Procedure and House Affairs Committee on April 8th, 2014

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

Thank you. Do I get her 15 seconds as well?

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

You did have it, you don't now.

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

All right, thank you.

In the interests of the full disclosure that everybody seems to be inspired by right now, I may as well admit that I used to work for Mr. Manning. I was hired about 20 years ago to work as a researcher for the Reform Party caucus.

Mr. Manning, the years I spent working for you were a real delight and a real education.

Mr. Manning, the proposed section 18 changes, the restrictions on Elections Canada advertising, I hope you'll see the problem that I'm struggling with.

Elections Canada, and other electoral authorities including Elections Quebec—I just saw an ad they had on the side of a bus recently—put motivational ads where they can. Posters, they put them on TV, and so on, either trying to encourage you to vote, reminding you that it's your duty to vote, that kind of thing. I've never seen any evidence that it does any good at all in increasing the vote, and I've never seen any report from any of these electoral authorities showing that it works. In all fairness, I have not done a scientific search.

It seems to me the best, most effective way of trying to get people to vote is to try to deal with the basic impediments they face: disabled people who can't get out of their house, people who don't know about advance polls or the fact that they can vote by mail, who are shut in, all that kind of thing.

I'm looking for your thoughts on this in the face of what seems to me to be a request from so many people that they be given a power that the agency has not been able to exercise very effectively, in my view.

[Preston Manning]

I agree with you that if these efforts by Elections Canada or the elections offices in the provinces to increase participation simply consist of advertising campaigns and urging the obvious that people don't respond to, if that's all they can do, then that is insufficient. I think most of the elections offices themselves agree with that, but I therefore think that greater and more profound efforts need to be made to try to increase participation.

There is a need for more scientific study to get to the root of people not participating in the process. I think some of that could be done by the elections offices, but I think everybody who's a player in the game—Elections Canada, the parties, the candidates—has a vested interest in increasing this. The reason I am in favour of restricting the vouching provisions is that I think the emphasis should be on getting people to get their name on the list and not on facilitating voting by those whose names are not on the list. I think that's one of the reasons many of the provinces don't allow vouching.

Those of us who have been candidates for public office know that one of the easiest and most credible entrees into the mind of the voter is when you knock on the door, go to a house, and ask if they are on the voters list. When they say they don't know or they're not, then we make the effort to get them on the voters list whether they like you as a candidate or anything else. I'm making a plea. Any and every effort to increase the number of names on the voters list is a good thing.

I also reflect on the fact that in the civil rights movement in the United States, this voter registration business was particularly effective in getting people who had been marginalized, people from minority groups, into the process. Get registered, get your name on the list. As you suggested, I think empowering Elections Canada to pursue that objective in better ways than we had in the past would be a good thing.

One other thing that's occurred to me is that maybe another way for the government to come at this is to put out a genuine request for proposals with some funding behind it asking if anybody in the country can figure out a way to get better participation in elections. Then look at the proposals, let Elections Canada be one of the people making a proposal. This student vote group, which I think has done a good job in trying to do this with young people, may be another route to try to address this problem.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you, Mr. Manning.

I thank you all. I thank our whole panel for being here tonight. We're going to call an end to our meeting. Thank you very much.

I will see you all tomorrow here in this very room.

This meeting is adjourned.