Procedure and House Affairs Committee on June 1st, 2006

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

One copy was delivered to the interpreters.

[Jay Hill, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River, BC]

With respect, Mr. Chair, I would suggest that you at least grant him the remainder of his five minutes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Is that acceptable to the committee? I will accept the will of the committee.

We are going to reset the clock to 2 minutes and 30 seconds, and perhaps we can do the rest of it, if you can, Mr. MacKinnon, in French, to assist them, and the interpreter can speak in English. Is that acceptable to the committee?

[Marcel Proulx, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

The question on the table, Mr. Chair, is that our colleagues are finding that he is speaking so quickly to meet the five-minute deadline that the interpreters have to interpret or read the copy they have so fast that it is difficult for them to take notes as we go along.

May I suggest that maybe the notes can be looked at after we get the blues from the committee, which doesn't help for question period, but at least let our representative of the Liberal Party tell you what he wants to tell you this morning within the five-minute debate. That is why we are here. Take it from there.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Mr. MacKinnon, is there any way that if we give you two and a half more minutes you can summarize that report and get the details out?

[Steven MacKinnon]

With respect, Mr. Chair, I doubt it, but I will do my best.

With the committee's indulgence, I'm certain that I won't abuse your patience.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Thank you very much. We will reset the clock, please.

Thank you, committee.

[Steven MacKinnon]

I'll pick up where we were. We were at the University Book Store.

The problem here is twofold. In our view, Elections Canada places little or no emphasis upon verifying or validating residential addresses contained in the register of electors. The Chief Electoral Officer often points out that lack of resources is never an issue for his office. With respect, the resources may well be there, but the will may not be. In one particular electoral district where problems of this nature were identified by us in extreme proportions, Trinity--Spadina, such concerns arising from the 2004 election went unaddressed in the 2006 election.

But on the other side of the coin is the ability of interested parties to raise specific objections. Under sections 103 and 104 of the act, the opportunity to make objection to a name on the list arises only in an election period, because you may only object to a name on the list of electors, not a name on the permanent register of voters.

We need a way to proceed that is effective so that we can remove invalid names from the permanent register and be able to do so on a continuing basis, and also so that we can remove those names from the list of electors at the time of an election. We must insist positively with Elections Canada so that, in addition to putting in place a reliable procedure for raising objections, these names are subsequently deleted.

We recommend that an effective process be established by Elections Canada and that the political parties be consulted with regard to that process.

The next issue is voter identification cards, Mr. Chair. The misuse of voter information cards is quite simply out of control. We have reports of neighbourhoods where individual single-family dwelling mailboxes, not apartments, were systematically de-mailed of such cards, and with the greatest of respect to the Chief Electoral Officer when he appeared before you in April, he mischaracterized the entire problem. It is not about using the cards as identification for the purpose of registering, an absurd notion, since the very existence of a card demonstrates that a person with the name and address that appears on the card is already registered. It is about using the cards as identification when voting. It is about walking into a polling place with a card in your hand, presenting it to an official without so much as uttering a word, and being issued a ballot.

This abuse happens constantly. Subsection 143(1) of the act requires that an elector “shall give his or her name and address”, and there is no doubt in my mind that this requires the person to state their name aloud, but in the interest of efficiency it seems that more and more no time is lost on that trifling detail.

A rhetorical question for the committee to consider is this. If you vote this way under the name of someone else without ever saying that you are the person named on the card, is it even an offence, and shouldn't it be?

We recommend that this committee continue to delve more deeply into the issues of this card. We encourage you to continue to pursue these issues in some depth with Canada Post and with Elections Canada.

I am going to try to cut this short. I was going to comment on Mr. Hawn's observation about the bus with 40 people. Suffice it to say that we are concerned, as he seems to be, about what we call serial vouching, and we are profoundly troubled by the number of on-site registrations: 55,000 at advance polls, plus 795,000 at election day polls, for a total of 840,000, or an average of over 2,700 people per riding. Assuming this number to be roughly consistent riding to riding, it means that your voters list did not allow you to identify 2,700 of your electors in advance, that the local spending limit was around $1,400 less than it could have been if these people were on the list earlier, and that national party limits are reduced by about $600,000.

But it is not an even distribution. The Liberal Party of Canada has asked Elections Canada to provide a riding by riding breakdown of on-site registration levels. We want to know where registration levels were simply excessive. The committee may wish to ask for this information as well.

In Trinity--Spadina alone we understand there to have been 12,000 election day registrations. There are people who were on the list who gave up waiting in line to get into some polling places because they were just too congested.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Thank you very much, Mr. MacKinnon. It's great information. We're already a minute and a half over, and I do apologize for interrupting you, but I've given you an extra minute and change.

We'll move on to the Bloc Québécois, please.

[Gilbert Gardner]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

We are pleased to see that all parties are now in favour of one of Mr. Kingsley's main recommendations, that returning officers be appointed by the Chief Electoral Officer, thus echoing a recommendation that the Bloc québécois has often made. The last time, in December 2004, Mr. Guimond introduced a bill containing a provision that does not appear in Mr. Kingsley's recommendations and which, we think, should be included, and that is that the said appointments should be made following a public competition.

Under the Quebec statute, this procedure has been followed in Quebec for 25 years. It was updated in 1989. Section 503 of Quebec's Election Act very clearly describes the public competition process. I believe that this is what is lacking for the appointment of returning officers to be done in a manner such that those officers have all the neutrality and objectivity we are entitled to expect.

Mr. Carpentier.

[Martin Carpentier]

We agree with Mr. Kingsley on two other points, to which we return election after election. They are the date of birth and the single elector number. I've had discussions with Elections Canada on the subject, and they have studied the matter to determine what would be possible to do.

The problem is that, depending on the version of the list we receive—during an election, we receive three lists and a final list is subsequently sent to us—the elector sequence numbers, which are one way of recognizing electors in the polling divisions, are constantly changed. Consequently, supporters who work in the various electoral districts after the election campaign have trouble dealing with the information they have gathered on election day.

The other problem that this could solve is the problem of elector information cards. All parties agree on that. Their distribution by Canada Post in apartment buildings poses a problem. Letter carriers simply take the cards and leave them at the entrance, so that anyone who goes to a polling station with the voter information cards of all the residents in his building can vote.

If we had the date of birth, when a person whose date of birth was 1928 and who looked 20 presented himself, the clerk and the deputy returning officer could ask him questions to determine whether he is really the person registered.

These are the three main recommendations we wanted to talk to you about. However, a number of Mr. Kingsley's other recommendations could be discussed during the question period.

[Gilbert Gardner]

As regards the date of birth, we don't feel the privacy issue is a problem, since this provision has been in effect in Quebec for a long time. Some provisions require those in possession of electoral lists to undertake not to use them except for electoral purposes. This information is already in the possession of the returning officers. It should be made available to the parties that receive the official lists.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Thank you very much. It was very brief, and I appreciate that very much.

We'll turn to the NDP now, please.

[Eric Hébert]

Thank you very much.

The NDP agrees on a number of the views previously expressed. In our view, if we could implement Mr. Kingsley's recommendations on the advance registration of candidates, we would solve half a dozen problems. I don't see why we couldn't do it, if we all agreed. So I ask you to correct this fairly serious problem.

I'd also like to talk briefly about audit fees. How can auditors contribute to campaigns? That could be a way to view the problem. There's another way to see the problem. Currently, auditors are paid differently, depending whether they audit the financial statements of electoral district associations or candidates' returns. That's a problem and a dilemma. Things should at least be unified for the auditors.

As for bank accounts of nomination contestants, there's also a fairly serious problem. In the NDP, nomination contestants do not always spend a lot of money. Often, a candidate will print 50 or so copies of a pamphlet on his printer at home. However, he is required to open a bank account, because he has spent money for goods and services. It's ridiculous; it makes no sense. We must absolutely review the obligation that nomination contestants have to open bank accounts, in which there will be no official transactions. The impact of the act was a bit unexpected, and it should be corrected.

There's also the question of membership fees. Bill C-24 set a limit on contributions, and that limit did not include membership fees in a political party, which in itself was very good. That means that, if you spend $25 for a membership, you're not entitled to a $25 tax credit. Consequently, someone who gives more than that $25 amount receives a greater benefit with respect to tax receipts than another person who only paid the membership fee. I believe that's another problem inherent in the Elections Act that could not be anticipated at the outset. So we're proposing this change. We don't see any objection to it being excluded from the maximum, but this must be considered as a contribution and must grant entitlement to a tax receipt.

We can transfer surpluses from campaigns and candidates, and the same should be true for debts, it seems to me. If a candidate has a debt, he should be able to transfer that debt to his riding association, if it is in agreement. Things should be made so that this is possible.

Let's talk about eligibility for public financing. Do you remember that there was an eligibility threshold for political parties with regard to that amount of $1.75—which is not $1.83, I believe—per vote received by a political party. We of the NDP believe that a proportional arrangement would be fair and would give all votes equal value. In the same vein, the same is true with regard to political party financing.

I'll tell you that I don't think our party would benefit in any way from this particular change. It would actually probably benefit many of our opponents, but from a purely justifiable position, it seems to me that if somebody votes for the Libertarian Party of Canada, their vote should have the same value as the vote that somebody might cast for our party or for one of the bigger parties. That is a serious undervaluing in the votes, and I think it doesn't do justice to our system.

Finally, I'd like also to recommend that we seriously consider the possibility of having limits on the spending of leadership candidates. All other campaign-related activities are subject to limits in our system, with the exception of leadership contestants. Nomination contestants are required to follow strict limits, but our leadership contestants are not. I think that would be a step toward greater accountability as well.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Thank you very much.

Again, I appreciate the information we've received so far. Committee members will know that some of it we've heard before, and I'm sure we'll have lots of time for discussion later.

I will open the first round of questions. Try to hold it to seven minutes, please. Let's try not to get into a discussion, because that will eat up your time. If we can keep our questions short and our answers short and to the point, we'll have lots of rounds.

Monsieur Proulx first, please.

[Marcel Proulx, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks to the witnesses for travelling here to meet us this morning.

I would like to address two topics, and I would appreciate it if the representatives of the four parties briefly gave us their comments on both.

The first subject concerns the process followed on election day. The parties must organize a system for transmitting information from the polling stations to their organization offices to determine which voters voted at what time in the day. That's commonly called the bingo card system because that information is transmitted. There's currently a similar system at the municipal level. I'll give you the example of my municipality, Gatineau. As the day advances, the returning officer himself provides multiple copies, at regular intervals, of the list of people who have already voted. Every hour or 90 minutes, the parties or candidates go to pick up their copies. I'd like to know what you think of that.

Second, in the changes to the Elections Act, reference is made to the right of access to residential buildings for all candidates, but there appears to be a problem with regard to what are called gated communities. I use that term because that's how we know them. Then I'd like to ask you whether we should also allow candidates to have access to public places, that is to say shopping centres, stores or places of that kind.

So I await your answers, and I thank you.

[Michael D. Donison]

On the first question concerning the Canada Elections Act, having a handout during the course of the election day--who has voted--I would welcome that. That would reduce the resources the parties have to put to scrutineering.

Most of the resources in scrutineering now are really to identify the vote. It's not so challenging. So if there's a way to officially get that, I have no problem with it. I think it would be a good idea.

With regard to gated communities, obviously the same access should be granted to them. I think Mr. Kingsley has suggested the current act covers it, but if not, perhaps a tight legal amendment needs to be made to the statute. If you have access to apartment buildings, you should be able to have access to a gated community.

[Marcel Proulx, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

What about stores and shopping centres?

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

I want to hear from all the witnesses, so we're going to extend the time a little bit here, but we need to go very quickly, please.

Mr. MacKinnon.

[Marcel Proulx, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Excuse me, but I didn't get an answer on shopping centres.

Mr. Donison, as with gated communities, should we include shopping centres giving access to candidates?

[Michael D. Donison]

Do you mean during the course of the campaign or--

[Marcel Proulx, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Yes.

[Michael D. Donison]

Well, I guess that's an issue of the ownership, the owner of the shopping mall. I am not sure of the answer. I have to think about that. It's something to consider.

[Steven MacKinnon]

On the second one, I think in principle anything that ensures access of Canadians to their elected representatives or candidates is a good thing, and if that access is not wide enough, then we ought to look at widening it.

On the first point, and in the interests of time, I will simply say that I agree with both the member and my friend from the Conservative Party.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Thank you.

Mr. Gardner, or someone from the Bloc.