OTTAWA – The Green Party Caucus will be voting in favour of the Conservative opposition motion in the House of Commons today.

Yesterday the Conservative Party presented the Opposition Motion that a) condemns the decision of the Parole Board of Canada that led to the murder of Marylène Levesque by an inmate, Eustachio Gallese; and b) instructs the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security to conduct hearings into this matter.

The Green Party of Canada extends deep condolences to the family and friends of Marylène Levesque.

Mr. Gallese was convicted of a previous murder in 2006, yet was released on day parole in March 2019 under a “risk-management strategy” which permitted him to meet with women to appease to his “sexual needs.”

“There are two areas of deep concern that need to be reviewed in order to ensure the series of mistakes that led to Ms. Levesque’s death will never be repeated,” stated Green MP for Nanaimo-Ladysmith, Paul Manly. “Firstly, we need to examine the process of appointment to the Parole Board of Canada. This process must be depoliticized, and replaced with a mixed-gender expert panel, whose members have significant training and expertise. Secondly, this tragedy also reveals that we need a system to legalize sex work. Legalization and proper regulation would make it far safer for sex workers.”

According to reports, Mr. Gallese, who was convicted for killing his female partner and has a history of violence against women, had been identified as violent by the massage parlour where Ms. Levesque worked and was barred from the business. Mr. Gallese made a separate arrangement to meet Ms. Levesque in a hotel where he killed her. If the massage parlour had been able to report Mr. Gallese’s behaviour to police without fear of criminal repercussions then Mr. Gallese’s parole would have been revoked. This is the problem with the current laws around sex work, the people who work to protect sex workers face criminal prosecution if they involve police in cases that involve violent clients.

“This case demonstrates a complete failure in the decision-making, the training and the protection that the Parole Board of Canada is meant to provide to society,” said Green Party Parliamentary Leader Elizabeth May (MP, Saanich-Gulf Islands). “This tragic case is not only evidence of serious negligence but also, of systemic failures. At the time of this decision, the Parole Board of Canada members were almost all men. Further investigation is required to bring some justice in this tragedy.”

“Sex workers are a particularly vulnerable sector,” said Jenica Atwin, Green MP for Fredericton. “The decriminalization of sex work would not only make it safer, but would also mean that there would be better statistical tracking and data aboutof the industry, currently there is a signficant gap in the data – meaning a lack in representation for female, male and LGBTQ+ sex workers.”

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We do not mind the concept of income splitting if there are adequate resources to make it possible without shrinking the services that we need in the Canadian government. However, I do not want it going on the record that we currently support income splitting. I want to give members some indication as to why it is unlikely to show up in our 2015 platform.

Members of the party at the convention changed from supporting a carbon tax that could be used to offset income splitting to moving to a carbon fee and dividend whereby every Canadian would receive the benefit of essentially translating pollution into support for lower incomes and all levels of income. That provision means that income splitting is no longer possible under our budget, because it is about a $5 billion cost. If we do not have something to offset that $5 billion cost, then it is simply not possible to do it. Therefore, we would be distributing the carbon fee and dividend throughout the economy, and we no longer support the income-splitting provision to which my hon. friend referred this afternoon.

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I am encouraged that the hon. member plans to vote for this resolution.

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There are fundamental moral questions about the temporary foreign worker program, and I think Canadians need to look to those as well. We need to ensure that capital, our respect for natural resources, and our use of human beings is never stateless, without place and without respect for Canada as the country it should be.

I ask my friend if he does not agree that we need to look at some fundamentals with respect to how we treat human labour, whether from Canada or from overseas.

Jasbir Sandhu: Mr. Speaker, the hon. member is absolutely right. We need to ensure, once those temporary foreign workers are here, that they are not abused by the employers and are not subjected to wages that are lower than the minimum wages we have in Canada. As the NDP pointed out, employers were happy paying 15% less to the temporary foreign workers.

We need to ensure that this program is not only functional but is credible and clean. We need to ensure that we provide protection for those workers to ensure that they are able to get the same protections Canadian workers would get.

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I ask my hon. colleague what remains to be done. Could more be done on these opposition benches by the opposition parties, working together, to try to get more public awareness across Canada of the threat posed by this legislation?

If The Globe and Mail could do what it is doing, can we not, as opposition members, do more?

Scott Simms: Mr. Speaker, I wish I had more time to expand on this. I will say that if 160 academics can band together, and we know that they always have differing opinions and are not united on all things, as some academics here in this House would attest, and agree that this is particularly egregious, to the point that many things are being done here that take away from our democracy, which serves to be a model around the world, I would hope that, yes, the opposition benches could do more to bring this to the public and band together to stop it. The key, however, is the backbench of the government side and whether those members could bring forward a unity of people against this act and what it could do to our democratic process.

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In my written submission to the minister, I pointed out that Canada had a crisis of voter turnout and that claims that we had an issue of voter fraud were erroneous and there was no evidence for it. I urged him to further expedite voting by reducing the number of pieces of ID required in various circumstances in changes to the Elections Act that his administration brought forward a number of years ago. He did not give me a hint of what he had planned or I would have been a bit more forceful in my recommendations that the Conservatives not make voting harder for Canadians.

Given that Mr. Neufeld’s report and Mr. Neufeld himself have made it very clear that they found no incidents of fraud, and I put it to the minister that the authorities could certainly have investigated it had they suspected it as there is more than enough information there to investigate if there was a suspicion of fraud, there is no suspicion of fraud. I say again that the electoral crisis in Canada is not that Canadians are voting more than once; it is that they are voting less than once, and we must change this bill.

Will the minister consider amendments?

Pierre Poilievre: Mr. Speaker, I do appreciate the input that the member provided before the bill was introduced. She is one of the most informed people in the country about matters of electoral mechanics, having been a leader in two or three successive elections. Yet, one of her public press releases suggested that Canadians require photo ID to vote when they do not require photo ID to vote. They do not even require government-issued ID to vote.

One of the problems the fair elections act seeks to solve is the bad information that circulates around the mechanics of voting. A lot of Canadians do not know what ID they need because Elections Canada does a bad job of communicating that information. Elections Canada’s own data shows that many people do not know what occasions and which days they can vote on in the lead-up to an election.

The fact that one of the most informed people in the country on the subject is not aware that photo ID is not required to vote tells us that the agency needs to do a better job of informing Canadians that there are 39 different acceptable forms of ID to vote. They do not need photo or government-issued ID. There are plenty of options. We will make sure that Canadians know what they are.

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I ask my hon. colleague, should the amendments not proceed successfully today, should we not be able to amend the bill, is it not time for opposition parties to band together and perhaps seek a ruling from the Supreme Court before the bill passes that this violates section 3 of the charter?

Craig Scott: Mr. Speaker, let me say that I am pretty confident that if the bill passes intact or anywhere close to intact, there will be no small lineup of civically minded individuals and organizations that would challenge it.

The vouching provisions will certainly be challenged as the final safeguard for protecting the right to vote, but the entire intricate interconnection of elements in the bill—which all come down to depriving and excluding people from their right to vote, in the result but increasingly by intention because the government knows this will be the result—will also be challengeable.

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Moving on, the member cited the Supreme Court decision that dealt with the current member for Etobicoke Centre while missing one of its central features, and that is the majority decision of the judiciary. I want to draw the member’s attention to this sentence: “The goal of accessibility”, that is the goal of being able to fulfill the section 3 right to vote under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, “can only be achieved if we are prepared to accept some degree of uncertainty that all who voted were entitled to do so”.

In other words, the ability to have vouching to make sure that people have the right to vote and can exercise that at the polls is so important that it is why the court found, in that instance, that the results of that election would not be overturned. We must have the right to vote and ensure that Canadians are not ensnared in a series of complicated ID proferrings that require multiples of different forms of ID.

I ask my hon. colleague if he does not think the Supreme Court was right on that point

Scott Reid: Mr. Speaker, I think the court actually was absolutely right on that point. Remember that this decision revolved around the eligibility to vote of senior citizens at a limited access, 24-hour care facility serviced by a mobile poll.

The argument being presented by the Liberal Party in this case, and supported by the dissenting judges in this ruling, was that the right to vote under the charter is a pro forma right. People must be qualified voters, and there can be very severe restrictions on what that means, including purely technical restrictions.

There is no question that the people who voted in that case could not be vouched for. There was no one living, including their spouses, if they had living spouses, at the same poll who could vouch for them. They were going to be deprived of their vote on that basis and an election overturned. The Supreme Court was entirely right to say that just because they did not have someone vouch for them was no cause to disallow their vote.

This is, in fact, the exact opposite of the point the member is making. This is about people who could not be vouched for. At no point in these discussions have I heard anyone talk about the people who did not benefit, who could not benefit, from the vouching system who were nevertheless being deprived of their right to vote by this kind of technical argument. Therefore I am very supportive indeed of that part of the Supreme Court’s ruling.

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I wonder if the member has any comment on that.

Wayne Marston: Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for the question and the observation. The fact is, proportional representation would have made this place look entirely different from what it does today. That, in my opinion, and the opinion of my party, is healthy for democracy. Some people are getting elected with a very small plurality, but they get to govern as if they have the majority of the Canadian public when they only have roughly a third of it.

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My friend asked if it is a privilege or a right to vote. He just needs to look at section 3 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which says that voting is a right.

We do not have a fraud scandal in this country. We do not have any evidence that Canadians are voting more than once. We have evidence that people are trying to confuse voters by sending them to the wrong polling stations. We have a lot of evidence that Canadians are losing trust in the system and are not getting out to vote. We do not have any evidence of the idea that Canadians are voting more than once. Our problem is that they are voting less than once.

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