Election-reform law to be in place for next October’s federal vote

OTTAWA — Legislation aimed at preventing foreign interference and constraining the influence of big money in Canadian elections has been approved by the Senate.

Bill C-76 passed in the upper house late Monday on a vote of 54-31 and is expected to receive royal assent this week.

That means the reforms will apply during the campaign for the federal election set for Oct. 21, 2019.

Chief electoral officer Stéphane Perrault had warned that the muchdelayed bill must go into effect by the end of this year if the independent elections watchdog was to have time to implement the reforms for next year’s campaign.

Bill C-76 is an omnibus bill that will reverse changes wrought by the previous Conservative administration’s widely denounced Fair Elections Act. It will restore the use of voter-information cards as a valid form of identification to prove residency and will do away with measures that critics argued were designed to benefit the deep-pocketed Tories.

It will limit spending by parties and advocacy groups during the three-month period before an election is officially called, as well as during the official campaign. And it scraps a Tory-instituted provision allowing parties to spend $650,000 for each day a campaign exceeds the minimum 37 days and caps the maximum campaign length at 50 days.

It will also extend the right to vote to expatriate Canadians, no matter how long they’ve lived outside the country, rather than the current five-year limit.

The bill grapples with the spectre of social media being abused by bad actors to manipulate election results, exacerbate societal divisions, amplify hate messages or instil distrust in the electoral system. It will ban advocacy groups from using money from foreign entities to conduct partisan campaigns. And it will require online platforms, such as Facebook and Google, to create a registry of all digital advertisements placed by political parties or third parties during the pre-writ and writ periods and to ensure they remain visible to the public for two years.