Procedure and House Affairs Committee on Nov. 22nd, 2007

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

Thank you very much, Chair.

Thank you all for coming out today on a very stormy day in Ottawa.

I'm going to try to encapsulate what I've heard—and please correct me if I'm wrong—and put things into context, if I can, based on your comments. Basically, what I've been hearing is that even though there are some conflicting reports—and there are many studies out there—generally speaking, I think it would be safe to say there's a consensus among you, perhaps not unanimity, that voter participation would increase if the elements of Bill C-16 were passed. It may only be marginal—it may only be anywhere from a 1% to a 3% increase—but nonetheless I think the considered opinions of you on a consensus basis is that it would drive up the percentage of voter turnout.

That, of course, is the essence of this bill. It may not be perfect; it certainly may not be the panacea to all of the ills facing us in terms of why people don't vote—and I take Professor Franks' comments to heart. Quite frankly, I think you're right on the ball there, Professor, with many of your comments. However, there are certain elements of the problem of low voter turnout that we can't legislate.

I think there's a massive amount of education that needs to be done. I think it's also incumbent upon us, as Professor Franks pointed out, to ensure that the image we're portraying as parliamentarians is such that people want to become more politically engaged because they feel they're being represented professionally and properly.

I think it's necessary for this committee just to focus on this bill. This bill is suggesting that if we enact the legislative provisions, we will increase voter turnout. The cost factor is something that, yes, you're quite right, we will have to determine, but I wholeheartedly agree with Professor Franks: at what price democracy?

I certainly don't want to get into a debate at any time with Canadians who feel they have not been given a proper opportunity to cast a ballot, to say, well, we would have done it but it's going to cost $150 if you do it.

I think we can all safely agree that this will achieve the desired purpose, and that is to increase voter turnout. This bill does not try to suggest it's going to increase it by 10% or 20% or more.

I think one of the important elements of what I've heard today is what Mr. Loewen has said. The tendency of people to vote on a continuing basis is established very early. I think there could be a multiplier effect here. If in fact your research is correct—and the more I think about it, the more I believe you are correct—if we can see, for example on the first election, a 1% or 2% or 3% voter increase, and we see a lot of that is among younger people, then I think with subsequent elections we will see that percentage of people casting ballots continue to rise. It may be, if we do an analysis ten years from now or twenty years from now, we'll see a continuing upward trend of people who want to go out to vote.

Obviously, I support this bill. I just want to make sure I get some comments from some of you that I'm not misrepresenting what you've said; that there is a bit of a consensus among you that we will probably see voter turnout increase if this bill is passed, the amount of which we really can't safely predict. Would you concur with that?

[Ned Franks]

I haven't done as intensive studies as the others have, but I'll make two points. One, yes, I believe it will increase voting. I myself have taken advantage of advance polls from time to time; I'm very grateful they're there, and with more opportunities, I'm sure more people will.

Number two, the problem of increasing voter participation is going to be solved in increments. There's no magic bullet that's going to solve the whole thing; it's increment by increment. In my view, this is a very useful increment.

[Keith Archer]

The trends suggest that an increasing number of Canadians are taking advantage of opportunities to vote outside their regular polling day. I expect those trends will continue. I would expect initiatives that make it easier for people to exercise voting outside of regular voting days will lead to increased participation. Again, the percentages that have been bandied around here, 1% or 2%, seem to me probably the right order of magnitude.

[Peter John Loewen]

I shall not disagree with myself from earlier.

The one caveat I would make is that the trend is still downwards among young people, those aged 18 to 34, so we ought not to expect this bill to turn around their participation, but to stem the decline, if you will, to make that decline of participation less steep from election to election. But that itself is of great benefit.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Madame Dobrzynska.

[Agnieszka Dobrzynska]

I would like to support Peter's remarks. It is true that Sweden is a kind of pioneer country. All possible voter convenience measures have been observed there for a long time. It has been observed that, over the long term, voter turnout rates are very high, even though voting is not mandatory. A kind of political culture has been created, but that's something that is not measured. We cannot demonstrate scientifically that the political culture is what determines whether people vote more. However, there is a phenomenon in the Scandinavian countries.

On the other hand, it should not be forgotten that, even in Sweden, voter turnout is in decline despite that political culture. That is the case around the world, particularly in the western countries. That decline is due to the fact that young people vote less than their parents used to vote. As Peter said, we can't guarantee that this measure will lead young people to vote more, but, over the long term, it could create a broader political culture that would encourage people to vote more.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Lukiwski.

Monsieur Paquette.

[Pierre Paquette, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

First, I would like to thank you for your presentations.

I particularly liked your study here—it has a wealth of information—and your somewhat harsh comments on parliamentarians. However, we all have our own opinions on mores and customs. I would have liked to be one of your students. You would probably have cited me as an example.

I very much enjoyed your presentations, but, at the same time, we see there is a certain diversity of opinion, except that everyone agrees that adding a general polling day the day before the general election is not a universal solution to the problem of declining voter turnout. Even though there may be increases, they will never be significant enough to stop the decline.

In the last two elections, in Quebec City and Ontario, we saw that the advance polling turnout rate was very high. That led us to believe that there would be a higher general turnout rate than in previous elections. However, in both cases, rates remain the same. In Quebec in 2006, the voter turnout rate was exactly the same as in 2003.

I also believe that each of you in your own way noted the fact that it is perhaps the role of the state, of governments and parliamentarians, that is perceived as being less useful than it was in the past. In a way, I believe that the political class has encouraged that, in particular when the effects of globalization were presented as unavoidable effects, natural effects against which governments could do nothing. So they preached, saying that, if we could do nothing with our governments, we would organize ourselves differently. We then witnessed much greater involvement by organizations in civil society, on environmental and other kinds of issues. So I think we have to work more on that.

You talked about a political culture. What I very much liked in your report—in fact, I didn't like it as a conclusion, but it enlightened me a great deal—is where you say on page 20 of your study, and I quote:

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 take advantage of such measures.

It's in this context that I very much wonder about the utility of taking $54 million...

[An hon. member]

It's $34 million.

[Pierre Paquette, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

I had written down the figure; the Chief Electoral Officer told us $54 million.

to provide an option that will probably appeal to those already using the other options, such as postal voting—my parents vote by mail—or advanced voting; we have three days of advance polling. Ultimately, we may encourage voting by people who are already the most likely ones to vote, that is seniors or adults. That's why I wonder whether we shouldn't focus our efforts more on a different way of accommodating young people. Mr. Lukiwski said it earlier: people who vote when they're young tend to vote all their lives.

A suggestion was made to us, and I don't know whether you have any other ideas on how to attract young people quickly. The idea would be to have the same convenience measures as there are in homes for seniors, where there are electoral review boards and polling stations. There could very well be a certain obligation on the Chief Electoral Officer's part to have review boards in the universities and postsecondary colleges, as well as polling stations on voting day. Students could thus vote at their universities, but those votes would count in their home ridings. That's a suggestion that was made to us.

I would have liked to have your opinion on that and perhaps on other ideas that you have to encourage young people to vote in elections. The question is for the four of you.

[Ned Franks]

I don't think you should make a distinction, that getting more seniors to vote is better than getting more youth to vote. Every citizen is equal, and I think that what you have to do is just get—

[Pierre Paquette, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Yes, but it was just said that someone who votes young will tend to vote all his life, and I share that view. That is why I am particularly concerned about young people. If youths vote at the age of 18, they will probably vote in the next election, and that will become a responsibility for them as citizens. If we don't concern ourselves with that, of if we don't concern ourselves with it in the same way as we do for someone who has been voting for 50 years, it seems to me we are missing something. That's somewhat the gist of my question. The idea isn't to consider that one person's vote is less important than someone else's.

[Ned Franks]

Let me offer you a different thought on this. If I were to express the concerns that lead to non-participation among the students I've dealt with—who are a very, very elite group in Canada—I would say that the environment is one concern, and that they don't see the government doing what they think should happen. Another one—and I recognize this is a very contentious issue—is that 60% to 80% of my students have indulged over the years in the recreational use of prohibited drugs. And it doesn't make them feel any allegiance to the system to have something they consider an innocent pastime treated as a criminal offence. Putting it another way, 60% to 80% of my students over the years have been “criminals”. They just haven't been caught or punished. What I'm saying is that this leads to alienation from the system, for better or worse.

I'm not going to offer any solutions, but I'm just saying that it's that kind of thing that, to my mind, creates this problem. That's just an example—because there are many other things that do it too.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Are there any other witnesses who wish to answer?

Mr. Archer, please.

[Keith Archer]

Yes, I have two brief comments.

I've not had an opportunity to read the paper written by the colleagues from the University of Montreal, but I'm not sure the finding was that seniors were the ones who are more likely to take advantage of this as much as older people were. So if there's a positive correlation with age, that suggests it could be the middle-age group as well. Maybe there could be a clarification on that.

On the question of whether there are things that can be done to encourage young people to participate, absolutely, as we have more than one problem with low voter turnout, and there can be a variety of policy responses to address a variety of problems.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Mr. Loewen.

[Peter John Loewen]

We should just say, quite quickly, that our finding was that as people get older, through the whole course of their lives, they're more likely to take advantage of opportunities to vote in advance—though, emphatically, that does not mean young people won't do it. It only means they'll take advantage of those opportunities at a lower rate than older folks will, which will increase the gap between the young and the old, while increasing youth participation at the same time. It's just that participation of older folks increases faster.

I should just say that we don't think the legislation is a silver bullet at all. If you want to solve the problem of youth voter turnout, you need to find out why young people around the western world feel a distinctly lower sense of duty than every generation before them. This is the single greatest explanation of youth voting decline. It's just a lack of a sense of duty that voting is something one ought to do—and that's a tough thing to solve.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Thank you.

Mr. Angus, please.

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

Thank you.

We have diverted significantly from the bill today, but I think it's an interesting discussion.

When I was a wee lad in the Catholic school system, the bishops always made sure that we had all our sacraments done before we got out of grade eight, because they figured if we were left on our own, we would never do them. That was considered a no-brainer for maintaining the flock size. And yet we have in high school today—And I would disagree with a lot of our talk about young people: I go into the high schools all the time, and I find I get better and more interesting questions from them. We do this whole get-out-to-vote campaign in high school, and yet they can't vote, because they don't vote till they're 18.

Many of our students leave northern Ontario and go to university. At that point, they're not enumerated. They go to university, say to the University of Ottawa or Carleton, or someplace else, and they don't know anybody in the electoral system here. If they did go to vote, they wouldn't have the proper ID to vote, so they don't vote. So we have that disconnect. It starts right there. And I know a number of students who tell me that's what the issue is. And now we have legislation before us—one of our other bills—that will make sure they don't vote unless they can really prove who they are, because we're really trying to get tough on voting.

We have a disconnect, and I would suggest that we should be looking at the voting age. Every time I go to a school, kids say, do you think the voting age should be lowered? At first I didn't agree, but now I'm saying let them vote at 17; let them have that first participation in high school when everyone's there.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Excuse me, Mr. Angus, I apologize for interrupting. I don't mind it when the witnesses deviate from the subject matter, but if we're done with the questioning on this bill, perhaps....

I'd be happy to let you go on, but I'm just trying to get us back to—

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

Yes, and that's what I'm going to get back to.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Okay, perfect. Thank you.

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

To focus this, Mr. Archer, you mentioned that 15% of all votes in Australia are now declaration votes. I would think that's probably very similar to what we're seeing across Canada, because, again, there are youth and workers moving.... We have seen transient neighbourhoods.

What we're trying to do with this bill is to increase voter opportunities. But we are also not dealing with the bigger issue that there is no coherent pattern of universal enumeration to make sure that people in these neighbourhoods are on our lists, to make sure that young people who do move are met by officials and their names are registered so they are in that process to vote. It is a bit of a haphazard system.

From your experience of looking at Australia, do you think the problem of people moving and not being on the list is part of the overall decline in voting that we're seeing?

[Keith Archer]

On the Australian case, I guess that's an exception to the decline in voting turnout generally, because the provision of compulsory voting means that if you don't turn up at the polls, you're going to get fined. Consequently, there hasn't been much change there, even though there's been a change in the way in which people are exercising that franchise.

As we said, the use of mechanisms like postal voting and what they call pre-poll voting--what we would call advance polling--is increasing the opportunities for people to express that vote in different ways, and they're taking advantage of it, as we're seeing in this country as well.

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

Then let me qualify the question. Do you think that the pattern for declaration voting would be similar here, that 15% of our population wouldn't be on any list if they came to vote because perhaps they've moved, perhaps the lists are just inadequate?