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.