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.