Procedure and House Affairs Committee on Nov. 20th, 2007

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Thank you.

Mr. Paquette, you have the floor.

[Pierre Paquette, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you for your presentations. To begin, I must say that the Bloc Québécois has a very active youth forum and, indeed, I believe that all political parties are responsible for awakening the political interest of young people in the places where young people are to be found. In fact, Elections Canada presented us with a study which concluded that the likelihood of people voting is higher if people are interested in politics. So as a political party, one of our duties is to awaken young people's interest in politics.

At the end of your brief, you ask a question which specifically concerns the bill:

[...] will this bill truly expand the opportunities of youth to become active citizens in our democratic process? If we don't address this issue of youth engagement now, we will not have a representative democracy worth worrying about 20 years down the line.

You pose the question, but you don't provide a very specific answer.

I would like to come back to the aforementioned study because it looked at many elections and concluded the following:

The first result suggests that the huge turnout gap between the youngest and oldest generations is unlikely to be reduced by an extension of advanced voting, since it is the oldest citizens who are most prone to taking advantage of such measures.

The study adds that an additional day of advanced voting might increase the turnout of young people, but not enough to reduce the gap between the participation rates of different generations.

A lot has been done over the years to accommodate seniors: polling stations were set up in seniors centres, revisal offices, and voting by mail was made easier. Many measures were taken to help seniors, and very few, in fact, almost none except for a bit of publicity, for young people.

In our youth forum, the idea came up that Elections Canada should be obliged to open revisal offices and polling stations in universities and post-secondary institutions, so that you would bring the election to the young people instead of the other way around.

I would like to know what you think of this idea.

[Ilona Dougherty]

That's a very, very good idea. You have to come to us, and not always expect us to go to you. This is one of the most important issues being discussed at Apathy is Boring.

[Pierre Paquette, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Do you have any other suggestions? I talked about what the political parties could do; you also referred to that. How can Elections Canada do a better job of promoting voter turnout among our youth? I know that that is a concern, I know that they rely on advertising to a large extent. Are there any other methods they could try?

[Ilona Dougherty]

I don't think that advertising works very well.

We have to make better efforts to reach out to youth, and the way we're reaching out to youth is by trying to be cool and trying to speak in their language--without actually succeeding.

I think that advertising needs to be...

We need to improve it and

by using technology. It is really important to find out where the young people are and

take the information that is important to share with these young people to them, rather than, as I said, always asking them to come to us.

I think that is really important.

[Pierre Paquette, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Thank you. I don't know if Ms. Picard has...

[Pauline Picard, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Thank you very much, it is very interesting.

I see another way of doing that: making people aware at a young age of their responsibility to vote. We have to get young people to understand that it is a civic responsibility. I have a friend who teaches political science in a CEGEP. She tells me that the young people who are enrolled in political science do not even know the difference between the provincial and federal levels of government, that have no idea at all who their provincial or federal members of Parliament are, and that they often confuse these individuals with municipal government representatives, such as mayors.

Now, it is all very well for us as members to try and increase public awareness... I have been a member of Parliament for 14 years. My friend told me that the students have trouble pronouncing my name. And yet, I often appear at many events and take part in a lot of activities. Education must, first and foremost, start at home. If parents are not interested in politics, never listen to the news, do not read newspaper articles and don't know what is happening in the Middle East, then obviously young people will not be motivated to turn out and vote and choose an elected representative who is going to be able to meet their needs. We have to educate our young people about the role that they will have to play in society. Based on the information that I have received, this is a big area of concern.

You also referred to technologically advanced polling, which is indeed a good way of encouraging our young people to vote. That is where matters now stand. We are behind because our young people today are born into technology. They operate solely by using computers and new technologies. The impression I get from them is that going to vote is not revolutionary. Maybe they consider it a waste of time. They do not see it as taking action. Now, if they were to take action via a website, things would probably be different.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Please give just a very short answer.

[Ilona Dougherty]

Technology is really crucial. As far as I am concerned, I use my computer five, six, seven, eight or twelve hours a day. And the same is true for all young people. Education must start at a young age, but the 18- to 35- year-old age group is also a problem. We need to look after that generation.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Thank you.

I'm sorry, I have a time factor, a time squeeze here.

Mr. Angus, please.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I commend your work with youth. I speak in schools all the time. I find that students are not the disengaged, layabout louts that some older people like to say. In fact, I find I get better questions in any school than I've ever had in an adult debate. The question is how we make the links so that they become members of the body politic in an active way. I think there are major gaps there right now.

My question to you is fairly straightforward. My colleague Mr. Preston asks how it is that we can continue to do the same thing over and expect it will get better. I guess I would look at it slightly differently: we do the same thing over, and it's getting worse. It gets worse every election.

The idea of advance polls is something people really support. It is positive for the people who are out working, who are travelling; advance polls are excellent. But there are people who, no matter how many advance polls there are—you could put one outside their house—still will not vote. So we have to find ways.

This bill is fairly limited. It's talking about a certain amount of advance polling and then it's talking about a full-out “election Sunday”. The cost we're looking at for the election Sunday—Elections Canada says it will be a marginal result in terms of numbers.... Are there not better ways that we could engage people than making the final Sunday a full Sunday vote? Is that the one way to get people out, or should we be putting those resources elsewhere?

I put that question to both of you.

[Ilona Dougherty]

I don't think this bill alone is addressing the issue; however, as I said, increased accessibility, in my mind, is always positive. The more opportunities you have, the better.

That's great, but we're not addressing the real issue of the disconnect between our traditional institutions and an entire generation, the 18- to 35-year-olds, who are not connecting with those institutions. I think this is a very small piece of the puzzle, and a lot of outreach and education needs to be done.

But there are also logistical issues, as I mentioned. Where are the polling stations? How are we using technology? There is a bunch of questions, which we need to be addressing as well, that this particular bill doesn't address.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Mr. Anderson.

[Rick Anderson]

I couldn't agree more. There is only so much to this. It really is a problem of convenience.

I run a technology company here in Ottawa, with lots and lots of younger software developers on our staff. I have sat in our cafeteria talking to them on election day, having spent the days before and the weeks before with them following what's going on, expressing strong points of view. I have sat with them at lunch on election day and asked whether they had voted yet, and they've said they weren't going to vote. They know I'm going to give them the four hours off. They can take the rest of the day off and go to vote; they're entitled to it. They're not going to bother, and it's because they think “it doesn't matter”.

It's not simply about the hours of the polling stations and the locations of the polling stations. We can improve those things; this bill does that. It's actually about things such as the excessive partisanship that people see in modern politics, not just in Canada but in other countries as well. It's a real turn-off to young people, to informed people, to literate people, to engaged people, to people who care about the issues.

They also look at the media covering ridings and saying, “Here's a swing riding”, meaning the one they live in is not a swing riding. What does that mean? It means the outcome is not in question. This is a legacy of the first-past-the-post voting system, which casts half our ridings as being non-contested effectively in an election campaign.

People are not stupid. They get that the vote doesn't actually matter that much in those locations, and so even though they may support a party or a candidate, they then think they needn't bother, because they know their person is going to win or their person is going to lose. We can only address that with a more comprehensive approach to electoral reform, which I know is not what's on the table here.

So I think where the bill is going is good in terms of making it easier for people to access the electoral system. What somebody needs to think about is how to start addressing the motivational gap and the interest and relevance gap that informed people are forming about modern politics.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Thank you.

Mr. Anderson, I'm sure you're going to be coming back for one of the other votes and bills we're dealing with, because you raised the issue of cheating. It was raised here in Bill C-31. Elections Canada did an extensive study. They found one case in the last three elections, and they did a fair amount of study, so either you believe their methodology and their work or you don't. The result was that we had a bill that disenfranchised a million people because we were going to get tough on voting.

I guess the question I'd put to you is, having seen the Ontario election.... I was at polling stations on election day when people were being turned away from voting because they were suddenly not on the Elections Ontario list, even though they had lived in their riding their entire lives. I saw another person with a passport being told, “A passport? That's not adequate ID”; people who have come out to vote being told they can't vote because they don't meet the new “get tough on voting” requirements. Those are people I met on the following days in Tim Hortons saying, “To hell with it. If you don't want my vote and don't need my vote, I can do better things.”

Elections Canada hasn't shown us where this massive fraud has taken place, but how do we balance this so that the people who want to vote aren't disenfranchised from voting?

[Rick Anderson]

It's a very good question, Mr. Angus. Sometimes I find it surprising how rudimentary so much of it is.

The banks seem not to have too much difficulty knowing who I am. The passport office seems to be pretty good at it. I run, as I said, a technology business. We do business with hundreds of thousands of Canadians through a website, and the incidence of fraud is maybe 1% or 2% there. It's real, it exists, but we know how to deal with it. We know how to address it, we know how to suss it out, and we know what to do when we encounter it—who to call and what to do with particular cases. Somehow in politics, when we get our civic hats on and are talking about voters lists and so on, we deal with more antiquated processes, and I have a harder time making it easy for people to do something.

How easy is it for all of us to get a credit card? It's very easy, but you have to prove who you are and establish certain real things about yourself. We know how to do this in our society; it's not a difficult or unusual proposition. But somehow in the electoral sphere we find it complicated, and we can't find that easier balance you're talking about: how not to obstruct legitimate people who deserve legitimate access to a voters list while somehow being smarter and more adept at identifying cases where there's probably not a legitimate situation.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Thank you.

Colleagues, we are finished that round, and I'm going to cut if off right now.

I want to thank the witnesses for coming today. It has been very enlightening testimony. We certainly appreciate it.

We'll take a one-minute break so that we can excuse our current witnesses and get the next witnesses to the table—one minute, colleagues.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Colleagues, let's resume the meeting now.

I want to welcome our witnesses. I'm going to give you a minute or two to introduce yourselves. If you have an opening statement, please make it as short as you can, because we'll have time for one round of seven minutes.

I will go past one o'clock. I apologize to colleagues for that. We'll just see whether we can maintain a quorum for gathering evidence.

If you have questions that you want asked but feel that maybe you can't stay, please give them to one of your colleagues, and we'll make sure those questions can get answered. I offer my apologies, but we will be going over.

I want to give members a bit of notice that on Thursday I will be asking the committee to review the budget of the committee, for witnesses' expenses for Bill C-16.

As I've mentioned before, the Ethics Commissioner would like to meet with the committee. I have some suggestions for that, but I want members to think about it.

As well, I would like members to consider striking once again the subcommittee that worked on the forms and the code of ethics last year. We should strike it again. The forms are in, and I would like that committee to review them and make recommendations to the main committee.

The last thing before we get on with our witnesses is that Monsieur Miron has invited the committee to go to visit his facilities. You have two choices of dates before you. I will ask you for a decision on that at the beginning of the next meeting.

Colleagues, I'd rather not discuss it now, if we don't have to; we could discuss it at the next meeting.

But yes, please, Madam Redman.

[Karen Redman, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

My question was whether the steering committee is going to meet, because I still have a motion before this committee that hasn't been dealt with. I'd like some indication as to when we would deal with it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

All right. I waited for the steering committee members to contact me. No one did. What I could suggest to you, Madam Redman, is that after the meeting I will agree to contact the steering committee members and initiate it from the chair, since no one called me about it from the floor.

[Karen Redman, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Marcel Proulx is travelling this week on House business, but I would fill in for that position.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Perfect. Then perhaps we'll plan on that for next Wednesday.

Very quickly, Mr. Angus.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Just for clarification, since I will have to leave, we will not be doing any committee business?

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

We will not. It's evidence-gathering only.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Okay, thank you.