The federal Liberal government learned Friday it might have to retreat on a proposal within its electoral reform legislation to delay the next vote by one week, after all opposition parties came out to say they can't support it.
Within Bill C-65, the "Electoral Participation Act," the Liberals are trying to move the next fixed election date from Oct. 20, 2025 to Oct. 27, 2025, citing conflicts with a series of fall holidays and local elections.
However, it's come to light that postponing the vote by even one day has the knock-on effect of securing pensions for 80 MPs first elected in 2019 who wouldn't qualify if they lost their seats before hitting their six year service mark: Oct. 21, 2025.
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Already facing strong headwinds heading into debate on the legislation – with the New Democrats vowing to amend this portion of the bill and Conservatives coming out against a later vote – the Liberals learned Friday that they also won't have the backing of the Bloc Quebecois.
For the Bloc, they cited a few reasons why they can't vote for the bill. MP Martin Champoux said his party doesn’t believe the government should be making religious accommodations, and noted bumping back the vote would bring it rather close to municipal elections in Quebec.
His colleague Xavier Barsalou-Duval raised the pension issue, questioning how many government MPs stand to financially gain by a later election date. "We are going to vote against this bill," he said, in French.
There are 32 Conservatives, 22 Liberals, 19 Bloc Quebecois, six New Democrats and one Independent MP whose pensions are potentially on the line.
"While some of the provisions of this bill are supportable, Conservatives have serious concerns concerning the changing of the fixed election date," said Conservative MP Dave Epp, who acknowledged he is one of the MPs from his party that stand to benefit. "This provision makes this bill an MP pension bill impersonating as an elections bill," Epp said. "This begs the question, why are they doing it?"
Epp said he's prepared to run on his record, and risk not being re-elected, rather than back a measure that could end up costing Canadian taxpayers "millions of dollars." He suggested pushing up the fixed election date to early October.
- Read more about the bill, the pension implications, and the plans to amend it
With the Liberals in a minority standing, they will need another party's support to pass the legislation, and in debate made an effort to note the range of other measures within Democratic Institutions Minister Dominic LeBlanc's Bill C-65 that they hope the opposition can still get behind.
The bill, tabled in March, also proposes a series of elections law reforms aimed at making it easier for Canadians to vote and harder for bad actors to meddle.
"Let's allow the process, allow it to go to committee… If all the opposition parties and maybe even some Liberals say we want to have it on 'X' date as opposed to this date, well, we will go with the majority," said Liberal parliamentary secretary Kevin Lamoureux.
"One can only do the math, if you have every member of the Conservative Party and every member of the Bloc, and every member of the NDP saying that we want to go to October 20, I suspect it will be on October 20. It's as simple as that."
This comes after LeBlanc's office told CTV News that in contemplating this change, the Liberals looked at "a range of dates" and there was "no perfect solution."
Ultimately, the Liberals said, they landed on the "best option" of Oct. 27, as beyond Diwali, the current election date also conflicts with Alberta municipal elections, and advance polls would end up being held during Thanksgiving as well as the Jewish celebration of Sukkot.
While the NDP has made it clear it wants this section of the legislation scrapped, when speaking to CTV News earlier this week, the party's democratic institutions critic Lisa Marie Barron wouldn't commit to pulling support for the bill – some components of which the NDP helped draft – if this change isn't made.
"Canadians don't want to see members of Parliament putting forward legislation that personally benefits their own pensions… The NDP has made it very clear that we will be putting forward an amendment to move this election date back to the original date to see this important legislation go forward," Barron said during debate.
With the Conservatives moving a motion Friday to try to defeat the bill before it makes it that far – calling it the "loser Liberal pension protection act" – it remains to be seen whether they'd be amenable to try to amend it instead, should it advance to the committee study stage.
