The detail of the government’s deals and agreements with suppliers and other businesses should be disclosed. It is not acceptable that the government should be allowed to protect information regarding its commercial activities on the basis of confidentiality.
Whilst not achievable in the very short term, we support the fact that Canada needs a balanced budget rather than continuous deficit spending.
We see proportional representation as vital part of election reform, ensuring that government properly represents everyone, and that everyone’s voice matters in elections. We intend to restart the national debate and push for a system of proportional representation to be implemented for all elections in Canada. The new system will ensure that elected government have a real majority of support and strategic voting becomes obsolete and unnecessary.
We will introduce a new right for constituents to force a by-election in the event of a loss of confidence in their MP. We will require minutes of all meetings of officials on government business to be accessible through Freedom of Information requests. We will also aim to ensure that all available information that could be requested under a Freedom of Information request is digitized and made public by default as part of a natural filing system, without cost for the public to access them.
We will introduce a constituent-representative interaction system to streamline communication at the constituency level and provide a transparent medium for contributing ideas or expressing discourse.
Other possible improvement could include a default proxy voting for each constituents granted to the MP following their election. A dissatisfied member can withdraw the proxy and vote on a bill themselves. If a certain % of proxy voting withdrawals or recall is reached, it will signal an MP’s constituent have lost confidence in their representative and a by-election is automatically called.
We will require that all international treaties be passed through parliament as a standard bill, requiring the full approval of both houses.
Any body, including the police, should be required to obtain a court order in order to perform any covert surveillance of specific individuals. Where obtaining a warrant would prevent the police acting on an immediate threat or pursuing a lead in an investigation, a court order should be obtained alongside the ongoing surveillance and, if denied, the subject of the surveillance must be informed. The court order required should be proportional to the amount of surveillance, the degree of the suspected offence and the amount of evidence against the individual.
The following policies have been approved by the Political Council and will be sent to the membership to be voted on:
-Require law enforcement to obtain a court order in order to perform any covert surveillance of specific individuals or groups.
-Where obtaining a warrant would prevent the police acting on an immediate threat or pursuing a lead in an investigation, a court order should be obtained alongside the ongoing surveillance and, if denied, the subject of the surveillance must be informed.
-Enforce laws that if the court finds that the surveillance was for political, personal, or other illegitimate purposes, the official who gave the order for the surveillance could face penalties.
-The court order required should be proportional to the amount of surveillance, the degree of the suspected offence and the amount of evidence against the individual or group.