Evidence of meeting #57 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 e-petitions.
A recording is available from Parliament.
11:50 a.m.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
It seems manageable to me. Are there any red flags you want to raise? It doesn't sound like a ton of money. It's not enough to stop it.
11:50 a.m.
Acting Deputy Clerk, House of Commons
I would add that there's always a possibility as well regarding the staff who could be required to follow up on this initiative.
11:50 a.m.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Right. Thank you.
Have you had an opportunity to study in any kind of detail the systems in some of the provinces and territories, but also internationally? Have you had that opportunity?
11:50 a.m.
Acting Deputy Clerk, House of Commons
We could certainly say that in all of those cases the context, the unique culture of each Parliament or country, was taken into account. It would be difficult just to apply very simply an approach from one Parliament to another. For instance, would you think that the U.K. example could be easily done here? We're not exactly sure of that. The Scottish example as well. The idea that having the appearance of individuals.... For instance, in Scotland they attempted at a certain point a petition signed by only one member and one individual or citizen could appear before a committee because it's a valid request and all of those things. Can we imagine that in this country? I think it would be difficult. I think we need to look at those in a conceptual way and try to get the best out of those situations.
11:50 a.m.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
I think my time has expired.
Thank you very much for the excellent answers.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
11:55 a.m.
Conservative
11:55 a.m.
Liberal
Kevin Lamoureux Liberal Winnipeg North, MB
Welcome to the committee, Mr. Gagnon and Mr. Ben Moussa.
In order for us to accomplish anything tangible on this particular file, is it fair to say we would, in fact, have to make some changes to the Standing Orders? Can anything be done without making changes to the Standing Orders?
11:55 a.m.
Acting Deputy Clerk, House of Commons
Can anything be done without the changes? When you see how the numerous changes, as we've talked about.... For instance, for a take-note debate, nothing is in the Standing Orders regarding take-note debates on petitions. How many hours would you want to have that debate take place? How would it be determined? All of that is not in the Standing Orders. It does not exist in the Standing Orders today. That's a simple one.
As for presenting e-petitions, the idea of number of days, those are not in the Standing Orders either.
All of those things would need to be put in the Standing Orders before we would proceed, because you would need some guidelines. You need some rules to administer that e-petition system.
11:55 a.m.
Liberal
Kevin Lamoureux Liberal Winnipeg North, MB
Yes, I do think that's an important point. In order to draw some sort of conclusion in a positive way on e-petitions, the committee would be required to amend our Standing Orders. That would have to be a recommendation, in terms of the committee, to say that we want this standing order to state this. That's a fair assessment then.
11:55 a.m.
Liberal
Kevin Lamoureux Liberal Winnipeg North, MB
The take-note debate was suggested by the member. There was an earlier discussion about why we would limit it to a possibility of a take-note debate. You started to make reference to it in your comments. In the observations you have made, are there alternatives to a take-note debate with the 100,000 signatures that you would suggest to the committee?
11:55 a.m.
Acting Deputy Clerk, House of Commons
Yes, there are other alternatives, and I think you'll hear about one from the National Assembly of Quebec after we're done.
Most of them go around the question of committee appearance of individuals who want to put forward the ideas they have regarding specific situations. You have a number of petitions that have been signed by a number of individuals, and after a certain threshold they can appear before a committee to make their point. That has been identified in some countries as a possibility.
As you are aware as well, in the U.K. there is what they call Westminster Hall, which is not exactly a committee and it's not exactly the House. That's where debate takes place. It's a grand committee; it's not a committee of the whole. You could situate it in those types of categories. This is also a possibility that exists. We've seen that in other parts.
November 18th, 2014 / 11:55 a.m.
Liberal
Kevin Lamoureux Liberal Winnipeg North, MB
That could be any sort of a standing committee, the people who would make the presentation, generally the sponsors of the petition itself and obviously not the signators.
You know, if I go on the Internet today, there are literally dozens, if not hundreds, of petitions out there. From what I understand, we're looking at something in which x, being the number of members of Parliament who would have to sponsor the petition, the ideal situation is your office would be provided the proposal: here is the wording of the petition and this is what we would like to do. It would then be approved, or changed and eventually approved, and then it would go on the Internet.
Would the hundreds of others be completely irrelevant to the debate, no matter the number of signatures they would acquire?
11:55 a.m.
Acting Deputy Clerk, House of Commons
I'm not exactly sure what you are.... Maybe I didn't understand well.
I think the proposal refers to 10 members of Parliament who would be needed after a petition has reached, let's say, over 100,000 signatures. Those 10 members would be needed to make sure that there is a take-note debate in the House. I think that is the proposal at hand.
But to start with, if there's only one member implicated in some ways per petition, in the sense that it would be a member who would be sponsoring or endorsing the petitioner to say, “I support the individual who wants to put a petition on the website”, I think those are the two....
Noon
Liberal
Kevin Lamoureux Liberal Winnipeg North, MB
Right. For example, If I surf the web and I find the dog abuse registry and there are 150,000 signatures on it, I then bring it to you and say, “I like this petition. I have nine other MPs. They all like it, so we want to bring it in.” Can I do that?
Noon
Acting Deputy Clerk, House of Commons
I understand. Sorry, I didn't get that part.
To put it very simply, no, you could not say that you have 150,000 signatures on this website and you just want to put it on this one so that we can get a debate. You could probably say that you've heard there are a lot of citizens who are interested in that issue; there is a citizen in your constituency who is interested in the issue and has approached you and said, “I want to put a petition on the public parliamentary website of the House of Commons.” That is where we would start counting the individuals who would sign the petition. You're not taking petitions from elsewhere, because as you can imagine, if you decide to do that, all of the questions that were raised regarding the authenticity of signatures, all of the follow-up that we want identified as being addressed or looked at, would not be possible from that perspective.
Noon
Liberal
Kevin Lamoureux Liberal Winnipeg North, MB
In regard to the current system of petitions, I think you mentioned there are about 4,000 coming in this year. Do you have any sense over the last number of years whether that is a fairly constant number? Is it a growing number? What is the general feeling toward petitions?
Noon
Acting Deputy Clerk, House of Commons
This year is an important year; let's put it this way. Last year was a prorogation year. There were close to 2,000 petitions, and before that, close to 2,650. There have been a lot of petitions over the last few years, but this year there's a good number.
Noon
Liberal
Kevin Lamoureux Liberal Winnipeg North, MB
If there was a norm, in your opinion, is there an overall increase? I can appreciate the election cycle, but is there a feeling that the number of petitions and the demand for petitions is actually increasing, that more people want to sign petitions?
Noon
Acting Deputy Clerk, House of Commons
That I could not comment on. I'm not sure about what the trend is here.
What you could see in terms of the situation as well is that you could see the number of petitions declining. Why would that be? For instance, we get a lot petitions in the House. We have a member who presents five petitions one day, and another member who presents five petitions the day after. Those petitions, let's say, have 100 signatures on them. That makes 10 petitions and 1,000 signatures. You could have one petition on the website that would have 1,000 signatures. In those terms, there are fewer petitions but as many people signing them. If you get more people signing them, maybe we could be in a situation where we would get fewer petitions tabled in the House. It's difficult to see where we would be going with that.
Noon
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Joe Preston
Thank you, Mr. Lamoureux.
We're moving now to Mr. Richards, for four minutes, please.
We'll see if we can complete this round and then move on.
Noon
Conservative
Blake Richards Conservative Wild Rose, AB
I'm going to go back to some technical questions again. I have to admit that technology is not my strong suit, so I apologize if my questions are simplistic.
The concern I have here is whether there's the ability to verify that each signature is one person. I know you did address that in your opening remarks, and I know you've addressed that in response to some other questions, but I'm still left with a few questions that I'm hoping you can help me with.
You talked in a fair bit of detail about IP addresses. Certainly the idea of being able to limit it to one per IP address was talked about at our last meeting. You mentioned what you thought some of the challenges with that would be, and I understood why those would be the case. I'm wondering if something could be done maybe within the technical capabilities to raise some kind of a red flag if there was, say, a certain number, maybe it was 20 or 10, whatever it might be from the same IP address, so that you would be able to say, “Hold on a second. Maybe we should have a look at this.” Is there something that can be built in to flag it at that point? What could be done to follow up on that if that was possible?
Noon
Acting Deputy Clerk, House of Commons
The answer is yes to that.
We need to start with the idea that at first the Clerk of Petitions would get the list of those who have signed the petition. From that perspective we would be able to see very rapidly who has signed the petition, and if there are funny names or whatever, as we've seen with petitions signed “Mickey Mouse”, or whatever, in the past. Over and above that, we could say that there could be or would be a more technical report included in the process saying how many signatures came from the same IP address. This could be one of the flags set up in order for the Clerk of Petitions to say, “Okay, there are 200 signatures coming from the same place. How can we go about looking at that?” If there would be a serious doubt in looking at this information, say, we need to pursue that, there are other ways afterwards to check and go further down that route to authenticate the signatures.