Evidence of meeting #22 for Procedure and House Affairs in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was vote.
A video is available from Parliament.
11:15 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Joe Preston
Excuse me, gentlemen. Thank you. We're well past the time on that one.
We're going to go to Mr. Scott for seven minutes.
11:15 a.m.
NDP
Craig Scott NDP Toronto—Danforth, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, Mr. Neufeld, for coming.
I want to go through a couple of quick questions just to get us on the right track.
It's true, I think, from your testimony and your report, and I just want to confirm it, that you did not recommend eliminating vouching. You also recommended an expanded use of voter information cards.
11:20 a.m.
NDP
Craig Scott NDP Toronto—Danforth, ON
In terms of the problem with the irregularities that you very carefully documented, am I right in thinking that you proposed a whole series of remedies?
11:20 a.m.
Electoral Management Consultant, As an Individual
I proposed a series of remedies, mostly administrative, for the 2015 election, and some legal changes, to enhance the ability of Elections Canada to hire people in an orderly way in order to compensate them in an appropriate way, and to make sure they are supervised appropriately.
11:20 a.m.
NDP
Craig Scott NDP Toronto—Danforth, ON
Great.
To your knowledge, at any point has the minister, in his public remarks, ever cited anything in your report to deal with these kinds of remedies that you are suggesting?
11:20 a.m.
NDP
Craig Scott NDP Toronto—Danforth, ON
Do you think it's fair to say that the minister has been very selectively quoting your report in order to create the impression that fraud is both a problem, and likely?
11:20 a.m.
Electoral Management Consultant, As an Individual
I think he has been selectively reading and quoting from my report.
11:20 a.m.
NDP
Craig Scott NDP Toronto—Danforth, ON
Thank you.
There is the following quotation from the minister, from February 6, where he said:
The Supreme Court has recognized that the irregularities are too high, as did the Neufeld report commissioned by Elections Canada. As a result, the fair elections act would protect the integrity of the vote by ending the practice of vouching as a form of identification.
Is this one of the examples of an invocation of your report to create the impression that getting rid of vouching follows from your report? Is this not something that you would consider as not an exactly fair way to link your report to his remedies?
11:20 a.m.
Electoral Management Consultant, As an Individual
I don't think it's a fair interpretation of what my report recommended or what it contained.
11:20 a.m.
NDP
Craig Scott NDP Toronto—Danforth, ON
Thank you.
Regarding your report, you set out a number of possible ways to improve recruitment and training, both in relation to administrative changes for 2015 and much more broadly, along the same lines that Elections Canada has already prepared to do with the New Brunswick model. I'd like to ask whether Mr. Mayrand has responded to your report and whether he accepted the key recommendations about how to proceed.
11:20 a.m.
Electoral Management Consultant, As an Individual
Yes.
In the published version of the report, which I understood all of you have received, and in the online version on Elections Canada's website, the response of Marc Mayrand is contained right in the report. Specifically with the 12 recommendations I made, there is a detailed response. He didn't agree with all my recommendations, but with by far the majority of them, he did. There's also a response following the executive summary.
Mr. Mayrand has been on record endorsing the work and endorsing the majority of the recommendations that I made.
11:20 a.m.
NDP
Craig Scott NDP Toronto—Danforth, ON
Was the minister or any of his officials ever in touch with you to discuss your report and to go into detail about what the appropriate response might be to your findings about irregularities?
11:20 a.m.
Electoral Management Consultant, As an Individual
I was waiting for that call and it never came.
11:20 a.m.
NDP
Craig Scott NDP Toronto—Danforth, ON
I'm very surprised at that. It's quite consistent with the stellar job of consultation this minister has carried out from the beginning.
11:20 a.m.
An hon. member
Have you read the report?
11:20 a.m.
An hon. member
Ignore him.
11:25 a.m.
Conservative
11:25 a.m.
NDP
Craig Scott NDP Toronto—Danforth, ON
Get rid of the substitute member and then we won't have this.
In terms of byelection compliance, the minister also likes to say things like the following, and this is in response to a question:
Mr. Speaker... If he thinks it can just be fixed, why does he not read in the Neufeld report where that was tried. It states:
And then he quotes you.
During two of these elections
—byelections—
quality assurance programs involving Onsite Conformity Advisors...were applied. However, vouching irregularities still averaged 21 percent during [these] monitored elections. This indicates that overly complex procedures cannot be remedied simply by improved quality assurance.
Is it the case that some of your administrative recommendations would not have been applied in those byelections?
11:25 a.m.
Electoral Management Consultant, As an Individual
You need to have the context of the compliance advisers and their role. Nothing changed in process. Nothing changed in terms of the forms. Nothing changed in terms of the training. It was all as it was in 2011. What changed was that there was a lot more oversight. The oversight itself isn't what did it.
What needed to happen, and I was very clear in my report about this, is that the administrative process needed to take a look at what the legislation requires and be simplified and streamlined. All the forms and all the instructions need to be made consistent and in absolutely clear, plain language. The training needs to be considerably improved. It all needs to be tested and be made sure that it works; and that, in a combination, can really improve the compliance level.
Simply having a bunch of people wandering around taking notes on whether people are doing it correctly or not, and intervening with their supervisors if they're not, isn't enough. That's the statement I was trying to make. If you read the whole report you get that context. If you selectively take a footnote, you don't.
11:25 a.m.
NDP
Craig Scott NDP Toronto—Danforth, ON
Thank you.
The last thing is, am I correct in recalling in the report, which I've read many times, that you recommended getting rid of the role of political parties in the recruitment of election day workers, so as to enhance both the quality of the recruitment and training?
11:25 a.m.
Electoral Management Consultant, As an Individual
There are a number of issues here. One of them is that fundamentally one of the principles, and this is endorsed all over the world, is that election administration should be administered neutrally. There's really no role for partisans handling ballots. There's certainly a role for partisans scrutinizing the handling of ballots, scrutinizing the registration process, and scrutinizing everything that goes on in the voting place. But it's not appropriate for partisans, who get appointed late in the game, to be....
What the Chief Electoral Officer has to depend on is his workforce. We have fixed election dates now, and one of the great advantages.... I was the chief electoral officer in British Columbia when the first—