Mr. Speaker, Canadians can tolerate quite a bit from our politics sometimes, whether they have a left or centre or right perspective. One of the things I have noticed that they cannot tolerate is straight-up hypocrisy.

I am looking at the member for Winnipeg North, who has now joined us here.

The member for Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, who was here moments ago, moved a motion a couple of years ago in this place. That motion said we should never use the guillotine of time allocation to shut down debate in Parliament on any bills that deal with our democracy, because they are so fundamental.

One would have to ask the Liberals: How did we get here? There must have been some massive impediment that made them have to go back on their word and force time allocation on Parliament.

The bill to fix the unfair elections act, which New Democrats support, was introduced almost two years ago. They must have been working hard in those two years in the hope of getting this legislation through in time for the next election.

We have now found out that they did not work on the bill. They sat on the bill month after month. We pleaded with them to show us the bill so we could debate it and pass it through the House.

The Liberals introduced Bill C-76 so late that the Chief Electoral Officer has told them they blew the deadline. A bunch of things in the bill will not even happen for the 2019 election.

Canadians are very frustrated with the Liberals, especially with respect to issues around voting and democracy. They broke their sacred promise to make 2015 the last election under first past the post. We really thought they would have learned a lesson that the urgency of now is incredibly important. It was not important to them.

Now the Liberals are introducing the exact same motion, word for word, that Stephen Harper used to ram his bill through Parliament. They want to use it to force their legislation through Parliament and are looking around for someone to blame. They cannot find anyone.

My question for the minister is simple. We had an opportunity to fix privacy rules in Canada to ensure that our democracy and our voting are free and fair. Why did the Liberals choose to ignore all the evidence that the committee heard, which screwed up elections in England and the U.S.? Why did they choose to expose Canadian elections to hacking and tampering by foreign influences because parties will not have to follow any privacy rules whatsoever under this legislation?

Nathan Cullen

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