Procedure and House Affairs Committee on March 27th, 2014

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

I'm just saying.

My question relates to the education role you guys have. One of the problems that I have felt exists, and I've felt this for many years, is that there is inadequate education as to how to vote. I think you and I may disagree a little about whether people vote because they are insufficiently motivated versus encountering genuine barriers to voting.

This is just my thought and then I'll let you answer, but here, Taylor, is what I wanted to say. We do know from the CEO's report on lack of youth participation, that when young voters—he divided the young people into five groups—cited reasons why they hadn't participated, three of the groups—and I can't remember which of the three subcategories it was—indicated that one of the primary reasons was lack of voter information materials, voter information cards, which among other things tell you where to vote. It does serve as a prompt. Many people carry these things into the poll. I did; it was a helpful reminder of here's where and when the advanced poll is, that kind of thing. They don't get those things.

If you're in the schools I think it would be useful for kids as part of your education process, when they are too young to vote but are at home. Then they move away to go to college and they can vote, but now we've lost track of them. Helping to educate them on how to exercise that franchise a couple of years in the future would be an enormously useful service.

I'm recommending you do something like that. I'm going to ask you to comment on that or general issues in relation to that.

[Taylor Gunn]

That's a great recommendation. Hopefully other members can agree that it's a great recommendation so that I can incorporate a great recommendation from the committee rather than just one partisan member.

I've always found voter information cards to be useful. I think voters now have a habit of recognizing and using those. Obviously that should carry on. I don't know if this is so relative to the committee—but certain election agencies across the country have attempted to explore whether or not they could share information with their provincial counterparts—the Ministry of Education, for example, so that as young people went through school, they were automatically put on the registered voters list. Does that help them if they move away to school and they're sharing a place and only one person has their name on that house as residence? I don't think so in the case of voter information cards. If it comes to be that this passes and section 18 is restricted, we'll focus our information that we provide to schools. Everyone will put more energy into just the when, where, and how to vote.

I think the bill is trying to imply that someone shouldn't be trying to tell people why to vote. I can understand that. But the why comes from the when, where, and how. At least in our program, when you go into a school with your fellow candidates, you're not teaching the why. The kids figure out the why. When they go home and talk to their parents, that's where they learn the why.

I feel that even the previous section 18, the current section 18, could be interpreted in exactly the same way. It would be great just to have the committee clarify that especially around things like civic education and public engagement.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you, Mr. Gunn.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

To all witnesses, I can understand we tend to always go over when witnesses are passionate about what they're here to present to us. So thank you all today for what you've done. Thank you for coming and sharing with us.

I've got just a couple of pieces of information for all of the committee, if you could, please, just bear with me for a second.

But we do thank our witnesses and excuse them.

We talked a bit about amendments that will be needed. We're suggesting Friday, April 25, at noon if you're submitting amendments to the clerk. Ask me how flexible I'll be on that. Clause-by-clause will be scheduled to start at what would be our regularly scheduled meeting, Tuesday, April 29, at the 11 a.m. start.

Pardon?

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

We've not agreed to that yet. We haven't deal with the other.... I stand to be corrected but to the best of my knowledge, all we've agreed on so far is next week. We still have further discussions talking about going forward.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

We have a delegation from Scotland with some informal gatherings about electoral reform and other issues they'd like to speak to us about. Monday, April 7, is when they're here. I'm suggesting a half hour in the morning. The vice-chairs, myself, or the whole committee or whoever would like to.... A notice or a letter will come out from me asking for that, please.

Pardon?

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

That meeting will be here?

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

That will be here in Centre Block some place I would hope, Mr. Lamoureux.

With direction from the steering committee, we've started scheduling for next week. We have finished scheduling for next week. We finished scheduling for the rest. It's not all available because we're still doing some invites.

This committee will be working Monday evenings, 7 to 11. Tuesday, normal time, 11 to 1. Tuesday evening, the same timeframe, 7 to 11. Wednesday evening, the same timeframe, 7 to 11. Normal meeting time on Thursday, 11 to 1.

That will happen through all the weeks that we're sitting studying this. I promised that we would give as much opportunity to every witness who is asked to be here and for any witness to send briefs and the like. That will accomplish that. We've also reduced the size from four to a maximum of three on groups, like we just had, to try to make that work a little bit better too.

So if you give the.... As the steering committee did the other day...allowed the chair and the clerk to move forward on that and started that scheduling and with the competent work of the committee, I'm sure we can accomplish the rest.

I would assume then that sometime after 11 on Monday night is when we'll deal with Mr. Christopherson's motion.

Sorry, Dave, that was just a joke.

Anything else for the good of the committee today?

We are adjourned.