Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you both for appearing. My questions are going to be entirely based on some facts and some important issues that I want to get out on vouching. I'm going to talk about a few of those statistics and then focus my attention on Mr. Dinsdale's response.
Many witnesses, including you, Mr. Thorsteinson, have wrongly connect two issues facing us. Voter identification requirements are one, and voter participation issues are the other. Several people have mixed this up...Professor Thomas the other day. Here is what the Neufeld report said, and that's the report commissioned by Elections Canada.
Their audit showed there were 120,000 vouching transactions through an audit. They don't know that for sure, but it's a statistically significant audit, and 95,000 errors were made in that process. How was the audit done? One thousand randomized polls, then 10 polls from Etobicoke Centre, and then 50 from the three byelections in 2012, including my riding of Durham. So 1,160 polls were randomized. There is no connection between those 120,000 vouching cases, and who vouched. So the suggestion that most vouching, as you said today, Mr. Thorsteinson, were young people, aboriginal people, or disabled people is not supported by the evidence.
Now we know there are turnout and participation challenges with those groups, and we should address those, but to suggest that they're the primary vouchers is actually not supported by anything before this committee. In fact, I appreciate Professor Howe's testimony here because he clearly said that participation, his area of study, is not really impacted by administrative barriers. In fact, my colleague, Mr. Reid, said that as well. The Elections Canada report from the 2011 general election showed that participation, particularly amongst aboriginal youth, was not the result of administrative barriers or vouching not being available. There are deeper issues that we have to address on that issue because I think all members of Parliament on all sides would like to see participation go up, particularly amongst our first nations. My colleagues heckle but they have no facts on any of the questions they've asked.
My question for you, Mr. Dinsdale, because I appreciate your time here, is this. You said in your experience both at the friendship centres level and at AFN, you found that for Elections Canada and particularly DROs the level of knowledge, experience, work on the ground to train and supervise varies dramatically across the country. Is there not more we can do directly, particularly within this act where we're trying to get back to first principles on access to voting, to get more first nations voting?