Procedure and House Affairs Committee on Nov. 28th, 2006

[Murray Mollard]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. My name is Murray Mollard. I am the executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association. I would like to thank the committee for the invitation to speak.

The association, as some of you may know, is over 43 years old and works on a large range of civil liberties issues, but the right to vote and political rights are at the heart, I would suggest, of the work we do. Democracy and making effective people's freedoms within a democracy are core principles and values, which the association strives to protect.

We see this issue with respect to Bill C-31. The impact it will have in terms of preventing eligible voters from exercising their fundamental right to vote is a top priority for the association.

I wanted to do something for the committee besides just sitting here and asserting that there will be people who are disenfranchised. I made an effort to contact a variety of social service agencies within the area that Tina Marie has referred to--the downtown eastside--that provide direct services for clientele and for marginalized people, homeless people, drug-addicted people, transient people, and people with mental health difficulties. I want to read into the record some of those letters. They have been sent to the committee, but I just want to quickly read some of those.

The first letter is from, Ethel Whitty, the director of the Carnegie Community Centre.

Dear Mr. Goodyear,

I am writing to express my concern regarding Bill C-31.

Thousands of individuals in the city of Vancouver are without proper identification due to poverty, illness or disability or having no access to a stable address. Many of them are known to their neighbours and the present system of verification of identity during election registration allows them to exercise their right to vote.

Changes to this system that would demand two pieces of identification for registration to vote would effectively disenfranchise them. I urge you to seriously consider the consequences of enacting Bill C-31.

This is a letter from Karen O' Shannacery,the executive director of the Lookout Emergency Aid Society:

I read with concern that the Act may change to require either proof of identification or require someone to take his or her oath as well as be vouched for by someone with id. This will place an unreasonable hardship on our residents and clientele, and will almost certainly eliminate the opportunity for the vast majority of them to vote.

I won't read all of this letter, but I'll read the concluding paragraph:

We believe that our residents and clientele should have as much right to vote as anyone else, and that means we have a responsibility to make voting accessible to them. People should be able to attest to their identity and eligibility to vote through a statutory declaration. We urge you to not implement the contemplated amendments, and use this alternative process.

This letter is from the executive director of the Motivation, Power & Achievement Society, Roberta Chapman:

MPA wishes to go on record as opposing Bill C-31.

This bill will make it extremely difficult if not impossible for those who are homeless to vote. The homeless are one of the most vulnerable populations with regards to social service funding reductions and should be able to exhibit that by voting.

MPA believes that “statutory declarations” are the appropriate path for those who are transient or homeless. We need to be encouraging everyone to vote and that includes homeless people. Many of the homeless are stricken with mental illness as a part of their difficult lives. This Bill only serves to remove them even farther from the voting process, giving them less say rather than more. Who is more compromised than the homeless population, and if not them, who will speak on their behalf in the vote?

Again, I won't read from the whole letter. This letter is from Jean Swanson, the co-coordinator of the Carnegie Community Action Project:

I am writing on behalf of the Carnegie Community Action Project to inform you that the requirements of Bill C-31 for 2 pieces of ID for voting eligibility will completely disenfranchise thousands of people in our neighbourhood....

This provision must be stopped if we are to call Canada a democracy.

I think there are considerable concerns by those who actually work directly with and will, as Tina Marie has also attested, know the very significant problems that marginalized people have in obtaining ID and retaining ID.

Our association believes that there should be amendments to the bill. We would urge you to consider carefully and implement provisions. For example, there could be amendment to proposed subsection 43.1(2) of the bill that would allow a sworn statutory declaration to establish the elector's name, eligibility, and residency. The act could also be changed. There would need to be another amendment in paragraph 161(1)(a) that would recognize that the statutory declaration could be used.

We note that the statutory declaration at this moment is reliant upon voluntary lawyers to come forward and provide their services. So it's not necessarily a holistic solution to this problem. We would urge you, for example, to consider permitting your deputy returning officers to take an oath, but not with the vouching system. I know Tina Marie maybe in the questions can speak of her experience of how the vouching system is ineffective because of the problems of these individuals not necessarily knowing others who would have to be on the registered voters list and have the requisite ID as well. Although we understand the reason why you put it in there was as a safeguard, we see the vouching as really a barrier to providing and ensuring people who are eligible to vote actually vote.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Yes, if it's a short comment, but we're already over by one minute.

[Murray Mollard]

The final note I'd like to close on is I've read the testimony from Jean-Pierre Kingsley. One has to ask the question, what exactly is the problem that you're trying to fix? According to Mr. Kingsley, there's actually no fraud that he is aware of, according to the testimony, or via complaints. While there might be a potential concern, there doesn't appear to be evidence of fraud at this point. I would suggest in trying to fix a problem you're actually going to disenfranchise not only marginalized people but a whole group of other people.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

I appreciate that very much, but I can't shut one witness off and not the rest. We certainly will deal with that issue during the rounds of questioning.

Mr. Quail, please, you have five minutes as well. I'm sure I'll be easy on you with that, but if you can, please keep it to five minutes. Thank you.

[Jim Quail, Executive Director, British Columbia Public Interest Advocacy Centre]

Yes, I'll be brief. My name is Jim Quail. I've been practising law in British Columbia for 26 years, and I'm the executive director of the B.C. Public Interest Advocacy Centre.

One of the things we do is represent low-income groups and individuals dealing with test case litigation having to do with infringements of their rights. If this legislation is enacted as it is, I can assure you this will be one of the files that we'll be taking on, and I can assure you that, in our view, it is highly vulnerable as it is now written.

I've also participated personally in the volunteer lawyer squads in the downtown eastside on election days, but I won't spend my time talking about that.

In any event, I would urge Parliament to simply eliminate these amendments from the Canada Elections Act. I would also add that this is not just a poverty issue--I think that point has been made--but it will create a situation where many electors who have come to the polls will be sent home to obtain the requisite identification. So not only people having problems in terms of owning identification, but also people with mobility problems in particular--seniors, people with disabilities--will in many instances be presented with a barrier that will make it impossible to vote, particularly if they decide to go to the polls late on election day.

I will get more into the legal issues, which are the main points I want to make.

Parliament needs to be aware that what it's proposing to do would mean to add further legal requirements for an elector, a Canadian citizen, to be entitled to receive a ballot. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees every citizen the right to vote in parliamentary elections, and I think it would not be a very large leap to find the government having to justify the legislation under section 1 of the charter.

I say that it adds further obstacles or requirements in terms of legal entitlement to receive a ballot in the following sense. A person would be required to own identification, either in the form of government-issued photo identification or as yet unknown scheduled identification that would be listed by the Chief Electoral Officer.

When you look at the realm of government-issued identification that has the bearer's photograph and address on it, we're essentially talking about drivers' licences and passports. Maybe prison guards and other occupations have badges that have their photo and their address, I don't know, but essentially, for all intents and purposes, those are the only two pieces of identification that an elector might have in the ordinary course. If you don't have a card, if you don't have a driver's licence, and if you don't happen to have a passport, you cannot vote under that section. You'd be required to produce the two other pieces of identification yet unknown.

The vouching process is not an adequate remedy because you would have to line up a registered voter who lives in your own poll, which might only be a couple of hundred voters, who has the required identification, who is available to attend at the polling place with you, and who is not vouching for any other voter. It is an absolute certainty that these amendments would result in a substantial number of people who are constitutionally entitled to vote being denied a ballot.

Essentially what it's doing is saying to people, you might be a citizen entitled to vote, but we're not giving you a ballot. This is a measure to prevent someone else, hypothetically, from receiving a ballot fraudulently, which is already an offence under the legislation, which is already subject to penal sanction. The question might be asked, what is it that you're seeking to fix?

We see this as a fairly straightforward matter, where, on the face of it, there's an infringement of a charter right and the government would have to show that it's reasonably justified under section 1. I suggest to you that reliance on anecdotal evidence is not going to convince the court that this passes muster. I'd urge the committee and Parliament to take a very close look at this and seriously contemplate eliminating these amendments altogether from the Canada Elections Act.

Those are my comments.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Thank you very much, Mr. Quail.

We will begin our first round of questioning. I'm going to indulge members. We normally go with a seven-minute round. If it's okay, I think we can afford five minutes on this first round and hopefully we'll have more time for more questions.

Mr. Bagnell, you're up first.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Thank you. I just primarily have one question. You can all answer, and maybe Tina can get in anything else she didn't finish in her opening remarks.

Basically, you're involved in the poverty area and you have good knowledge in that area. You've identified the problem. We're involved in the political area and we've identified a major problem, and you're going to have to assume that, because it's our area of expertise. We're going to try to fix that problem, so we're not going to drop this issue. We have to solve this problem of people voting who aren't identified and who are fraudulently in the system, because that's not fair to Canadians.

You identified a very good problem. You identified some problems in the solutions that have been proposed. So what I'm asking is whether any of you have other ways we could ensure that these people are enfranchised, so they can have ID or someone to vouch for them, or some way that they will be able to be fitted in and not be disenfranchised. As we ensure that the vast majority of voters are properly identified, how can we also make sure that these people do not lose their votes?

[Tina Marie Bradford]

My position is that we're trying to fix something that doesn't appear to be broken. Maybe you've heard other evidence that there is prevalent fraud out there. I haven't experienced it on the ground or at the polls. I've spent numerous hours, all day during election day, moving in between polls trying to help people present their statutory declarations to make sure that they are in fact given a ballot.

We're not just swearing statutory declarations willy-nilly for people. We are doing a screening process before we do this. However, our process is a little bit different from what you're doing in the polling stations. I organize people who work in the community, maybe social workers or welfare workers, to come down to our tables to identify these people for us if they have no identification. They've worked with them for years. They know who they are. They're able to, in effect, vouch to me that this person is who they say they are. If we're not able to find someone to identify them, then I get them to go through their pockets. You can be darned sure if someone is carrying around a bail release from the local courthouse, they are who they say they are. People don't carry around those sorts of things unless they are actually theirs. However, if they were to show up to the polling station now, they would be turned away with something like that. That form of identification just wouldn't pass muster.

A solution to this would be to have someone in the polling station with Elections Canada who has the same authority that I and the other lawyers have to use their discretion to do a bit of an interview with the person. Maybe they've come in with someone from the street who can identify them, or they can produce some form of identification such as a prescription bottle or welfare stub or that sort of thing. They can take the oath themselves.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

I'm sorry, Tina, I so hate to cut off the witnesses, but we are on a time limit here, and I would like, if it's possible, to hear from the other members as well.

We have two minutes left in this round, and I just want to give everybody an opportunity to express their opinion.

Thank you.

[Murray Mollard]

Very quickly, the solutions are, number one, a statutory declaration. But more profoundly, as Tina Marie suggests, give the authority to deputy returning officers to take an oath, for someone to swear and take an oath that they are who they say they are and that they're eligible--without the vouching requirement, because the vouching requirement will kill this as an effective solution.

I do want to challenge one statement, though, that the committee member has made. Perhaps you disagree with the Chief Electoral Officer, but in his testimony there is no evidence that there is wide-scale fraud, or any fraud. There are provisions that allow prosecution. My worry is that in seeking to fix this, you're going to actually disenfranchise not just marginalized people, but others who don't have access to the ID that's required. You're going to actually disenfranchise more people and reduce voter turnout at a time when we're very concerned about voter turnout.

I just wanted to make that point.

[Jim Quail]

I'll be very brief.

First of all, I would suggest to you that a sworn declaration is a pretty good piece of identification compared to other pieces of identification that people can obtain that could potentially be listed by the Chief Electoral Officer. There is a criminal sanction if someone swears a false statutory declaration, so I'd suggest that you take that very seriously as a way for people to identify themselves.

Another aspect that the committee might want to look at would be the restrictions on the vouching process. For example, I refer to the fact that the person doing the vouching has to reside in the poll, which is a rather extreme restriction. The provision that the voucher can only vouch for one elector is a rather extreme restriction as well. For example, a welfare worker or someone of that nature might know a number of people. Someone who works in a community centre in an affected area might know and be perfectly, validly, able to vouch for a number of individuals, but really that resource is eliminated for all practical purposes. They can vouch for one elector, and that's it for that election.

If you're looking at ways to reduce the impact, I'd suggest those would be two ways of doing it: providing in the statute that a sworn declaration in a prescribed form would be acceptable identification, and have a mechanism perhaps for them to be sworn at the polling places; and doing something about the vouching process and what I suggest are unnecessary restrictions on the scope of that remedy.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Thank you very much.

We did go over on that round. I would just remind members to try to keep it as short as you can on your questions.

Mr. Reid, and then Madam Picard.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My question will be to Ms. Bradford.

You've had the experience, having worked on the ground in the East Hastings area, so I want to focus a little bit on your comments on this.

It seems to me that what you're trying to do, in a sense, is engage in a kind of enumeration of voters who have been left off the voters list primarily due to homelessness. This raises a question that hasn't really come up all that much in our discussions around the bill. It certainly hasn't come up in the Chief Electoral Officer's testimony, but I think it is very much an underlying problem, and that is the abandonment of the old enumeration system.

The idea was to do focused enumerations and to require the Chief Electoral Officer in particular to do focused enumerations in areas of high homelessness shortly before the time of the election, in order to ensure that some of this was captured. If that were done, would that ameliorate the situation? Would it make it somewhat better, in your opinion?

I'm asking Ms. Bradford. I have a follow-up question, but I only have three minutes.

[Tina Marie Bradford]

It would reduce some of the problems we face. The problem is that if you do pre-register someone on the voters list and a voter's card is mailed out to them, most of these people aren't going to get their voter's cards. The cards are simply either going to be lost in the mail or they're not going to get delivered. A lot of these people are living in shelters or in rooming houses, so the cards are not going to get to them.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

I apologize. I hate cutting people off, but we have little time and our chairman is strict.

Could we not put some requirements on the manner in which these things are mailed or arrange to make sure a copy is sent to the returning officer at the polling station, so that when they arrive at the polling station, it might be there and serve as one of the means by which they could be recognized?

[Tina Marie Bradford]

That would be a good idea; however, when people attend at a polling station, they're going to be asked to produce some kind of identification before they're going to be given their voter's card. Unless Parliament is prepared to give people their voter's cards—

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

You're required to have it when you vote. You're not required necessarily to have it in your hands. It sounds to me like part of the problem you've been drawing attention to is the fact that people are given stuff and then it's stolen from them or they lose it. I'm just trying to think of practical ways of ensuring that people who are currently unable to vote get the opportunity to vote, without obviating the entire purpose of removing voter fraud, which is the purpose of these sections.

If we were to take Mr. Quail's suggestion, we might as well not have this bill. I'll just say that bluntly. I'm looking for practical ways of ensuring that homeless people are captured to the best of our ability, and that we ameliorate the situation as much as it is within our power to do so. That's why I asked the question that way.

The other thing I wanted to ask, as a possibility.... Just a second. Hang on.

[Jim Quail]

If I can comment on that, being on the voters list does not eliminate the requirement of identification, so the enumeration doesn't resolve the problem. I just hope there's no misunderstanding.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

I just want to go on and ask another question here, and this actually relates to the problem, Mr. Quail, that you had raised with regard to the requirement of residence within the poll. If we were to adjust that somewhat and say, for example, that it was a person working within that poll, I think you'd have to agree that would ameliorate the situation to some degree. You did suggest a version of that yourself. Am I correct in understanding that if we were to extend that definition a little bit, that would also be of assistance?

[Jim Quail]

That would assist somewhat. I think there's a problem, and that might reduce it somewhat. On why the person would have to work, I just question how that relates to the objective, which is—

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

The reason, Mr. Quail, is this. You have to be able to actually know that person and to be able to demonstrate that you know that person in some way. If you live in the poll, there's a reasonable probability that you know that person. If you work in the poll, there's a reasonable probability. If you're someone from across town—with all due respect to Ms. Bradford—I'm actually not sure how you would know the person other than by the fact that they've presented you with a document.

On your statutory declaration, I'm not sure how that actually proves the person is who they say they are, how it proves that they live where they say they live. It's just you saying, or, more correctly, them saying that they went and stood in front of you and said they were who they said they were.

I don't mean to be disrespectful, because I know you're trying to do a good job. I'm just trying to deal with the basic problem here. On the one hand, we want to prevent voter fraud. On the other hand, we want to do what we can to ensure that everybody gets a chance to vote. We don't want to have one goal destroy the other, in either direction.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

I'm terribly sorry, but we don't have time to do that. Perhaps another member, in his or her round, will allow that to happen.

By the way, witnesses, we're on a time schedule. If, following this meeting, there is anything further you wish to say, you can certainly put that in writing, get it to my office, and I will make sure all members have it in both languages.

We will go now to Mr. Godin.

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Talking about the statutory declaration that Tina Marie talked about, you said you go onto the street and meet the people; you get them to sign it and you vouch for it. Is that right? When we're looking at identification, would it help if we were to have the election poll where you go to vote directly in the shelter or a place like that?

[Tina Marie Bradford]

The downtown eastside has so many people in such a small area that there are usually three to four polling stations within a block of each other. I'm not sure I understood the question. They will be placed in things like community centres in areas where the shelters are, so the polling stations are right in the heart of the downtown eastside.

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

Yes, but Madam Bradford, you said that when you do your own investigation on those people, you go to the shelter and you meet the people who work there, so they know the person. If we were to have those same people to identify them.... For example, if Elections Canada were to hire those same people to identify them, would that help?