Procedure and House Affairs Committee on Nov. 29th, 2007

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Colleagues, let's bring our meeting to order.

We have limited time today. I would like to remind members that at the end of this meeting there are two things that I wish to happen. One is that we need to leave some time for committee business, some of which has carried over from the last meeting and some of which is just standard committee business. As well, colleagues, I want to remind you that Mary Dawson, the Conflict of Interest Code and Ethics Commissioner, has asked to meet with the committee. She will be bringing some of her colleagues, and we will leave time for that at the end. Depending on how the meeting goes, we may suspend to do that informal meeting and then resume the meeting, or perhaps the meeting will have found its natural conclusion and we will conclude the meeting and then meet with Ms. Dawson. We'll see how that goes.

I want to remind members that pursuant to the committee's order of reference of Thursday, November 7, 2007, the committee is here to study Bill C-16, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act (expanded voting opportunities) and to make a consequential amendment to the Referendum Act.

Colleagues, again we are dealing with three different bills at the same time, so I just want to refresh your memory that today we are on Bill C-16.

I want to introduce our witnesses, whom I appreciate very much attending without handcuffs or warrants. We do appreciate the fact that you have made, in Mr. Docherty's case, a second attempt to attend the meeting. The dean of arts at Wilfrid Laurier University, colleagues, you might remember, was scheduled for last week, but the weather did not allow for that. So we certainly appreciate your second attempt, and it appears to be quite successful.

Mr. Pammett, we appreciate your being here as well. Mr. Pammett is with the political sciences department at Carleton University, where my son used to attend. So it's an absolute privilege to have you here.

I will allow our witnesses a couple of minutes to introduce themselves to the members of the committee. If you have an opening statement, you're certainly welcome to do that, and then, colleagues, we will open it to the usual round of questions, seven minutes for the first round, and we'll see how we do with that.

Perhaps we can start, Mr. Docherty, with you, please.

[David Docherty, Dean of Arts, Wilfrid Laurier University, As an Individual]

Thank you very much. Thank you for the kind invitation to appear. I will say that I managed to raise quite a few eyebrows yesterday when I told my colleagues I was going to Parliament Hill to appear in front of a committee at 11 a.m.

I realize I only have a few minutes, so I'll keep my comments short. I did manage to make some notes that you can look at.

Most of my comments deal more specifically with some of the advance polls, in terms of “not the day before”, and I know my colleague Dr. Pammett will be maybe making some comments on the Sunday before the election day poll, and I'm happy to answer those questions. I thought I'd just take this opportunity to make a couple of quick comments about advance polls in general, and also on part of the title of the act, increase the opportunities to vote, and to make some general comments about other things this committee may wish to look at or other considerations in terms of increasing voter turnout.

I think the best way to look at the first purpose of any of these changes is this. Will these changes create the kinds of things we want, or what might some of the unintended consequences be? If, at the end of the day, the consequences are larger or more detrimental than the purpose, we might decide to tackle the problem from a different perspective. However, if the purposes are achieved with minimal problems, then certainly this process is worthwhile.

So what do we know? As members of this committee know, more and more Canadians who vote are voting in advance polls, but while the number of Canadians voting is going down, the number of voting Canadians who vote prior to election day is increasing. According to Elections Canada data, we now have over 1.56 million Canadians voting in advance polls, so this is becoming an increasingly large number of Canadians and a larger number of the electorate. It's an important constituency and it's a growing constituency.

The question is this. Will increasing the number of advance polling days actually increase voter turnout in Canada? Unfortunately, I'm not convinced it will. First, in the absence of any good survey data, we know very little about who actually votes in advance polls in Canada. Barry Kay and Chris Cattle, in a piece they did for the Canadian Parliamentary Review, argued that differences in advance polls and poll results on the election day results--

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Madame Picard.

[Pauline Picard, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Excuse me, but could we ask the witness to slow down a bit, because the interpreters are having difficulty keeping up.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Perhaps you could slow down a bit, Mr. Docherty. My apologies, Mr. Docherty.

[David Docherty]

No, my apologies.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

I'll tell you what. I think I should accept blame for that. I told you two or three minutes. I don't tend to cut off witnesses, so, please, take your time.

[David Docherty]

It's not been the first time I've been told I talk too quickly.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Madame Picard.

[David Docherty]

It's one of the politest times I've been told.

Barry Kay and Chris Cattle argue that differences between advance poll results and election day results in 2004 suggested there was a swing against the Conservative Party. Their argument was essentially that we may want to look at advance polls as an indication of whether things occur between advance polls and election days that change voters' minds.

Tony Hill at MIT looked back even further and argued that between 1979 and 2004, the Conservative Party, or its predecessors, tended to do better in advance polls. Hill suggested that 2004 was not an anomaly and there might not necessarily have been things occurring among the public between the advance polls and election day to change their minds.

We do know, based on advance polling, that Conservatives tend to fare well outside of Quebec and that Liberals have traditionally done better in Quebec in advance polls than election day polls. We also know that advance polling is higher in New Brunswick than in other provinces, and that in Ontario, advance polling is highest in the Ottawa area. We don't know why this is, but the numbers we look at have been able to tell us this.

The problem I have is that I'm not sure what any of this means. It could just be election day effects. The 2004 election took place in late June. How many voters wanted to vote early as a result of holiday plans? We don't know. The 2006 election took place in winter. How many of the 1.56 million advance pollers decided to take advantage of good weather and advance polling days and not risk voting in possible bad weather on election day? We don't know the answer to these questions.

If we extend the hours and have more advance polls, will this number increase? Again, we're not sure. What I would caution against is having too many advance polls well before election day. I like the idea of extended hours right before election day. I think the notion that we should have more advance polls and should extend the hours immediately prior to election day is actually a good thing. I'm not convinced it will increase voter turnout by those individuals who might not otherwise vote, but if it makes it more convenient for those individuals who are committed to voting, then I think even this step is one in the right direction.

So, by all means, I support this legislation. My own view is that it does much more good than harm.

I would also suggest doing some survey work. I know Elections Canada is loathe to engage in election day surveying, but it might be helpful to find out whom these individuals are and what percent make up their minds to vote on voting day. It might also be helpful to know if they are committed individuals who would have voted otherwise or if the advance polls are the things getting them out to vote.

I would also suggest that we revisit other methods of increasing voter turnout. The permanent voters list is often pointed to as one of the biggest problems in getting new voters out and in having up-to-date lists. I think there's an awful lot to be said for this; perhaps it's time to revisit the permanent voters list and return to door-to-door enumeration. It's more expensive, but, quite frankly, democracy is not cheap, and I think if we're really committed to increasing voter turnout, we have to look beyond just advance polls.

Your proposals also talk about institutional change. I'll be very, very quick here. I think there are also cultural changes going on. As part of my own work, I've noticed you can almost track decreasing voter turnout with decreasing newspaper readership. Newspaper sales go down at exactly the same rate as voter turnout goes down. There's nothing anybody in this room can do about that, but I think it's worth reflecting on in terms of how political messages are getting out and how we engage voters.

Finally, I'd like to make my own little pitch about youth voting. As a professor who talks to students all the time, most of the studies I've been able to look at suggest that if youth don't vote by the age of 25, they're not going to vote at all, or it's very, very difficult to get them to vote. I think all of us, academics and politicians, have a job to do to engage youth. One thing that concerns me is hearing politicians of all stripes using the word “taxpayers” when they really mean “citizens”. This turns off the youth too quickly; essentially, they're saying to university students and others under the age of 25, come back to us when you have a job.

Citizenship talks about a two-way level of responsibility, a responsibility of politicians and the state to citizens, but also a responsibility of citizens to the state. I would encourage all of us to increasingly use the words “citizenship” and “participation” in government, instead of “taxpayers”.

Again, I have a lot more to say. I'll be happy to answer any questions, particularly about the advance polls and the day before polls. But at this stage, I'll thank you for your time and turn it over to my colleague, Jon Pammett.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Thank you very much.

Professor Pammett.

[Professor Jon Pammett, Political Science, Carleton University, As an Individual]

Thank you.

My affiliation is with the political science department at Carleton. For many years I've worked on studies of voting, with a kind of sideline on participation and non-voting, which in more recent years has taken more prominence than the voting in my own work.

I want to say just a couple of things in introduction here. First of all, on advance polls, we know who votes in advance polls. They're more likely to be older and they're more likely to be people who are determined to vote, who are taking opportunities to get their votes in. So increasing the number of advance polls may have some effect, but the people who are attending them are people who are generally likely to be voting anyway.

The main problem with turnout is, of course, with younger cadres of newly eligible citizens. We have done quite a number of surveys of young people, voters and non-voters, and we do know some things about why young people don't vote. One of those things might be addressed by the changes being proposed in this bill; maybe a couple of others will not.

The kind of thing that young people who don't vote give as a reason, one of the things that really differentiates them from older non-voters is their propensity to say they don't vote because they're too busy. Now, leaving aside the question of whether they're really more busy than the rest of us, the question would be, what does this mean? I think there are really three things it can mean.

First of all, it can mean they perceive themselves to be very busy. I'm not saying young people aren't busy; I know very well many of them are studying. They run one or two jobs at the same time. They can be busy. They perceive themselves to be too busy to take the time to go on election day.

Secondly, though, I think this busyness hides an unwillingness of young people to cast an ill-informed vote, and this I think speaks in some way to their credit. They don't want to vote because they don't really know enough. They haven't studied who the parties are, what they're saying, and so on. So there's a kind of knowledge gap or knowledge lack that is behind this busyness rhetoric.

The third thing is lack of interest. Politics is marginal. They're not very interested in voting.

Of those three things, in providing for more opportunities, the bill might address the first one, that is, people who genuinely perceive themselves to be too busy to go out on a workday, on a weekday, could very well be enticed to go out to vote on this Sunday prior to the election. So I would say that it could have some effect.

The only other thing I wanted to say is that in my reading of the bill, it does strike me that it proposes to set up what I think is a unique election system. I don't know of any other country in the world that would have, in effect, a two-day election period.

So my question is this. Why call this an advance poll? Why not simply bill it as a change to a two-day election period and give publicity? This might entice more people to take it seriously rather than calling an advance poll.

At any rate, I think it's an interesting idea, and it might go some way to increasing turnout.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Thank you, Professor.

Colleagues, we'll start with our first round of questioning. Normally we do seven minutes, but would it be acceptable if we cut that back to five minutes to make sure we get as many questioners up as possible? Are there any objections to five minutes?

Thank you very much. Let's go to a five-minute round, beginning with Madam Robillard. You might want to talk amongst your colleagues and get your questions short, and let's get as many of them as we possibly can.

Madam Robillard.

[Lucienne Robillard, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for coming to meet with us today, gentlemen.

I am sure you understand that all of the political parties have the same desire, or the same objective — to increase voter participation. However, we are lacking research data for taking the right measures and making sure they are effective.

Mr. Docherty, on page 2 of the French version of your presentation, you seem to be saying that we have to avoid having too many advance polls before election day. You seem rather to favour increasing or extending voting hours.

I have a very specific question to ask you. Instead of adding two advance poll days, as Bill C-16 proposes, if we increase the voting hours on the three advance poll days we have now, and the number of places where people can vote, do you think those two factors would likely produce results in terms of voter turnout?

[David Docherty]

Yes, it's a very good question.

I think my real concern is having too many advance polls well prior to election day because I think we lose the ebb and flow of an election. We lose the build-up of an election and the dialogue that takes place among individuals, among Canadians. So to answer your specific question, yes, if we were to increase the number of hours on the advance polls and increase the locations of the advance polls, then we would go a long way to making it easier for individuals to vote in advance polls. I'm not opposed to the two extra days that this bill presents. My fear is that we might open the floodgates to say that every day is voting day once the writ is dropped. So I think we want to be very careful about when we have those advance polls, and I would certainly be more in favour of longer hours and more polling locations than too many more advance polling days.

[Lucienne Robillard, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

I understand. We are wondering about that.

You know that this bill will involve a cost of $34 million. Is there a better way to use that $34 million, for example by increasing the hours and the number of polling stations? These are the kinds of questions we are asking ourselves around this table.

Mr. Pammett, do you have any comments on the same question?

[Prof. Jon Pammett]

My focus, I think, would not be on doing much to increase the advance polling days prior to the stage just before the election. I like the idea of focusing on that and opening all the polling stations, as this bill proposed to do. I would suggest opening them for the regular election hours. I believe the bill proposes to start them at noon, which I think is later than the regular hours, and to close them at eight. So that might be a shorter time period. I don't see why it wouldn't be sensible to just use the normal election day time period and focus on that day. I think that would have the maximum impact.

[Lucienne Robillard, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

Do you know whether there is research that proves that voters would get out more to vote on Sunday than on Monday?

[Prof. Jon Pammett]

Yes. There is research that shows the countries that do hold elections on weekends...and there are quite a number of countries that either hold elections on weekend days or declare election day a holiday. I believe there's a study, by André Blais, which is available to this committee, that goes into this in some detail.

[Lucienne Robillard, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

Yes.

[Prof. Jon Pammett]

Are you familiar with that one? It's detailed there where a lot of these places are, and indeed, these are associated with higher turnout weekend voting.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Merci.

Mr. Lukiwski, five minutes, please.

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

Thank you very much, Chair.

Thank you, gentlemen, for appearing here.

I must say, Mr. Docherty, that I found your brief very interesting. I have a couple of points, and then I'll just get you to maybe comment on a couple of your observations.

Number one, I think you concur with a number of other witnesses we've had here. While the bill before us, Bill C-16, is not going to be perfect--it's not going to dramatically increase voter turnout--it's probably better than nothing. It's going to, at least, in your opinion, marginally increase, incrementally increase, and I think it's important for all of us to know here that the intent of this bill is to try to increase voter turnout.

If you want to get into an argument, well, it doesn't increase it enough. I'm not sure how relevant that is, but I think most witnesses agree this will have an effect of increasing the voter turnout.

I'd like to concentrate on a couple of your comments, your observations. The first thing is that although you probably, correctly, assume that Elections Canada is maybe loath to do the surveys, I think it also would be very interesting to see a survey of some empirical evidence, in other words, of how many people actually make their voting decisions on voting day. I think for future legislation that might be very interesting to know.

You may want to comment on that, but what I do want to ask you particularly about is your observation that perhaps the permanent voters list may not be the best way to go, and perhaps we should consider going back to the door-to-door enumeration. I guess my observation would be that I don't think the door-to-door enumeration would necessarily improve the permanent voters system, because I can give you an example of what happened back in Saskatchewan, and I know witnesses coming after you will perhaps attest to that.

We found that in certain sections of Regina, when we provincially do door-to-door enumeration, when we got the voters list out and all candidates took a look at it, in many elections we would have actually blocks upon blocks of communities that were not enumerated. I would go to certain areas--maybe 10, 12, or 15 houses in a row--that were not on the voters list, yet we knew there were people there.

So I went to Elections Saskatchewan and said, “Why is that? Are you guys just getting sloppy? Didn't you enumerate?” They said, “No, the problem is these people won't come to the door. Many times we knocked on the doors, and we can see people inside the house, but because of the time of day, they were afraid to come and answer the door.” So I think that's going to be a problem, frankly, in a lot of urban centres, where we have the same fear of one's safety.

Therefore, I think to get more and more people actually on the voters list, we need to have maybe a hybrid between some form of a permanent voters list and maybe special enumerations.

I'd just like to get comments from both of you on what you think might be an answer to getting more and more people registered to vote, because I think that is one of the more serious problems we face.

[David Docherty]

First of all, it's nice to appear before a committee where everybody has the same goal, so this is really a great opportunity.

To clarify remarks, Elections Canada I think is loath to engage in an election-day survey of people who voted. I just want to make that clear. They actually do a lot of good surveying to try to increase the vote, so I didn't want that to be read as a criticism of Elections Canada, and there are reasons why they don't want to do exit polling, essentially. A lot of the national election surveys have indicated how many people make up their mind on voting day, or two or three days beforehand, so the committee may want to take a look at some of those national election surveys.

In terms of increasing voter turnout, yes, I think one of the important things is that we have to make sure that Canadians have more opportunities to vote. So if they do not vote, not to necessarily say we can lay the blame on them, but at least they can't say we didn't give them enough opportunity. I think this bill goes a long way to improving the opportunities that every Canadian has to engage in the democratic system, and for that I absolutely support it. So I'd say that.

In terms of door-to-door enumeration, yes, there are problems in terms of getting people to answer doors. Certainly all of you have worked on your own campaigns and knocked on doors. Depending on which neighbourhood you go to, some people don't answer their doors. I do think, though, and I have the beauty of tenure to be able to say this, that door-to-door enumeration is very, very expensive. Democracy is not about saving money, so the $34 million this is going to cost is well worth it. If it costs a few more million to do door-to-door enumeration, or a hybrid, as you say, I'm all in favour of that. My fear with the permanent voters list is that it does actually impact those Canadians who tend to move more, therefore those people who don't own houses. It also impacts new voters and new Canadians, and I think that's part of the biggest problem.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Thank you.

Professor Pammett, did you want to make a brief comment? We are out of time on that round.