principles for the voter include that voting must be fair, safe from abuse, convenient and extended to all eligible voters. He says that the system should be easy to follow, up-to-date and, above all, fair.
There have been some problems with that because these are very difficult standards to meet. And of course, when you look at the changes that are proposed to the electoral process, one looks at the goal of what they are and how we are trying to use them so they are, above all, fair, certainly convenient, and extended to all eligible voters and all of these other criteria that the Provincial Secretary has put forward.
I was very interested in the speech of the member for North Island (Mr. Gabelmann) who laid out very clearly what the possible reasons for this legislation are. I chose to phrase them as goals, and I would think that either the minister, the Provincial Secretary, is hoping for ease of administration or, one supposes, increased voter participation.
I suspect that the third reason that was brought up by the member for North Island, which was a political reason, is certainly something that the party in power couldn't afford — a recognition that that party was actually behaving in a manner that was simply political, and political in the most miserable sense. So I have taken that out of my remarks and suppose that perhaps the reason that the proposals are here is for ease of administration. Certainly the remarks that he has made indicate that that is why the changes are being made. In other words, it was far too difficult to deal with 150,000-plus voters who wandered to the polls on election day and said: "I should be here; I have a right to vote and I want to vote."
What I want to say is that this is not the only way that one can address the problem of administering the vote, of in fact doing a registration procedure and then being assured that all the people have the right to vote, and being sure that one doesn't infringe upon that right by telling them that they cannot vote on election day when in fact many of them have come from very far and wide with the understanding that it is a citizen's right to vote, that they have simply to meet the criteria of being 19 years of age and of having lived in British Columbia for six months in the area in which they want to vote.
I'm suggesting that the other goal which I am sure the minister would also espouse — increasing voter participation — could be better served if he used different methods of dealing with the administrative part of getting the voters out to the polls. The Provincial Secretary would do well to remember that we all complain of voter apathy. We all say: "Oh, the public doesn't care." Then when the public cares and comes out to the polls in droves, could somebody tell me why we want to turn them away and say: "I'm sorry, you didn't come three days earlier," or "I'm sorry, you didn't come three days earlier, and it worked for you"? In other words, the process that we have worked.
We need, really, an assurance of better enumeration in any case, and I am suggesting that we should proceed by changing some other processes. I'm suggesting that if this legislation were hoisted for six months, the government would find a golden opportunity to try out some different methods and see whether in fact they could more efficiently register the voters that we calculate to be out there. If they found they could reduce the percentage of section 80 voters, then perhaps there would be no need to change this legislation.
There are some other problems. For one thing, the minister has not consulted with the public. This has not had a great deal of discussion in the public domain. In fact, it has been overshadowed by a number of other issues that have been of what we consider to be a great radical nature; that's why this particular bill hasn't come to people's attention the way it deserves to have.
We think that consultation should occur, and it could occur before such time as we need to run the by-election or by-elections that are upcoming with other jurisdictions. I may be repetitive, Madam Speaker, but I would like to point out that it's important that we look at what happens across the country. In fact, if we canvassed the other provinces, and even some other jurisdictions — in other words, Canada and perhaps our neighbouring state, Washington — we would find that British Columbia is out of step. What we find, if we look at whether or not there is voting on election day by people who come to the polls, is that there is that kind of voting. You can come in and vote on election day in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.
HON. MR. VEITCH: With restrictions.
MS. EDWARDS: You can come into the polls on voting day, and they have some kind of legislation whereby you can vote. In fact, in federal elections — and in Ontario and in New Brunswick in the rural areas — if you come to the polls on voting day and you have not been able to register, and you can swear an affidavit that you are eligible to vote....
Interjection.
MS. EDWARDS: In general the trend is that in the rural areas there are procedures for voting on election day in those three areas.
In two areas that we canvassed in our check of the way things are, there was no voting on election day. One of the provinces in Canada where it is not allowed is Quebec; one of the neighbouring areas where it is not allowed is the state of Washington. We might note that in those jurisdictions there is something else that happens that might make a difference. In Quebec they do an enumeration and register voters annually; they do an annual list unless it is ordered otherwise. In Washington state they have a permanent voters list which they keep updated.
In Manitoba, where in fact they keep a voters list, they update their voters list on a regular basis. I've forgotten just exactly how, but I could find out by consulting my notes. They enumerate after the writ, and they have been able, with
[ Page 3127 ]
an open voting list, to have only 2.8 percent of their calculated number of voters come to the polls on election day without having been previously registered.
That is probably much more administratively acceptable to the electoral officer, and certainly wouldn't create the situation that we had in the 1986 election, where people were lined up so badly. Everybody has talked about it. There were lineups, there were people turned away who didn't vote because they knew it would take too long, and there were people who didn't have proper ballots and so on and so forth.
[3:15]
It seems to me that the registration process must be very carefully examined before we look at taking away section 80 and allowing people to come to the polls and vote if in fact they were left out of the process somewhere along the line.
We have to look at our own registration system in British Columbia. We know that it hasn't been working well. We know that duplications in registration do not necessarily mean that there has been an abuse of the right to vote; we know it by the arguments that have been put forward already. But basically there were people who may have been registered in another riding. The chief electoral officer said that if they forgot whether they were registered in their previous riding, they were quite eligible — and quite correctly eligible — to vote under section 80.
Of all the numbers of people who voted under section 80 in the last election — this has been said endlessly; I will repeat it because it is important — there has not been one single case in which any charge of abuse was brought. This is a large number of people.
There were only 61-plus percent of our population registered to vote. That of course doesn't mean the percent of the voters; I'm saying the percent of the population. It's been calculated that in any riding there were from less than 50 percent to just under 75 percent registered on the list. That isn't enough. That is not a good enough registration to ensure that everybody in our province has got the basic right to vote. That should be fixed up. The Provincial Secretary tells me that it will be better next time. I'm delighted it will be better next time. If the registration process can be improved so that we do not have a calculation of up to 25 percent of the voting public in British Columbia left off the registration list, then we won't have the large numbers of people coming to vote on election day and plugging the system, and not having their rights recognized.
One has to notice that the total number of people who voted in 1986 was less than the total number that voted in 1983, despite an increase in the population of the province. It's important to know these things, and to put them down and to consider them, before we change a process that perhaps does not need changing.
It's important to talk too.... I think the government should look at these procedures before they take away the right of British Columbians to vote on election day.
The card process. I want to add a little bit to what's been said before. There are certainly any number of reasons why people don't recognize what card they get in the mail, and whether that card said: here you should register to vote, or here you have registered to vote, or here you are a registered voter, or Columbia Natural Gas called, or you are being dunned for a bill from B.C. Tel. People find in their mailbox printed messages and, for all the reasons that the member for North Island (Mr. Gabelmann) has just outlined, they sometimes are unclear. The general public is not as interested in elections as we in this House are. They do not pay that kind of attention, and whether we like it or not, that's what happens. That may be something that we should shake our finger at them about, but probably shaking your finger at voters is not the appropriate thing to do.
I think the whole business of phone calls was very confusing in the 1986 election. People were told: "No, you haven't got your voter's card yet, but all you need to do is phone up and find out if you're on the voters list." Well, I am sorry to have to remind the members of this House, in case they had some of these voters in their constituencies, that people do not trust phoning a government bureaucrat to be told they are on the list, yes. Too many people in my riding have had too much experience with the kind of bureaucracy that takes a look at some microfiche and tells them something that isn't quite accurate, and when the time has passed, they are out of luck. The phone call business was told to them, and may have worked, but people didn't trust it, and they weren't going to do it, because they wouldn't trust that it would bring them any results. That was a problem. Maybe we can get around it some other way.
The whole business of registration booths was handled not as well as one would expect, to put it very mildly. The registration booths were established in various locations in everyone's constituency. In some constituencies there was no notice to the public as to where they were, for example, over a weekend. That can be a major reason why many people did not get their names on a registration list. If the electoral process is not better, and if it cannot efficiently tell people, in the most human way.... I say the most human way because I mean that it appeals to the human being out there. If they can't do that, then they cannot expect that the registration process will work well. They might expect the kind of thing that happened with so many people not being on the list. Why don't we try better registration methods? Why don't we try them in Boundary-Similkameen and in any other by-election that we're having? Why doesn't the government try to see if it can make a better system and perform better administratively in this particular aspect of the voting process? Why don't we see if the number of section 80 votes can be reduced in one or more by-elections for ridings? If that's the case, then there is no reason to impede the course of justice for people who require and expect the right to be able to vote.
We have to remember, in thinking about that, the reasons why people may not be able to get their names on the voters list and to register up to three days before voting day. It may sound very generous to those of us who are of course always there come voting day. We're around, right? We can find some time to do this in the riding, the constituency, where we belong. But there are some problems.
I know it's always said: "Students, well, they're fine." I think that those of us here who have been students know that there are times in the life of students when they read nothing but the books that they must get from a library or which they have had to buy from a bookstore for their courses. Students don't have time to sit around reading newspapers. In fact, some students don't see a newspaper from the time they go into university, for example. And it's the university and post-secondary level students we're talking about, because these are the ones who are older than the rest, and voting Canadians. They are going to be there, and they often do not have the time to do the kind of scanning that is considered the kind of stuff that every citizen does. That's one of the reasons that we
[ Page 3128 ]
have problems registering students. We forget what it is that makes them tick. We don't seem to know yet how to get to them as well as we should.
I think every member in this House has people in their ridings who are tradesmen who work somewhere else. In my riding I have carpenters; 80 percent of the carpenters who are employed — which is a very small percentage of the number of carpenters who are there — work on the CPR tunnel project in Revelstoke. They go to Revelstoke to work. Their place of residence and domicile is in my riding. They do not easily get back to get their names on a voters list three days before a voting day. It is not easy for them to get registered. They do not find it simple. There are the others who in fact may go to Pincher Creek to work on a project over there. That's even more difficult. They can't even talk to their provincial people from there. The Alberta government, I'm trying to say, hasn't stopped them all.
There are tenants who move around. Of course, tenants have to move from place to place, and I'm told they can vote in a different poll under some section of the Election Act. But that doesn't cover the whole thing. In my area, they move from riding to riding, and they don't find it easy to get themselves registered on the voters list.
[3:30]
I think that we can't forget the illiterate. People pass this by, but it's a matter of some considerable concern, and we are just now in this country addressing the extent of illiteracy and how it affects many people in our country and certainly in British Columbia. A person who is illiterate is going to be able to vote, is going to be able to hear the issues by oral ways, and so on and so forth, but in fact is not necessarily going to be able to easily find the way to register to vote. If a person who is functionally illiterate doesn't happen to be home when an enumerator comes around, it is very difficult for that person to cope with the electoral registration process.
We have, then, all of these things. We have students that don't have time. We have seniors who can't afford newspapers either, and there is a lot of work for this through newspapers.
We also have the problems that come with the latest technology. I believe the Provincial Secretary said that there is a lot of use of computers with the voters list. I would certainly applaud the use of computers, but I think everyone has to recognize the problems that are not human that come with computers. When was the last time you got your name mixed up or a machine made a mistake? "The computer made the mistake at the bank," is the one we often look at first, and we go and talk till we're blue in the face to try to explain what's wrong. That becomes a major impediment to people trying to have the process work for them.
I think that all of these things need to be addressed. I think the Provincial Secretary has to look at them all. He has to be assured that the chief electoral officer is looking at them all and has a better plan than the one we had in the last election so that we have far more people registered, in which case there is no need to eliminate section 80 votes where there is no evidence of any abuse having taken place.
If the government can improve its registration techniques, and if it betters its record in Boundary-Similkameen and the other ridings in which it might have the option to try out these techniques — in other words, move the 7.05 percent of the vote that was section 80 votes down to something closer to the Manitoba achievement of 2.8 percent — only then could we decide if we should move away from an accepted practice in Canada. It may be well to stop here for a minute and say: " Oh, yes, you just want us to be the same as everybody else." That's not what I'm saying. People always do like to stand out from the crowd as a person who looks better, who achieves better, who moves better, but nobody likes to stand out from the crowd because they have a large wart on their nose. I'm suggesting that this difference from the rest of Canada would be like a large wart on the nose.
If the chief electoral officer fails to improve the situation in the by-elections, we could then decide if we should move to a practice that is obviously more necessary in British Columbia where the section 80 vote is so high. If we have poor registration, it doesn't make sense to take away section 80. If you can't get on the vote by registering in the normal way, you should still have that right. It has been argued very forcefully that voting is a right, and therefore it is there. You should have the right to walk in and declare that you have the right by an affidavit and have your vote cast and counted.
We could also decide if we have any excuse at all for removing this opportunity for the public to prove that it is not an apathetic public. We sometimes are careless with that term, but all that the large number of section 80 votes proves to us is that the public is perhaps not as apathetic as we sometimes accuse them of being. If people were sitting home, if we had a registration process that miscalculated 15 to 25 percent of the voting public, and if we didn't have any section 80 vote, that would be different. But we did have a huge section 80 vote. We need that safeguard, and we need it whether or not we have a good process; we need it because it's a right of people. We could decide, if the process was improved, that we have the technical expertise and the ethical commitment to open the door as wide as possible to the voters of British Columbia instead of closing it, where we don't have any need to close it. We can handle election day section 80 votes, which have their function and purpose in establishing in this jurisdiction that voters who have a spoken right to vote also have an actual right to vote.
What I'm trying to say is that we want fairness in the electoral process. We want fairness that is perceived to be fair. Probably the clearest thing anybody knows from the time they're a child is whether something is fair. It's not fair if you go to the polls to vote and you can't vote. We need to be sure that we have that possibility for every one of our citizens, and we need to have that perception clearly in the public mind.
MR. MOWAT: I sit in this House today to oppose the opposition's motion to hoist Bill 28. I think Bill 28 ensures the eligibility of all British Columbians to have their name placed on the voters list. I think every British Columbian has a right to vote, and it's a given right, but with that right comes responsibility. We give our British Columbians the right to drive a car, but with it comes the very serious responsibility of how they drive it. Many of our Canadians, and particularly a lot of British Columbians, have fought for our right to vote in provincial elections. I think sometimes we don't take that right and our responsibilities seriously enough.
I note that in many other countries in the western democracy, the law says you must vote. If you do not vote, you're penalized — Australia, Belgium, Greece, Luxembourg, Switzerland. In Italy they say that while it's not compulsory, it's regarded as a duty, and failure to vote is recorded for five years on the elector's identity card. I also note that in Australia, for example, a member of the Commonwealth, it is mandatory to vote, and their voter turnout is 94.3 percent.
[ Page 3129 ]
In other countries, we often see on television where some people abuse the privilege of voting. They do not vote in other types of elections, whether we see it as a democratic country or not, and they are not exercising their rights or responsibility.
I recently read the book From Snowshoes to Politics, written by a former member of this House and minister, the Hon. Cyril Shelford, in which he recounts very graphically why he went to war and some of his thoughts, when he was fighting up through Italy and in Europe, about the right to vote. When he came back to Canada he was going to ensure that he got involved in the process of democracy, which is a very precious thing for us in British Columbia and in Canada. But often we do not take the responsibility of the right of voting very seriously.
I know that some members of our House on both sides have gone through a recount in the recent election in 1986. I went through this in Vancouver–Little Mountain, and I noted that there were 953 duplications of registration and 790 section 80 duplicates. The total number of section 80 votes in Vancouver–Little Mountain was 9,206, and those were just the ones noted. That says to me that there's something wrong with the system and it must be looked at.
I must say that one of the other things I feel very strongly about in Bill 28 is what it will do for the disabled. They're referred to in the act as shut-ins, but those are persons who, because of disability, cannot get out to vote on voting day. They now have the privilege of voting on voting day.
But again, to ensure that that voter has taken his responsibility, the act says he must be on the voters list and must be registered. I think that's a very little price to pay for a person who wants to exercise the democratic right, to take the time and become registered. Now a person who's on a disability and has trouble getting out can become registered very easily, and that will allow that person to exercise the right.
Also we have the advance poll, which allows for a lot of people who, because of their age, may have problems in getting to a very busy poll on voting day but can go to the advance poll and vote in a leisurely method, to get in with the assistance of people who will take them to the advance poll.
I think very strongly that a person who wants to exercise his right has, any business day of the year, the right to go and see if he is on the voters list and, if not, to put his name on the list. I was very concerned to hear the member for New Westminster (Ms. A. Hagen) speak against the public service people working for our government and knock them and say that she was very concerned about what happens when you phone to see if you're on the voters list and that — if I understood what she said — you cannot rely on information given by the public service. I think the public service of this province does a great job in many areas, particularly with the problems on voters day.
I think that by expanding in Bill 28 the number from ten days, adding on a number six for a total of 16, it's another way we're looking after it. We know Bill 28 will ensure that no British Columbian is denied his or her right to vote, but in it we ask that when they go to the ballot-box that day, they be a registered voter in the electoral district where they reside. But where their name has not been included on the voters list, they can cast a ballot. If there's no voter registration card in their name at the polling place, they can apply for a ballot, mark it and have it placed in a ballot envelope to be dealt with by the returning officer on or before the final count.
I think that's little to ask of our citizens, that they become registered on the voters list to ensure that they are not denied and to ensure that they have taken that step of responsibility and have gone to the electoral list to see if they are on it and, if not, made that effort to put themselves on it.
I again speak against the hoisting of this motion and hope that the House will proceed to enact this legislation very quickly.
MR. SKELLY: I'm in the difficult position of being against the hoist, but I'm going to speak in favour of it and vote in favour of it. I can say this because the Minister of Labour (Hon. L. Hanson) is in the room. In very few instances — and I said this during my last participation on a hoist motion — during the 16 years that I've been a member of this Legislative Assembly has the opposition ever chosen to use the hoist motion.
In my view, a hoist motion is generally brought to the floor of the House out of frustration, when all else has failed, when reason has failed, when negotiations among the critic and the minister and the House Leaders have failed. We all know that this is a motion of confidence; we all know that the government is bound to reject it, so we all know what the outcome of that process is.
This bill has been on the order paper since the last sitting of this Legislature. There has been an opportunity to discuss the issues between the critic and the minister. I know those discussions have taken place. I have a great deal of respect for the first member for Victoria (Mr. G. Hanson) and for his commitment to the democratic system. He has presented a bill in this Legislature calling for a reform of the electoral system in this province and indicated to the minister that he is prepared to discuss these issues to see if we can bring about, through the process in this Legislature, the most neutral and most effective electoral legislation that this province can possibly bring.
I resent the fact that government members in this House seem to be comparing us with other provinces and saying — in terms of the open period for registration — that we're a tiny bit better than Manitoba or some other province. What we want in this Legislature, and what we want for British Columbians is the best we can possibly be.
When we've reached this point in debate, and the minister smiles across the floor at me, knowing that we've reached the end of this debate, really.... We reached it when it began, because the government isn't going to make any move on this. If I were the Provincial Secretary or the government or the Minister of Labour, knowing that we've reached the point where, in labour relations, we're ready to walk out on the street in a strike or a lockout and that reason has failed and the parties to negotiation have failed and the process has really failed and that something has gone wrong.... If I were the Provincial Secretary when this kind of a motion has been put on the floor....
Remember, as I said, in the last 16 years that I've been a member of this Legislature, I think we've dealt with only a dozen of these motions. A tiny fraction of one percent of all the bills that have come in to this Legislature since I've been a member have been subjected to this kind of motion. I think that the Provincial Secretary should take this into consideration, because we don't use this motion lightly.
[3:45]
We've reached the point that people reach in labour negotiations when everything has failed, and negotiations
[ Page 3130 ]
have failed, and reason has failed, and people hit the streets or get locked out. I think that — and this is why I'm against a motion to hoist for six months because I know it's the end of the road — perhaps the minister might think it over a little while and not take six months, but maybe withdraw this bill during second reading and offer to meet with our critics and the experts in this area and say: "If this isn't going to serve the people of the province by establishing a neutral voter registration system and a neutral piece of electoral legislation, then what suggestions do you have that might be brought back on the floor that will resolve the problem?"
This is the government — and I don't have to remind you, Madam Speaker — that campaigned during the last election on being consultative and cooperative and willing to listen to the people of the province and incorporate their views and the views of the people on this side who represent 43 percent of the voters in the province of British Columbia. This government campaigned on that basis; why don't they act on that basis? Here is an opportunity for the minister to demonstrate what kind of stuff he is made of, to demonstrate whether he really believes in that kind of process, and to pull this bill. Don't wait for the hoist motion. We all know we're wasting our breath on that. Pull the bill. Discuss it with the debate leaders, and I think that we can come to some kind of conclusion on an adequate and neutral registration and voting process that will satisfy all of the people of the province and will be neutral with respect to political favour. I think we can do that, and I want to suggest that the minister do that. That's why I say I'm against the hoist motion, because I know what the ultimate result is going to be.
I feel that I'm put in an unreasonable position by having to support a motion like this, knowing that it's going to be fruitless and that the result isn't going to favour the people of this province and that we're not going to end up with a neutral and effective voter registration system. That's why I guess I feel frustrated in being forced to speak against the hoist and vote for it. I don't like being forced to do anything.
Interjection.
MR. SKELLY: I'm going to vote in favour of the hoist.
There's only one section that's in dispute, and that's the section that does away with section 80 votes.
Interjection.
MR. SKELLY: Every speaker — including the member for Vancouver–Little Mountain who is interfering, contrary to the rules of this House — on the government side and on the opposition side has recognized that section 80 is a problem. He said that 9,000 people in his constituency sought to register on election day under section 80 because they didn't know if they were or weren't on the voters list. In any case, he said that that told him the story, that there was a problem with the registration process in the province of British Columbia.
When you get 157,000 people registering on election day, going through the kind of confusion that resulted from the section 80 process, it certainly should have told you the story: not that there's something wrong with section 80, but that there's something wrong with the initial voter enumeration process and the voter registration process. Rather than trying to eliminate the symptom, we should be dealing with the disease, and the disease is the voter registration process.
You've suggested that by expanding the voter registration time, the time that people can register to vote prior to an election call, or by delaying the creation of a new voters list until the third year after an election, we may be dealing with the problem. But I'm not convinced that we're going to deal with it. One of the problems in this Election Act is that it doesn't require voter registration people in a constituency to compile an adequate voters list through an effective enumeration process. They may be instructed to do it, but they're not required to do it. As a result, we have the kind of process where there's a little registration booth at Safeway or in the shopping mall or somewhere else, but there is no adequate voter registration procedure in this province.
What this side is arguing for is that that procedure be established first. If it works, we fully expect to see the number of section 80s reduced, the confusion and the expense and the problems and the bureaucratic routine that surround section 80 on election day reduced, and the problem resolved. What we don't want to do in the process — and I know you don't want this to happen either — is to restrict voters and deny them the right to vote.
[Mr. Pelton in the chair.]
I used to fly airplanes — not for a living, but to spend what I earned in making a living. I used to fly airplanes for fun, and I also fly other people's airplanes for business purposes. In airplanes — and I think the Minister of Labour (Hon. L. Hanson) does a little flying himself — they have what they call redundant systems. A redundant system is something that does the work if the first system fails. You have two sets of magnetos, so you keep those plugs a-poppin'.
You're a flier yourself, I understand, Mr. Speaker. You know that you have redundant systems in order to protect you if the first system fails. I'm glad that a 747 has two systems to make sure the flaps get extended, because if the first system fails you can always rely on the second one to catch the problem, rather than hitting the ground too fast and too far from the runway. I'm glad that they have these redundant systems built into airplanes, so that we as travellers and fliers can be protected if the first part of the system fails.
Mr. Speaker, the right to vote is so important that there should be redundant systems built into the electoral process to make sure that if we're not caught in the registration system on the first round, there's a second round and perhaps even a third round to make sure our citizens have the right to vote by the time election day arrives. I think that in looking at this Election Act we should be prepared to build in those redundant systems so that our people are protected, and the democratic rights of our citizens are protected.
I was surprised at the member for Little Mountain, who suggested that being able to vote is something like having a driver's licence. That is as far from an appropriate comparison as you can possibly get. Having a driver's licence in our society is a privilege, a privilege that's granted by the government and a privilege that can be taken away legitimately by the government if you abuse that privilege. In a democracy, the right to vote is not a right that you can grant or take away. It is a right that is derived from this being a democracy in the first place. There is absolutely no comparison in what the member said between the issuing of a driver's licence by a government and the right to vote, which is a fundamental and a basic right that no government in
[ Page 3131 ]
British Columbia has the right, as the member for North Island (Mr. Gabelmann) suggested, to abridge or to take away or to deprive any citizen of. In fact, this government has an obligation, as I suggested before, even to introduce redundant systems that make sure that that right is there and can be exercised by citizens on voting day.
I don't want to take too much time in what I consider to be really a waste of the House's time. It was my hope that when the first member for Victoria (Mr. G. Hanson) brought this issue forward and asked for a hoisting of this legislation, the minister might have taken his words and his arguments into consideration, and pulled the bill and debated the bill outside the House to see what might have been done to improve the legislation in order to deliver the best possible voting system in the province. That not being done, as I said before, we've reached the point where it's almost fruitless.
The minister might argue that the 157,000 section 80 votes that happened on election day in the 1986 election were confusing; that it was a time-wasting process; that it was expensive because we had to hire more deputy returning officers and that kind of thing to handle the problem; but I'll tell you, already in this debate we've spent more of the public's money than it cost to deal with the section 80 process in the last election. That's how fruitless this debate is. Already we've spent more in terms of the time of this House debating this piece of legislation than it cost to run the whole section 80 system.
Surely members on the government side concerned about the amount of public money that we're expending have to make some kind of judgment themselves. Is there no more effective process than a hoist motion where our debate leaders can sit down with their debate leaders and hammer out a system that will be more acceptable to all members of the House, that will eliminate the amount of time we have to spend on this kind of debate in the Legislature and yet produce a better system for the people of this province? I'm convinced that there is such a system, Mr. Speaker. Even though the Provincial Secretary is not in the House, I hope that he's listening; I hope that he'll take my words into consideration; and I hope that we can come up with a system.
I'm certainly not satisfied with the Election Act and the electoral system in the province of British Columbia. I think this Legislature is proof positive that the system has failed. When the people who got 49 percent of the popular vote have 66 percent of the seats in the Legislature, that's proof positive that the system has failed, because the seats in this Legislature are not representative of the wishes of the people. There should have been a fairer distribution of seats in this Legislature, and that is proof that our electoral system is skewed in favour of the government party.
[4:00]
If the minister really wanted to correct the problem, maybe he should have looked at the way people are listed on the ballot. As you know, Mr. Speaker, under section 86 of the Election Act the government party is always listed first. It's worth sufficient percentage of the vote in each constituency that that alone could have turned the election around in the last few elections. This Election Act was set up in such a way as to favour the governing party, and there are many things in the act that should have been changed.
I suggest to the minister that if he was interested in providing a fair and impartial and neutral electoral process, then he would have checked through this act with a fine-tooth comb and identified sections like that that run absolutely counter to a fair and impartial and free and democratic process, and along with other sections he would have eliminated that section.
The fact that he hasn't done it indicates to me that he's not interested in the neutrality of the act. He's not interested in the fairness and impartiality of the act. What he's interested in is identifying a problem for a certain number of Social Credit candidates in the last election and eliminating that problem. I don't think it works. That kind of unfair and politically motivated tinkering with the act doesn't work. The people know what's going on, they recognize what's going on, and you'll pay the price, I'm sure, at the next election.
Besides, section 80s wouldn't have turned the election around one way or the other. They may have favoured us in one particular constituency; they would have favoured the Social Credit Party in another constituency. There's really no benefit to be derived from it politically one way or the other, so that's why we question why the minister, even if he's politically motivated, would want to proceed with it. We recognize that the government has the majority in this House, and we recognize that we're not going to turn it around or change it by a motion like this. But I think we can get together, work out the problems with the Election Act and bring a statute on to the floor of this Legislature that we can all be proud of regardless of which political party we represent.
I have a great deal of confidence and a great deal of respect for the first member for Victoria and a great deal of respect for other members who have spoken in this debate, but I think we'll probably have an opportunity before the day ends to go home and think this piece of legislation over, because it appears to me that the debate won't be completed before we close at 6 o'clock. I would hope that the minister might withdraw the bill, consider this section of the legislation, consider improving the voter registration system, and by an improvement in the voter registration and enumeration system reduce the requirement for section 80, but not eliminate the availability of section 80 for those who do need it on election day because they fell through the cracks of the system. I think that if reasonable members of the Social Credit caucus are able to discuss this with the minister, they will probably appeal to him on the same basis as I am now and ask the minister to reconsider.
So that's why I say I'm against hoisting this for six months. I think we can resolve the problem within two or three days. By having reasonable people sit down with reasonable proposals we can come to reasonable solutions that will be of benefit to all of the people in this province. Basically, that's who we're serving when we're elected to the floor of this Legislature.
MR. LOENEN: I find myself in unusual agreement with a lot of the statements that were just made to the House by the member for Alberni. He pointed out that this motion is useless and it's wasting our time. I couldn't agree more. He says that he's been here for 16 years and motions to hoist are rare. I've been here less than a year and I've seen three of them. I hope that the opposition House Leader and the NDP will heed the advice from the member for Alberni, quit wasting the taxpayers' time and money and no longer resort to hoist motions which are purely tactical and meant to frustrate the will of the majority of the people of British Columbia.
He also mentioned that the Election Act favours the government of the day. The question is why then did the NDP not change that when they had the opportunity to do so? I
[ Page 3132 ]
think it's somewhat hypocritical to suggest that we're politically motivated, etc., etc.
I was also happy to learn that the member told us that there is no political benefit attached to the changes that are recommended and are before this House, and that in fact it would not change a whole lot. The outcome of future elections or past elections would not really be affected, the member told us. I am happy to hear the member say that, because I agree with that. This amendment is not politically motivated; however, the reason for it is to ensure that we have greater democracy in British Columbia than we do today. We are all agreed that democracy is most precious and that the right to vote is one we ought to protect and shield and guard for all people.
There are very few people.... In fact, the majority of people alive today do not live in a democracy. If you look back over history, only very few people have enjoyed what the people of British Columbia enjoy: namely, the right to vote and the right to participate in a democracy. Because it is so precious, we ought to devise ways that will guard against abuse. We do know that the section 80 provisions do lead to abuse. When we have the chief electoral officer tell us that a voter honestly not remembering if he is registered in another electoral district may vote, we create a situation which is certainly open to abuse. We ought to recognize that most people are honest but that there are people who for one reason or another will be tempted. We ought to remove that temptation from people. It is naive to suggest that this won't happen.
Politics is simply war by another name. We know that. We know that millions of dollars are spent fighting political battles. Reputations are won and lost, emotions run high, and we ought to make sure that there is not the least opportunity for people to abuse the system. All we are doing here, Mr. Member, is safeguarding — not for political reasons; safeguarding — the preciousness of democracy. I think we ought to recognize that, and we ought to recognize that it is simply naive to think that when there are opportunities for abuse, people will not in fact do that.
The other thing that we ought to recognize is that, as so many members opposite have told us time and again, people have rights. Yes, we have rights. We have a right to vote. But along with those rights come responsibilities. You cannot have the one without the other. When I hear the member for North Island (Mr. Gabelmann) speak, it is the same innocent, naive, simplistic NDP philosophy all over again and again and again. You ought to trust people, people are honest, etc., etc., etc. They only talk about rights; they never talk about responsibilities. When someone in my riding abuses this system, he deprives me of my democratic right. We ought to recognize that in order to ensure the franchise for those members of our society who are responsible, who do not resort to illegal tactics — to guard their rights — it's only right and proper and appropriate that we insist that people exercise responsibilities that come along with living in a democracy.
We all recognize that the problem lies with the registration of voters. This legislation, this bill, does more to fix that problem than anything we've seen for a long time. In fact, we're leading the nation. No legislation is perfect, and if in time, through technological changes and abilities to register people even better than we intend to do.... I am sure that this House will ensure that amendments are introduced to make it even better. But this is certainly a step in the right direction. I just want to recommend it to the House and I know that people of this province are going to welcome this kind of legislation which ensures that all our rights are fully protected and that no one can even be tempted to tamper in the least.
The member for North Island told the House that we are in a kind of conflict-of-interest position and that we ought not to be dealing with changes to the Election Act. The ultimate court of appeal is the voters of this province, and in due time they will have the right to decide whether the decisions that we have made and introduced as government are appropriate and in the interests of all British Columbians. We ought to recognize that, to say that we have no right to make such decisions. We are here to represent the interests of the people who sent us here, and in due time they will judge whether or not we are making the right decisions. I am quite prepared to submit this decision before that final court of appeal.
Mr. Speaker, I'm against the motion to hoist; I do recommend this Bill 28 to the House. I hope we can quit wasting time, as the member for Alberni (Mr. Skelly) suggested, and that we can get on with the work speedily.
MR. ROSE: I'm very pleased that the minister has returned from his long walk, back to listen intently to the wisdom that I'm about to offer.
I hope I can add something beyond — and I don't mean to be too unkind to the member for Richmond — some self-righteous platitudes to do with rights and responsibilities and all that good stuff.
One thing worries me a little bit about the attitude expressed by the previous speaker. He said that if you don't watch people very carefully, they'll do something naughty. I don't know if that's the proper faith in people that I think he should have. Why do you need to control people all the time and take away their choices? There's a little touch of authoritarianism in all that. They're the same people who say that the best government is the least government. When we suggest here that there might be a little more freedom, somehow people are going to take advantage of that, and we must slap their wrists or they'll do something naughty and bring down an honest and God-fearing government like the one that sits across the aisle. I can tell you a little bit about trustworthiness too, in terms of the kind of gerrymandering that's gone on in this province for the last 15 years. That's why I'm in favour of the hoist motion.
[4:15]
Interjection.
MR. ROSE: That one never saw the light of day, so I couldn't tell you what happened to it. I know it was done by the previous government, but when this government came in.... It must have been a good one because they quashed it. We've never seen it since.
I want to address just one more remark to my hon. friend the second member for Richmond, and it has to do with the waste of time. Yes, it is a waste of time talking to the wall. That's true, it is very costly. But I'll also remind him, because I know he's a new member, that it's the only power the opposition has. You guys have fixed it up so that when it comes to a vote, the voting machines over there on the other side always win. So it's the only power that we have.
I don't particularly want to hoist this thing. I'd much sooner do what 78A calls for. Mr. Minister, 78A is in the rules now. You can stand up and refer this whole matter to a standing committee. You can take this little book.... And
[ Page 3133 ]
you're well and truly informed on this little book because you helped write it, along with other estimable members in 1985 — one of the scribes. I want you to listen to this carefully. I know some of you over there are functionally illiterate, so I'll read it to you.
Interjections.
MR. ROSE: I withdraw the "functionally."
This is what 78A, Reference to a Select Standing Committee, says: "At any stage after introduction a bill may be referred to a select standing committee upon motion without notice" — without notice; spring it on us! — "made by the member in charge of the bill. Such motion shall be decided without amendment or debate." If you want to shut me up, stand up and refer it to a committee. What would be better than that? The committee would have the power to call witnesses; it would have power to move from place to place and time to time; we could examine all kinds of swell suggestions coming from the public and other interested people. I don't like participating in these things either because I think if the minister.... We can adjourn from place to place, from time to time, and we could study voter registration in such exotic places as Bangkok, Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador. Why don't we go to Japan or Europe and see what's happening there? I'm not a member of the committee, but I would certainly try to get on it.
That option is open to the minister. That would give us an opportunity, a substitute for the six-month hoist. I would be very pleased to sit down, yield the floor to the minister, and have them come in here and bring this to us. Break new ground. Don't be cautious. Throw caution to the wind. Take a chance. Have faith. Not like the member for Richmond. He has no faith. He has no faith in the natural goodness of people.
The just have not always inherited the earth, nor have the meek — not up to now, anyway. It's the strong and those that may be a bit clever who seem to inherit a good deal of the earth, if not the wealth of the earth.
All right, why are we doing this? Why are we doing this business about Bill 28? Why are we going through this agony? Why are we going through this futile exercise? Why are we, as my hon. friend here said, wasting the taxpayers' money by going through this? It's symbolic. Unfortunately, there is a good deal of cynicism over the record of this government when it handles matters dealing with elections. I'm sorry. [Applause.] Thank you very much. Not too much applause, because you're eating up my time.
As David Lewis said one time, before he was going to say something particularly sarcastic: "It pains me to say this." But why are we doing this? What is so vile about Bill 28? I guess we homed in on this section 80 because of the history of this government's dealing with election matters. It hasn't always provided an objective, level playing-field approach to politics. As a matter of fact, it's something almost in the way they're handled in the Deep South. This is Deep South North.
It's not that we don't trust the minister. We do trust the minister. But I don't know if I trust some of his close associates here. Perhaps some people in the bureaucracy have given him some wrong information about how difficult it is to have section 80 voting, how dangerous it is, how pernicious it is to allow more people to vote.
I don't know why we need to change. So there are a few things in here that might be better. But look at what has happened to us in the past. We've had a history since 1975 of electoral hanky-panky on a large scale. It really does pain me to say this. We've gone through the Eckardt commission. That was straight and utter gerrymandering. We had the sad spectacle of Gracie fingering some of the votes in Point Grey so you could add Socred votes to....
SOME HON. MEMBERS: Order!
MR. ROSE: There's nothing out of order. The Eckardt commission was a classic case of gerrymandering. This was supposed to be a learned judge, and this was supposed to be an objective exercise. It wasn't. It made certain that Little Mountain would remain Socred — forever, perhaps. There was an example of that. The Eckardt commission: it was outright gerrymandering.
I don't know if you know what gerrymandering is. I'd like to tell you.
"The term is derived from the name of Gov. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, who in 1811 signed a bill readjusting the representative districts so as to favour the Democrats and weaken the Federalists, although the last-named party polled nearly two-thirds of the votes cast."
Those guys were better than you are.
AN HON. MEMBER: Who wrote that?
MR. ROSE: I'll give you the source in a second.
"A fancied resemblance of a map of the districts thus treated led Gilbert Stuart, the painter, to add a few lines with his pencil and say to Mr. Benjamin Russell, editor of the Boston Sentinel: 'That will do for a salamander.' Russell glanced at it, 'Salamander?' said he. 'Call it a gerrymander!' The epithet took at once and became a Federalist war cry, the map caricature being published as a campaign document."
Now what I'm saying here is that despite the outcry of Eckardt, Gracie's Finger, all that other stuff at the time, it carried, and as a result we had the government re-elected. It was in bad shape. It had a redistribution and it was re-elected; close, but it was re-elected. So when things get close, the government changes things.
Let's have a look at 1983-85. In 1983-85...
HON. MR. VEITCH: Eighty-six.
MR. ROSE: No. I'm talking about 1983-85.
...we had the restraint program. This caused marching in the streets, bankruptcies and unemployment to the extent that we hadn't seen them for years, and also a consequent downswing of the governing party in the polls. So what do we need now? We need another quick fix. We're going to come up with this great little deal. We will take 12 ridings and make them dual-member ridings; 11 of those 12 happen to be Social Credit ridings. We won't change the boundaries of the Eckardt commission, which were gerrymandered to begin with. What we will do, Mr. Speaker.... This is exactly why I want to tell you that I'm speaking to the hoist motion.
MR. PETERSON: I rise on a point of order, Mr. Speaker. I realize that my doing this is like David taking on Goliath, when I'm dealing with the opposition House Leader.
[ Page 3134 ]
However, I was led to believe that we were talking about the hoist motion on Bill 28, not about redistribution in this province.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Thank you, hon. member. I'm sure that the hon. opposition House Leader has heard clearly what you say, and will carry on the debate bearing that in mind.
MR. ROSE: Mr. Speaker, through you to "David," I admit that I became a bit discursive there. I might have strayed marginally from the point. However, I was trying to make the point about our suspicion and why we can't embrace the minister and his proposals with greater alacrity. It's because we're suspicious; we've had these terrible experiences.
One of the ridings which benefited from this particular arrangement of redistribution, a bill occurring in the last House, was "David's" own riding. It took about a third of the number of people to elect him as it did to elect me, when you come right down to it. They got two for one; out in Langley they had a two-for-one sale in 1986. I wouldn't suggest that some of the products might have been a bit shop-worn or shoddy. Certainly I have great affection for both the "David" from Langley and his partner. Is she the caucus chairman of the governing party now? Yes. I have a great regard for her as well. Anyway, the quick fix worked.
Ladies and gentlemen over there — and I'm sorry that the member for Richmond has gone — I think we can make the point that 11 of 12 of you estimable ladies and gentlemen wouldn't even be in this House if it were up and up. Never mind the second member for Richmond (Mr. Loenen) fixing it up so people have got to be honest; what we have to do is fix it up so the government is. That's the point.
Was this practically double majority...? It was a miracle, but it wasn't done with mirrors; it was done with definitions. I won't go into it deeply, because I don't want to offend your sensitivities about order, Mr. Speaker. It was done when some ridings like Central Fraser Valley or Langley, with roughly 160 square miles, were called "urban rural," and therefore had a lower voting base. Some, such as mine, were called suburban, even though they were four times as large and required a much larger growth factor in order to qualify for two members. That isn't straight up; that's not nice.
The former Provincial Secretary, Mr. Chabot, defended this on the grounds that we were anti-rural. "What about Atlin?" and all that nonsense. It worked perfectly, though. Here we have a government elected by about 5 or 6 percent more of the vote than the opposition, with more than double the members. You've got to think there's something wrong with that in a rep-by-pop situation.
I don't say that this party would have formed the government; it wouldn't have. But it wouldn't have had the big, lopsided majority that we have now. That's why we want the hoist. We want to have more information; we want people making greater opportunity to consult so we can have a better system developed that is fair. It's not sleazy.
Again it pains me to say it, but like our Prime Minister and his problems in Ottawa, there's a sleaze factor in all this. Again, some of the people — as a matter of fact, nearly all of the government — I have some affection for. They are my colleagues; I work with them and I see them every day, and you're bound to develop certain kinds of relationships — love-hate relationships sometimes. You're bound to develop that. So it's not nice to stand up and say: "Look, you're not quite straight up, you guys."
[4:30]
We've just been through a privilege motion the last couple of days which indicated in the financial area it wasn't quite straight up. I don't want to comment on that because there hasn't been a decision by the Speaker, and I won't go further on it than that. We've seen it in many other ways over the last three years since 1983. We've got a commission now.
Anyway, instead of two to one almost, it would have been roughly 37-33. I worked it out in terms of the bill. Would we have gone on this radical business about privatization, selling off everything left and right, all this kind of stuff about abortion and denial of human rights if there had been that close a squeaker? Because that's the difference, and that's all.
AN HON. MEMBER: Fairer distribution.
MR. ROSE: So distribution has been unfair. Now we're in trouble again. After the election — notice, after the election — the Sun and Marjorie Nichols and others came out and said this was awful, this two-member-riding stuff. We shouldn't have it. So now we've got Judge Fisher.
Now when Judge Fisher was first given the job, he was told that he could only fiddle with dual-member ridings, because I think the Premier was sensitive to the fact that it was asserted that he stole the election. He didn't need to steal the election. I am sorry to say it with my honourable friend sitting here, but as the percentages turned out, he would have won anyway. He didn't need to steal the election.
We don't need to have special things happen to protect the government in the coming by-elections unless things are in trouble again. Now I haven't got the poll, so I can't tell you whether they are or not, but there has certainly been lots of criticism.
Despite the undoubted integrity of a lot of people over there, their wins are suspect and there was political manipulation. The atmosphere stank so much that we have to have another redistribution thing. We have to have a bill while this is going on. I think it's an insult to Judge Fisher that, despite the fact that he can come up — and I think he will — after Eckardt and McAdam....
I'm not blaming either of those two estimable judges — certainly the second one — because they were probably given terms of reference so limited that they couldn't do very much. All they could do was find out where they could add other double-member ridings; and I'm not saying they got their marching orders, but it's funny that they all ended up in strong Socred seats.
With that kind of suspicion behind us, with that kind of experience behind us that things are probably not really level electorally, we then come along and have what is, in effect, the Smallwood-Marzari amendment. That's what we've got in section 80.
There are some good things in the bill. I'm not denying that extra registration time is not a plus. I don't think it's the answer, but I can't deny that it's a plus. It's an improvement, right? The mail ballots for the disabled seems to be a reasonably sensible provision. I don't think it's outstandingly progressive, you know.
Interjection.
[ Page 3135 ]
MR. ROSE: Well, you could. You could go a lot further; you could do a lot better. I have great faith in your ability to do better things than you've shown us up to now.
MR. SKELLY: Not based on performance.
MR. CASHORE: One must have faith.
MR. ROSE: Yes. So we want the hoist because that's the only way we've got to delay this thing, to delay this madness, to have the minister think about it. He's here and he's undergoing all.... I know I might be repetitious but I just hope I'm not tedious, so I don't suffer from the twin diseases of tedium and repetition.
AN HON. MEMBER: No, only one.
MR. ROSE: Oh, just one. All right. The third year enumeration is not a bad idea. I don't object to that, but I think it's too little and too late. The average turnover in population in any district — in some it's higher — is about 20 percent per year. When you're talking about trailer parks or apartments or whatever, it's roughly 20 percent per year. So over a period of four or five years you lose them all. Now that's not true. There are stable suburban districts, but I think you've got blinders on if you don't think that the strength in the legislation is based on stable suburban districts rather than districts where there is a high degree of migratory population and changeovers in rental accommodation.
So it undoubtedly affects.... You can look at the percentages of the votes. A lot of others have said 157,000 used section 80. Did they use it for nothing? Why did they use it? Because they were lazy? Because they couldn't get out? They couldn't get off their chairs to get out and register? It's darned tough to register sometimes. It's very difficult for some people to register.
You know, a large segment of the population in the Deep South in the 60s and before that were left off the list deliberately. They were left off the list because they thought that if they voted, they would probably vote in black people in the Deep South. There were voter registration marches there in the Deep South. They barred the door and wouldn't let them in. There were all kinds of sit-ins. They wouldn't let them come in the front door in the Deep South in the 60s — only 20 years ago. People got shot for the marches and the demonstrations and.... Get to the back of the bus where you belong and stop interrupting me. No, I appreciate the interruption. But the point is that people fought to get those votes, and they were thwarted in their attempt to get those votes. Why? Because they might vote for the wrong people.
When you have a short election period of roughly 28 days or whatever it is, the argument is you don't have time for enumeration. Well, make it longer. The only reason you have section 80 at all is because you have a shoddy, sloppy enumeration system. That's the only reason you need it. How come 157,000 people took advantage.... ? It didn't amount to much in my riding; it amounted to 6 percent. What about the ones who were left off and didn't even bother to vote? Only about 70 to 80 percent of the people vote anyway in this province. We need to figure out ways so that more people can vote, not fewer. Well, you're not addressing the problem.
Somebody comes into the polling booth and says: "I'm on the list. Why am I not on the list?" Go over to the section 80 lineup where there are 100 people all filling out these dinky little things that take forever, especially for senior citizens who don't hear very well or see very well. There's a big lineup, and some of the polls in my riding ran out of ballots.
So you've got to think one of two things. You've got to think that there must be some basic reason why those people aren't on the voters list. Either they're too old, or they've moved in recently, or they're functionally illiterate, or they're really illiterate, or they don't give a damn. There's got to be some reason for it. Why don't we address that problem?
Well, if they don't give a damn, they probably won't vote. You know what they do in Australia? They fine them if they don't vote. I'm not suggesting that heavy-handed stuff, but it might appeal to the government — at least some members of it. It's kind of a jackbooted approach to electoral politics, but it's a long, long way from Australia. We don't need that, but what we do need is a better system.
Why should we be unique in being one of the two provinces in Canada that doesn't allow voting on election day?
HON. MR. VEITCH: You've got to take the whole thing in context.
MR. ROSE: I know; it's a package. That's what worries me. The whole thing is a package. That's what really bothers me.
Look at section 5. It removes the right of anyone to pick up multiple applications. So the minister says that we want more people to vote, but you can’t register them. Only we can register them. Will you make certain in my riding that I can have 1,000 application cards? No, it's not in the cards, because you're afraid that I'm going to sign up some NDPers. I would suggest that you give 1,000 to the Social Credit machine. They may not need 1,000, especially after the events of this week. They probably wouldn't even need 100. I've heard that they've cut off your money supply. Next thing they'll do is cut off your air supply.
What I'm saying is that if we hadn't had these terrible, terrifying, terrorizing experiences, I think we would have a much greater degree of confidence that we're going to have a trick-free election. What are the people going to do in Boundary-Similkameen? They're not used to this new system. They'll say: "I'm on the list; I was registered; I registered. A guy came along and registered me." It turned out to be federal, but it doesn't matter. People think they're on the.... "Oh, I've lived here all my life. I'm on the list." I hear that all the time.
Somebody else made the point that not everybody thinks about elections every day. Not everybody thinks about politics every day, every moment of their waking hours, as we do. They're not that concerned, and they're very confused with the federal, the provincial and municipal. Maybe there should be one master roll for them all. Maybe there should be some kind of voting card like a Visa card so you could move.... I don't know how you'd identify your place of residence under that voting card, but maybe you could. Maybe that's the way to do it. A person does it once, and he's got it there for a lifetime. You change your residence like you change your driver's licence. But to suggest, like the hon. Minister of Education (Hon. Mr. Brummet) — I wonder if he's qualified to be Minister of Education — that somebody and some group and some ridings are going to be like the lemmings who en masse head for the sea or head for, say,
[ Page 3136 ]
Point Grey to elect my hon. friend here, as worthy as she is.... That is the bogeyman theory of electoral politics: you've got to watch them like hawks or dead men will be on the polls.
Despite what I regard as less than fair distribution and election legislation, we have a pretty good record of honesty in elections in this country. I think we do.
Whenever we want it to be objective and fair, we try to put things in an outside commission. That's why in business we have auditors. Auditors come in to make certain that the accountants aren't mixing up their money with the firm's and taking it all home, or that there isn't juggling to avoid taxes. So we do have outside.... We have an ombudsperson. Even for this Legislature we have an auditor-general.
So the idea of having an electoral commission at arm's length from politicians, giving them that power to accomplish the goal, which is one person, one vote, equal access to voting, an encouragement to vote.... Maybe that would be the way to go. Maybe we could have a more simplified system, but....
My hon. friend has asked me if I wanted to be designated speaker. No, I didn't ask to be designated speaker, and I see that I've now turned green and am about to turn red, so I'll conclude my remarks with that.
There's nothing wrong.... As a matter of fact, the appearance of evil, the appearance of influence, is what hurts us and makes politicians be treated cynically by the public. We can change that: send it to a committee and we'll look at it; we'll stop this talk right now.
MS. MARZARI: I rise as 50 percent of the reason for the abolition of section 80 in Bill 28. The other 50 percent, the member for Surrey-Guildford-Whalley (Ms. Smallwood) will be addressing this tomorrow or on Monday. I address it not only as 50 percent of the reason for the abolition of section 80; also address it as a politician who believes very strongly in process, in how things are done; in fact, even sometimes more strongly in the process of how things are done than what gets done. My colleagues on both sides of the House have come to know me as a person who cares about machinery and administrations and proper and due process all the way along the line. For that reason, I am adding my support to this hoist motion of Bill 28.
Like others among my colleagues, I would that there were other techniques for the opposition to ask the government side of the House to defer this bill; to send it to a committee; to take another look; to cool off, as it were. I would that there were other techniques than a hoist motion. But that is not the way it is to be, and therefore we on this side of the House are putting forward a hoist motion in an effort to ask you to take a cautious and a concerned second look.
[4:45]
I ask you to do that for three reasons. What has happened in this section 8 of Bill 28, the abolition or the modification of section 80, is a twisting of numerical analysis which has led to a twisted presentation of this bill to the public and to the House and which has, in effect, twisted the actual bill — twisted the process by which we will be going into the next election.
I believe that your side of the House has been handed numbers that we have never seen on our side of the House. From what has been said by the Provincial Secretary and others, you are operating under the premise that 157,000 people did not vote section 80. You have another number altogether. You seem to have a number that suggests that 83 percent of people were irregular in their voting, that there was some irregularity, some abuse.
Interjection.
MS. MARZARI: Well, please do comment after the fact. You have numbers which are almost inconceivable. We have in front of us numbers we have gleaned from the electoral returns office that suggest that 11 percent of those voting under section 80 were registered in another constituency. We have numbers that suggest that 8 percent of people overall in this province were forced to vote under section 80 — 11 percent of 8 percent, by my calculation, is not a massive percentage of double registration; it amounts to less than or around 1 percent of the total vote. After that is said and done, the presentation that you have put on that 1 percent of voters suggests that that 1 percent of voters who double-registered were in fact abusing the system. You have lent that innuendo to the process which had been carefully set out by Mr. Goldberg in February of '86 as a legitimate process — a legitimate process in the eyes of the election office and of the officer in charge.
The officer in charge of the elections office and the procedure informed a questioner that if a person, a voter, honestly couldn't remember if he or she was registered in another riding, that person would be eligible to vote in the riding in which they were presently residing and section 80 would cover that — section 117, as you know, exists for absentee votes — and with that assurance and with all good will, the election proceeded. The lineups at the section 80 polling booths were outrageously long. The people who lined up at the section 80 booths were there for a number of reasons, many of which my colleagues have elaborated on. They were there because they did not know if they were registered elsewhere. We can get into how that could have been resolved a little later on. They were there because they had been left off the voters list. They were there because of improper or sloppy enumeration. They were there because they are students who have permanent residency, for all intents and purposes, for their lives in the town in which they are studying, with, as my colleague for North Island suggested, no real knowledge of where their next permanent residence might be; it would depend on where they go to their job.
These people have been slandered. Their integrity has been impugned. These people have been called cheaters. This is where I get to this twisted presentation which we have been dealt, both through the press and in the House. In saying that the voting was irregular, you have managed to imply that the voters were committing irregular and illegal acts. Language is very symbolic, and people will take that suggestion that the voting was irregular and automatically assume — not automatically, but there is reason to believe that many people would believe — that the voters were, in fact, committing a sin. Nowhere have I heard that double registration was an illegal act. I have heard, and I know, that double voting is an illegal act. You don't vote twice. You don't go from one polling station to another, from one riding to another, and vote twice. Who would want to? Who could possibly pay someone enough to go and abuse their rights as a citizen by voting twice? Who would do it, and for what reason? Why would anybody put their name, their reputation, their career and their record on the line by voting twice?
[ Page 3137 ]
You have left the impression in your presentation of this bill that people have committed an illegal act, that they were cheaters. You have even convinced many members of your own back bench that that is the case. We have been regaled with speech after speech about privilege and responsibility as if the vote is something to be dangled in front of people as a reward for good behaviour, for being able to find their way to the Safeway store, for example, to register — not as a right, but as a reward.
It has been suggested that voters are lazy and that section 80 voters must therefore be the laziest that they should wait so long as election day to find out whether or not they were on the list. And laziness will not be tolerated; laziness must be punished.
One of the members this morning talked about: "We've been lenient, and now we're cracking down." The government has been lenient; these people must be punished. The voters should be punished, because we've had lenient regulations. All these attitudes come from the innuendo, the smear, that you have placed upon people who have voted in good faith and in good conscience.
In my constituency I sent around 10,000 letters. I sent them to all the people who had been left off the voters list.
HON. MR. VEITCH: How did you find out who they were?
MS. MARZARI: I found out who they were very easily. I used twentieth-century technology, and I compared the telephone list in my constituency with the voters list. There are things called computers now, where if you put magic disks into the right slot and press the correct button — which took some time to find in my constituency — the names of those people in the riding who happen to have telephone numbers but who don't show up on the voters list would be printed out. We found 10,000 people, some of whom were not eligible to vote, many of whom were eligible to vote but had not been caught in the enumeration net and had not been placed on the voters list.
It was not an expensive procedure. Even my constituency could manage to do it. If it was handled 69 times for the number of people in this House, it would still not be an expensive procedure to buy the telephone lists and for the provincial government and the election office to do it and find out how effective the electoral and enumeration machinery is. It's not a cost item, an item which enfranchised a number of people in my constituency and informed all those people that they were not on the voters list — not just NDP voters but Social Credit voters and people who really didn't give a damn. People who didn't care at all were also informed.
To those people I wrote a letter. I said that section 80 was about to be cancelled — the section they had voted under. Section 80, which enabled them to have a vote in the last election, was not going to exist anymore. And I asked them if they would let me know what they felt about it.
Interjection.
MS. MARZARI: I found those people before the election, and I have sent a letter to them. They write back, these people whom you would call cheaters, lazy, people who need to be punished, whom we've been too lenient with.
Corrine Scott says: "I spend a lot of time in the north central part of B.C. There are times when I'm caught in between, and luckily have been able to vote here. There are a lot of people like myself living in the Point Grey area only part of the year."
Here's a letter from Sheila Ahearn: "I have lived at the same address for over the past two years. What kind of province is this that the enumerators would not come back to my home to get me on the voters list? I am originally from Toronto, Ontario, and the enumerators there do not miss a home. They always come back to get you on the list. Obviously, some people work for a living and are not always at home to answer the door."
Doreen McDonald's letter: "I was not on the voters list last year and had to stand in line on election day for 45 minutes to register, even though I have lived at the above address since 1954."
A letter from Mary Payne: "I feel it is a privilege to have a vote when women suffered so much to obtain it. I remember in Britain how some women chained themselves to railings and were thrown into jail; and when they refused to eat, they suffered the humiliation of being force-fed. It would be a grave miscarriage of justice if voters were denied those rights because of careless enumerators."
Laurie Kerr: "Although we are both citizens who always vote and are concerned in the government of our city and province and country, we are very mobile and have lived at numerous addresses over the last ten years. Were it not for same-day registration, we would have lost our right to vote on more than one occasion."
Anthony Boardman: "In the last provincial election my name was not on the voters list, and I registered on election day. I had, however, completed all requests to be included on the voters list and had not recently moved into the neighbourhood. My wife was on the list; I was not."
Sophia Samson: "Since moving to Central Park Lodge" — this is a senior citizen — "in February 1985, no one has been around to enumerate me, and I would like my name added to the voters list."
Cheryl MacLean: "I was very upset when I went to vote last and found my name was not on the voters list, as I have been at this address — and voted from it in at least one previous election — for seven years. In fact, I did fill out a card to ensure that I would be on the list, and still they missed me."
[5:00]
From Brigitte Peschke: "I only became a resident of Vancouver in 1986, in August. I lived for 31 years in Montreal, Quebec. B.C. politics are still pretty foggy to me, but I am learning. I found enumeration procedures in Quebec satisfactory. There was always a procedure to get on the list, and I was always able to vote. I would like to make very sure that I can vote next time."
Moira Munro: "I entered my polling station and discovered I had to line up for one and a half hours to vote. Determination made me stay, although I had another appointment. However, I am sure that many people left in disgust without voting at all. The fact that I had just moved into the area in August is irrelevant, as I stood behind an 80-year-old gentleman who had lived at the same house for 30 years and also had not been enumerated."
[Mr. Weisgerber in the chair.]
[ Page 3138 ]
The letters go on and on. There are many letters. But perhaps the most telling letter is from the students themselves, who understand, in Point Grey at least — and certainly at Simon Fraser as well — that section 80 most definitely has an impact on their eligibility to vote. The students have made themselves heard. In fact, they have written letters to newspapers to make sure that their protest is a public one.
In response to Paul Mendes's letter to the Vancouver Province around Christmastime of last year, our Provincial Secretary said, in a letter back to the Province under the title "Voting Enhanced": "Bill 28 does not remove section 80 from our present elections legislation; instead, section 80 has been modified so that in future elections the voter registration period may be increased. In total the number of days of registration will be increased to 16 days." The wording suggesting that section 80 wasn't being removed may be technically correct, because section 8 of Bill 28 modifies section 80 so as to make it completely irrelevant. It twists the language because of the twisted analysis. It twists the presentation so as to confuse the issue and to further impugn the reputation of people who have voted and their future right to vote.
I would suggest that this bill must be hoisted just to give you a chance to think it through. If your numerical analysis is so correct, if section 80 voters are so dishonest, I ask you, Mr. Provincial Secretary, why then have those people enumerated and registered under section 80 in those constituencies where there are about to be by-elections? Why are their names now on the voters list? Why have the names of people who voted under section 80 in those areas where there are about to be by-elections been put by our elections branch onto the voters list for the purposes of this by-election? Why, when there should be cases in court every day of the week until sunset, as you put it, with charges being laid against dishonest voters, did you take the section 80 voters and put them on the election lists of the by-election areas?
Why, if you do not want to get rid of voters, I ask? Mr. Speaker, I ask you, since the minister has left the room, what possible difference there can be between asking people to come in three days before an election to register under section 80.1, or whatever it's going to be called, to further confuse the issue.... What conceivable difference is it going to make that they come in three days in advance to register, as opposed to coming in on the day of an election and registering? What magic feats can the machinery perform three days before an election that it cannot also perform on the day of an election?
These questions must be answered, and answered in a forthright, non-misleading way before any of us on this side of the House can begin to think that this removal of section 80 is anything but a political sham, a piece of political maliciousness directed at two members on this side of the House who happened to get elected on section 80 votes. Why else would it be done when in fact in 55 of the 69 ridings, section 80 votes broke in favour of the winner? In the two instances where people were actually elected, why would the government even think about removing election day registration?
There are other things that could be done, but I don't think that your analysis has been untwisted enough to begin to think about adequate and comprehensive enumeration. And I would put that before you. Cost it out. Ask your election officials how much it would cost to do a complete enumeration after the writ's been dropped — a complete, active enumeration. Not a passive Safeway enumeration but a complete, active enumeration such as is done in most other provinces and territories and in the federal government. And if you haven't had it costed out, why have you not had it costed out?
Lengthening the time during which people can come to a passive registration poll in a Safeway booth or a local library might be cheaper by a few cents than an active enumeration; but doing a complete enumeration, I think, would convince people in this province that you're serious about what you're about and would bring us up to some kind of a national standard that B.C. could well start thinking about. If that were to happen, then I think you'd find that those people who were still left off the voters list — inadvertently, by accident, or who had been out of town — would dwindle to a handful. They would be able, then, to come to a polling station and go through a section 80 procedure or an enumeration or registration procedure on election day without any major problem. In fact, the checking could be done at that very point in time. Telephone hook-ups to computers could test their affidavits on the spot, could test the truth of their statements. They could be spot-checked or 100 percent checked in terms of their identification. It's impossible to do when you've got 8 percent of the population voting using section 80, but not impossible if you have only a few people using a section 80 equivalent.
What is stopping you? What is stopping the government from taking a relatively simple concept such as universal enumeration after the writ is dropped and moving along with it? Why would the government want to focus in on those people who were forced to vote section 80 because of a poor enumeration and eliminate their right to vote? As I say, there are many ways to improve the situation, and as I say, this government seems to have chosen a particularly cumbersome approach which can only be explained in terms of motives which are politically driven.
When people can't vote in the next election, when they show up at the voting station and are denied the right to vote because they were left off the voters list for one reason or another or because they are not registered in that particular constituency, I dare say it will come down heavily on this government. This government, rather than being a government that could open the door a little bit and spend a little extra money to come up to some kind of Canadian standard of enfranchisement, will suffer as a result of it because — and I will just say it again — of its own maliciousness of intent.
MR. LOVICK: I am sorry that we seem to have an uninterrupted opposition statement unfolding this afternoon, as opposed to some interchange and interaction with members on the other side. The debate began with a kind of ritual response from the other side. As we would put up a speaker, somebody would come from the other side. I thought: "Isn't this wonderful! Isn't this a return to what the system is supposed to be about." Sadly, however, what seems to have unfolded latterly is that we're getting into the old habits of this government: they don't answer, they don't respond to criticisms that come from this side of the House. And that's really too bad.
Interjection.
MR. LOVICK: The hon. House Leader on the other side tells me that they do listen. Sadly, I have only your assurances, sir, because I have not yet seen much evidence that
[ Page 3139 ]
you are indeed listening. I would offer as an example of that the fact that the last speaker who stood before this chamber, the second member for Point Grey, posed various direct and specific questions which carried within themselves some pretty serious charges. They were challenges. They amounted, in fact, to accusations, it seems to me. If I were a member on the other side of the chamber I would feel honour bound and duty-bound to stand up and defend myself. Unfortunately that isn't happening. Clearly one can draw all kinds of conclusions, and I'm not about to attribute motives or devious intent to the other side, but I would just like to suggest this: if members on the other side do indeed believe even a part of the rhetoric that the Provincial Secretary used in presenting this measure to the House, then they do have an obligation, moral and intellectual, to stand here and defend themselves. That has not happened; that's sad.
My role in this debate is a difficult one, because I am, of course, as I am sure you now have heard, the designated speaker on the hoist motion.
Interjection.
MR. LOVICK: The Provincial Secretary seems perplexed; not that that's untypical, but I wonder why. I don't hear anything coherent coming from him.
It's a difficult role to play, because I also have the misfortune to be coming at the end of a rather long debate. In fact, we have heard considerable arguments presented to this chamber. One might on the face of it conclude that we have heard everything there is to say. I do not think that's the case, Mr. Speaker, and I want to assure you that I have considerable regard for this House. Indeed I revere and venerate the rules of this House. Therefore I shall certainly make every effort to ensure that my comments are in order.
[5:15]
HON. MR. VEITCH: On a point of order, I would simply ask that you take some counsel in this and ascertain whether or not a designated speaker is allowed on a hoist motion. It is not that I don't love to hear the hon. member speak. I do — for a certain length of time, of course. As the hon. House Leader of the opposition said, we helped write the standing orders, and I don't remember writing in that you would have a designated speaker on a hoist motion.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: I will confer with our learned Clerks. Carry on.
MR. LOVICK: I was just going to make the point, Mr. Speaker, that it's not a very esoteric or arcane point of order. The fact of the matter is that we've carried on for the last year or more that I've been in this chamber doing precisely this. Is there a ruling, however?
DEPUTY SPEAKER: I would certainly encourage you to carry on while the Clerks do a bit of research into the question. I think we can safely allow you the balance of your half hour, in any event.
MR. LOVICK: As I was saying before that rather abrupt interruption from the hon. Provincial Secretary, it is difficult to talk on a hoist motion after so many speakers have already come before me. I hope that I will not be guilty of any blatant repetition and tedium or some such thing — not that I would ever do that, of course.
I think it's appropriate to begin comments on a hoist motion by reminding everybody of the nature of a hoist motion. The fact is — as I and a number of others have pointed out on various occasions in this chamber — that a hoist motion almost of necessity will have arguments on either side that tend to be substantially the same, whatever the subject might be. In short, there are only so many arguments in favour of holding up a measure, and so many against, whatever the measure might be.
I see that the second member for Cariboo (Mr. Vant) is listening, and I want him to pay close attention because I'm going to teach him a bit about logic here.
Inevitably, one will be involved in repetition. In fact, the rules of the House clearly acknowledge that insofar as they acknowledge the validity of designated speakers on hoist motions. However, I am certainly not about to ask for any extra latitude from the Chair. Instead, let me continue the point I'm making about hoist motions. Traditionally and conventionally, it is safe to say that the arguments adduced for hoist motions are usually predictable, pro forma and sadly pedestrian. Similarly, on the other side, the arguments against hoist motions — to show that we too can take blame unto ourselves — are traditionally seldom prescient or penetrating or, for that matter, surprising. They simply aren't.
The traditional counterarguments.... I'm going to be making some points on this to support this hoist motion, and I'm simply sketching out the logical base for this. The arguments against the hoist motion traditionally will be four.
One, time is marching on. Time is pressing on us. We need to act, and we need to act right now. That's one argument we have already heard from the other side.
The second argument we are going to hear is that action is deemed to be preferable to any kind of reflection or discussion. We are bound to hear that as well. Indeed, we have already heard that on a number of occasions, and I'm sure we'll hear more of it from the other side.
Interjections.
MR. LOVICK: I am pausing for a moment, because I see that the Clerk is about to divulge something to us.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Hon. member, you are entitled to the designation of designated or recognized speaker, and are therefore allowed two hours' debate on this particular issue.
Interjections.
MR. LOVICK: I want to thank you very much, and I hope that Hansard will duly record that the House erupted in thunderous applause to that announcement. We live in a benign universe, I am sure, and the cause of justice and truth and righteousness will surely unfold, as it just has.
The third argument I was presenting — the pro forma kind of argument that we get against a hoist motion — is that the legislation proposed does indeed do all that can reasonably and fairly be asked. Of course, that's predictable and understandable; indeed, it's defensible. The question, however, is precisely whether the legislation does what that contention suggests it does. Clearly, I want to put some pressure on just that point.
[ Page 3140 ]
The fourth argument against a hoist motion will take the form that the arguments adduced by the other side, those offering a hoist motion, do not hold up. In short, people on the other side of the House, such as the Provincial Secretary, will periodically say things like: "Nonsense."
AN HON. MEMBER: What does he mean by that?
MR. LOVICK: I'm not entirely sure what he means by that word, because seldom does he ever explain what he means by it. Instead he prefers just the assertion.
Let me turn to the other side of that for a moment, if I might, Mr. Speaker, and outline very briefly, for good and, I think you will discover, absolutely legitimate purposes, what the arguments supporting a hoist motion traditionally are. Of course, you can measure what I have to say by using this list.
The first thing to be noted is that the arguments in support of a hoist motion will be essentially the converse to those four. Clearly, they will be the other side of that particular coin.
They too, then, have four root forms, the first of which is that there is no urgency; there is no pressing need for action.
The second argument that will be offered is one usually held to represent a conservative philosophy or ideology, namely that line that I have quoted in this chamber before — I believe it's from Romeo and Juliet — that says: "Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast." And with no chimeras, of course, but what we can do in five minutes by acting precipitately and perhaps cavalierly is destroy what took a very long time to build up and to create. That's the argument essentially underlying that notion about proceeding carefully, cautiously and reverently.
The third argument? The third argument for a hoist motion is of course that the legislation proposed does not in fact do all that the proposers and supporters of the legislation suggest it does. The legislation, in short, is not good, is not desirable and is not all that might reasonably be achieved and reasonably be expected from legislation.
The fourth argument, of course, Mr. Speaker, is that there are solid reasons why the measure in its present form should not be adopted as policy. That is an argument that has been presented on this side of the House, an argument that I shall certainly present.
I have listened to good chunks of this debate. That's the advantage, if you will, of coming last in a debate — or very close to the end, I should say.
AN HON. MEMBER: You're not last.
MR. LOVICK: That's good, because clearly the first shall be last, in most cases, right? And in this case it's also true. I have, however, had the advantage of listening to good chunks of this debate. I have also had the advantage of reading a good part of the transcript of the debate. And behold therein a wonder: the arguments adduced on one side of this House, the other side of this House, don't even — in the majority of cases at least — live up to the four basic arguments against a hoist motion that I sketched out a few moments ago. And I'm troubled by that, Mr. Speaker.
Before I develop that point with specifics, let me just offer a couple of exceptions to that broad generalization. I want to suggest that a couple of the comments made by the other side of the House did indeed make some effort to provide substantive arguments. The Provincial Secretary, for instance, made a token and a credible enough effort to justify the measure. I haven't yet heard too much to support any of the claims made, but nevertheless there were claims. There were substantive assertions by the Provincial Secretary that we can at least respond to, and I appreciate that. Fair and good.
As well, the Minister of Education (Hon. Mr. Brummet), in his usual bombastic braggadocio and booming voice — which I delight to hear — made a valiant and honest effort to respond to the concerns raised by my colleague the first member for Victoria (Mr. G. Hanson). On close analysis, I don't think the arguments presented by the Minister of Education will bear much scrutiny or will stand up. I don't think they present a very compelling case, but at least an effort was made.
As well, the former Minister of Highways, the member for Shuswap-Revelstoke (Mr. Michael) — to give him his due — made an effort to put specifics to the case against this side of the House and our efforts to hoist the motion.
I will perhaps deal with all those arguments in the course of my remarks, but I want to stress that those three are the exceptions, because the other comments made in support of the government's measure — in this case, speeches against the hoist motion — have not had that kind of substance. Rather....
MR. SERWA: In your estimation.
MR. LOVICK: Well, I think I can document the case, to answer the hon. member — is it the member for Okanagan South? — and indeed I shall try to document the case.
HON. MR. VEITCH: Go ahead and elucidate.
MR. LOVICK: I hear somebody inviting me to elucidate, and I certainly shall endeavour to do so.
The great majority of speakers, I want to suggest.... I'm being very careful how I say this, because I heard somebody mutter something about elitism and all that, and I don't want to be accused of that. Frankly, I don't think the label applies. So I am being careful; I'm trying to be — a la Micawber or Uriah Heep or whoever it was — forever humble.
[5:30]
But I want to suggest that what speakers on the other side do not understand — to judge from the written record — is the nature of argument or the nature of evidence. Instead, it seems they believe that flat statements are a fair substitute for argument. They believe that a simple declaration makes something so, apparently. They believe that sufficient repetition will make something true; that if you say it often enough and loud enough, it becomes true. They further seem to believe that a flat denial and an expression of disagreement — to wit, expressions like "nonsense" or "balderdash" or "garbage," words that are quite commonplace on the other side of the House — all represent counterarguments. The fact is that they don't. To put it in more prosaic language, it just ain't so.
A couple of examples, if I might. Again, I do this more for edification and clarification than anything else. On page 17 of the Blues the second member for Central Fraser Valley (Mr. De Jong) makes the direct declaration that "the privilege under section 80 has been abused to the point" — listen to this — "where the basic principles of democracy have indeed been broken." That sounds pretty close to,"The sky is falling," pretty close to,"We should all rise and take arms against a sea of troubles," etc. The predicament is that in the
[ Page 3141 ]
rest of the testimony, and in the testimony presented by all the other speakers, there's nothing to support that proposition. It's just a statement.
Similarly, the member for Yale-Lillooet (Mr. Rabbitt) illustrates the point I made a little earlier about saying that what we must avoid is, of course, reflection and discussion; we've got to get on with it. The only reason I draw this to your attention is that it's directly below the last passage I just quoted, and it leapt out at me; it deserves repetition here. Again from the Blues, the member for Yale-Lillooet says that the opposition's main interest in this case is to procrastinate; not to reflect or to think about it and say,"Hey, wait a minute, maybe this stuff doesn't make good sense," but to procrastinate. My God, that sounds like the original sin, the way that was uttered in this House. I suggest to you that that is a good example.
One more, just to make the same point: the other member — I believe it's the second member for Central Fraser Valley — gives us a similar line about ten pages later. I mention this only because I think it's nice to see that, indeed, these things all happen the same way again and again. He suggests to us that we should forget about this hoist motion — and listen to the reasoning here, Mr. Speaker; listen to the argument. Why? Because it is pure nonsense. That's pretty impressive, except that it isn't an argument. It's a proposition, a declaration. It says,"This is my opinion," but it doesn't say anything to show why that is the case, that's the problem.
That's what I want to stress here. I do so, as I say, for good and valid purposes. It seems to me that this House is not well served if any of us, me included — and I'm as guilty of it as anybody, probably, on occasion, and just as likely to fall into the trap — get into the realm of declaration, declamation and denunciation rather than argument. And Lord help us if we start to do that.
As I say, I'm perhaps being unkind in terms of pointing to specific comments from the record, but I think the laws of evidence and fairness demand as much. I am ready to acknowledge that there are some arguments adduced that do bear scrutiny and do hold up under some analysis. Fair enough. Of course, I shall make every effort to refer to and to deal with those. For the present, though, I want to offer a set of arguments in support of the hoist motion that I submit have merit and are compelling. I am prepared, of course, to be challenged on all of these. That's the nature of the beast, as it ought to be.
I want to emphasize again, though — and I say this with a little bit of irony intended — that my arguments, in certain cases at least, are not simple. They are not instantly understandable. In some cases they are a bit subtle, they are a bit complicated. They are comprehensible for those who are not habitually intellectually lethargic, for those who are prepared to make some effort. I am sure that the Provincial Secretary sees himself instantly in that category and therefore will have no difficulty following the arguments, and I invite him then to join me in that process.
The first point I want to make, and I say this, believe me.... My last comment was offered with some irony and some burnout, and I hope everyone appreciates that I am not meaning to be insulting; rather I am trying to interject a slight note of levity.
But my first argument is one that is indeed very serious. It is this: the haste with which the measure is brought forward will fuel the anti-government feeling that we now see around us and that we see growing.
HON. MR. VEITCH: Haste — in 18 months?
MR. LOVICK: Yes. Because it has not been debated, Mr. Provincial Secretary, and that's why I say haste. If indeed you had taken that bill, and when you first discovered that there were flaws — at least flaws perceived by those of us on this side of the House — had said,"We're going to do something about that; we're going to have a series of discussions out there with the people; we're going to entertain input, amendments and suggestions," then you would have solved the problem. But the fact that something is sitting on the order paper for 18 months does not address the problem that I'm referring to: the indecent and indelicate haste with which this measure is perceived to be coming before us. That's the point.
I want to suggest to you that there are some compelling reasons why members on the government side of the House ought to be very concerned. Let me give you a very specific example. The other day there was a rather small group, about 125 people, standing on the steps of the Legislature. It was a group that called itself — and the title is important. I think — the Coalition for Democratic Process. It's a group that claims to be, on the public record.... I met this group the other day in front of the Legislature, and I encountered the group when I was at Camosun College having a debate with the Minister of Finance (Hon. Mr. Couvelier) on privatization initiatives. That's my only knowledge of the group, by the way. But what they said on both of those occasions was that they are non-partisan; they represent persons from all parties. They have made that public statement on at least two occasions that I'm familiar with. To my knowledge, they have not yet been challenged; therefore I think it probably will hold up, or it is indeed true,
A small group, to be sure; 125 people is not exactly a giant rally, compared with some others we have had here, as yesterday when we had 2,000 people or more. But what they are talking about is something important. Those individuals are drawing our attention to something, and we ignore their concerns at our peril: namely, democratic process, due process. They point, for example.... I am very pleased to note that the Provincial Secretary is indeed listening seriously to this, and I commend him for that, because it is a serious matter. They contend that there are a number of signs to suggest that the normal process we associate with parliamentary government and democratic process in this province is under attack. Whether that argument is entirely valid is moot. Of course, it's debatable.
They nevertheless offer some arguments. They say, for example, that there appears to be a greater incidence of spending by special warrant rather than going through the normal process of legislative approval. They point, for example, to the results of the McKay commission on that, and they point to the creation of the eight ministries, and they wonder if what we are seeing is, in their terms, an abuse of spending power by this government. Again, we could and should debate that.
The point — and I'm suggesting that it is an important one — is that there is a perception out there that this is a government that is not firmly wedded to democracy. I'm suggesting that this kind of measure, given its capacity to generate the heat and anxiety, if I might put it that way, that we have alreadv seen in the course of debate in the last couple of days, does so because and only because a number of us
[ Page 3142 ]
have looked at the measure, and in our considered opinion there is something wrong, with it.
We're not standing here — and I'm not now standing here — to use a phrase, for the heck of it. I'm doing so because I believe that there is something important at stake here. I think that the measure presented to us is wrong-headed, and I'm hoping that eventually I can try to show the Provincial Secretary and others on the other side of the House why it is wrongheaded and why it is not a good system for this province.
Here are just a couple of other brief examples, other illustrations, of the same point about the Coalition for Democratic Process. They argue that the apparent or ostensible disregard for a Supreme Court of Canada judgment, as manifested in the most recent activities we have seen in the Legislature — certainly in question period in the last few days, and certainly in the demonstration on the lawns yesterday — is another indicator of precisely the same predicament: that this government is apparently not wedded as firmly as it ought to be to due process. We who are involved in the system tend to fall into the trap of thinking that politics is all about only things and measures and policies. But what we mustn't forget is that it's also about process — very much so, Mr. Speaker. The very fact that there is a body of individuals representing all political parties who feel sufficiently strongly about these matters to create something called a Coalition for Democratic Process sets off alarm bells, I hope, for all of us.
I want to reiterate the point I'm making. I hope I've demonstrated that this measure, capable as it is of generating the acrimony we've already seen, capable as it is of producing division and discord, is going to fuel those fires — to use a terrible cliche — and is going to continue to make that anti-government perception we see around us all the more powerful. On that basis alone there's every good reason to hoist this measure for at least a period of six months.
Interjection.
MR. LOVICK: The reference from a member opposite is to yon Cassius. Do I look lean and hungry? Is that the suggestion? I think you may have the wrong character, by the way, but I won't debate the point.
Let me offer a second argument in support of a hoist motion, Mr. Speaker. Again, I think it is one that will hold up to some scrutiny. I certainly am looking forward to the Provincial Secretary's response to all of these arguments, because I know he is not going to ignore these things. Contrary to what we have had suggested to us, there is indeed no urgency manifest or demonstrated. I am certainly critical of the existing Election Act. I acknowledge without question and without reservations that there is considerable room for improvement and amelioration — no question of that. But the fact remains, and we should never forget it, that we have functioned with the existing measure; so there isn't necessarily any great urgency.
[5:45]
Now the argument we're getting is that there is urgency because we have a by-election pending. Indeed, a couple of people have made reference to that point in their comments, speaking against a hoist motion. They have said that if we delay this measure for six months, if we have a hoist motion or we in any other way slow down the process, what's going to happen is that there are going to be some 19-year-old people who probably have a birthday on or about the election and, holy cow, they might get disfranchised.
HON. MR. VEITCH: No, read the bill.
MR. LOVICK: I'm merely saying that, Mr. Provincial Secretary, that's the argument at least three people on the other side of the House have presented. I'm not making that up. I'm telling you what the testimony says. That's the argument offered to support the arguments against a hoist motion. People are saying: "It's urgent. We've got to do this." I can quote you that. I won't now, because I'm not going to get lost in the Blues, but it's there. I assure you it's there.
I suggest that the argument that we're going to perhaps do some slight disservice — or let's even put it in more dramatic terms: perhaps an injustice — to some small group of 19-year-olds is pretty small stuff compared to the injustice we're going to do by taking away that section 80 provision wherein people can vote on election day. It's pretty small stuff.
Interjection.
MR. LOVICK: The Provincial Secretary is now saying: "Don't you like 19-year-olds?" Great question. Yes, I like 19-year-olds. Do you know what else, Mr. Provincial Secretary? I like 18-year-olds too, because I think people should be able to vote in this country and this province at 18. I would suggest that's the kind of measure — if you were seriously concerned about representing youth — that you would introduce in your election amendments. That's the kind of thing you would do instead of this half-baked, half-hearted effort at reform. I'm sorry I'm getting a little exercised, and I will pause for a moment to have a drink of water.
If we're going to amend and reform something as crucial and as important as the Election Act, then we ought not to go about it haltingly, carefully, and incrementally. Rather, let us do it right. Let's have a wholesale reform of the thing. Let's have the entire thing re-evaluated and re-examined, and I'm going to sketch out some of the things we might do apropos of just that.
Though I am prepared to argue, I think there are some good measures in this bill. There are some good things as far as it goes; the fact is it does not go far enough. It's just that simple. I want to suggest that there are easy ways to make it go further. Unfortunately, Mr. Provincial Secretary and your government, you don't leave us any other option but to have a hoist motion to try to hold you back, because there's no other possibility to reform this measure. The amendments that have finally come abirthing after the 18 months you alluded to, don't make a heck of a lot of difference. They're not bad amendments necessarily, but they don't make a heck of a lot of difference because they don't, it seems to me — and I'll have occasion to deal with this when we get to the substance of the thing rather than the hoist motion — deal with the fundamental problem of the bill. That fundamental problem, of course, as everybody now knows, at least from our perception — and I think it's a legitimate one — is that it is wrong quite simply to remove the right to cast a vote on election day. It's just wrong, and I think we can argue good cases for it for some people.
Interjection.
MR. LOVICK: For some people. I will correct it if indeed my statement misrepresents.
[ Page 3143 ]
We like the small steps the Provincial Secretary and the government are taking. We like what they indicate. The steps themselves we could perhaps debate. We like the steps themselves because they indicate a move towards the kinds of things the Provincial Secretary said in his opening remarks; namely, a fair and open and accessible and convenient system. They are, however, mere slight, small steps towards that end rather than the kind of giant steps we need to take.
It's good, for example, to say that we can increase the period of voter registration from 10 to 16 days. You need a lot more than that, however, if you want a real voter registration that's going to guarantee you get everybody who is entitled to vote. If you want that system to function as it ought, you need much more than adding on an extra six days. It's good insofar as it does something about disabled persons and shut-ins. Great, no complaint. It's a step.
It's good insofar as it deals with persons on parole, but I note — and I would love to pose this question to members opposite — that the reasons persons on parole now get to vote in the province of British Columbia is the Charter of Rights. And I really wonder, if there were a free vote on the other side, how many of those individuals would believe that parolees do indeed deserve the right to vote. I suspect, sadly, that the majority of members opposite would not conclude that parolees have the right to vote, because after all, those individuals, to judge from other comments they have made on other subjects and in other debates, have a very different view of how you deal with people who don't measure up to the norms as society understands and establishes them.
My point, then, Mr. Provincial Secretary, at this juncture is that you should screw your courage to the sticking place, if we're going to be Shakespearean. Go for it, Mr. Provincial Secretary! You can do so much better. Instead, we get a Mickey Mouse, half-baked, tentative move towards electoral reform. Be courageous, Mr. Provincial Secretary. Try to do something more than you have done so that the new Election Act will in fact do what the Provincial Secretary suggests it does.
[Mr. Speaker in the chair.]
Let's recall that the rationale, the justification, the explanation for this measure, the Provincial Secretary tells us, is that it's a good bill "because it provides voters with more opportunities to register." True. Not enough, but more, granted. The Provincial Secretary continues to defend it by saying: "It extends to the disabled and shut-ins the privilege of voting by mail" — good — "and to parolees the right to vote." Yes, because of the Charter of Rights; the provincial government had no choice. I just can't resist making that point. "It's a good bill because it introduces some important administrative measures that will make enumerations more efficient." Little steps, good steps. And finally, says the Provincial Secretary,"it will make voters lists eminently more accurate than they've ever been in the past and the whole system more efficient, scientific and practical." A little hyperbolic, Mr. Provincial Secretary, but probably a step in the right direction.
We're prepared to grant you all that, but we argue that the bill does not demonstrably deal with what we perceive to be the central issue: namely, the right to vote on election day. Everybody has now spoken about that, Mr. Speaker. We have heard the figures again and again that in the last election, for example, some 150,000 section 80 ballots were cast, which represents some 10 percent of all the ballots — people who registered and voted on election day. Consider the magnitude of that problem. We're not talking about a few individuals; we're talking about 10 percent of the voters.
I see the clock is getting close to the end, Mr. Speaker, so I want to close up....
MR. R. FRASER: Don't stop.
MR. LOVICK: Oh, I'm not going to stop, I assure the member for Vancouver South, who has just entered and always asks me to tell him something, because he is so demonstrably in need of evidence and good argument. I am certainly not going to stop. I hasten to point that out. But I am, I realize, coming close to the time of adjournment, so I will just wrap up for this section by adding a couple of very small points.
It is not selfish interest on this side of the House; it is not a particular interest in improving my chances of getting elected or anybody's chances on this side of the House that leads me to stand up here and talk against the bill and against the proposal to make it happen now. Rather, it leads me to argue the case that we should slow it down if we can't amend it, and slow it down in the hope that we can amend it.
The question I want to pose is this: what are you folks on the other side of the House afraid of. What is it that causes fear and trembling about section 80 votes? Why is this a problem? Lots of people will say things and give us all kinds of examples of people being double-registered. They'll talk about this in terms of it being a terrible abuse of the system. But the obvious question is: so what if people are double-registered? Is that a major problem? Is that somehow too big a price to pay? If you want to tell us that what's happened is that there are individuals who are breaking the law and indeed voting twice, you bet we're on side with you. If you can find them and you want to present evidence, we will join you in prosecuting those individuals to the fullest extent of the law — or whatever else that phrase might be in law. The point is that you haven't got that evidence. You haven't presented that evidence.
So the question, of course, instantly asserts itself: why are you doing this? I mean, one wonders, if you're so worried about people double-registering and yet it doesn't really have much to do with the integrity of the election process and doesn't change an election if somebody is double-registered, if maybe what you should do in this measure is simply say that anybody who double-registers will be shot. Why not be done with it? What you don't do is corrupt the whole process for some strange unstated and unstipulated argument about voter abuse, because we haven't seen the argument about voter abuse.
I think that rather than start into the next major section of my remarks, which is reason number three for hoisting this bill, perhaps I shall take guidance from the Chair and from the House Leader and move adjournment of this debate until the next sitting of the House.
Motion approved.
Hon. Mr. Strachan moved adjournment of the House.
Motion approved.
The House adjourned at 5:59 p.m.