Procedure and House Affairs Committee on Nov. 25th, 2014

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Mr. Rankin.

[Murray Rankin, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you to all the witnesses.

I'd like to direct this to Mr. Winter and to Mr. Shaw.

I know it's been only a few years—I think it was 2011 when this process started, so this may be a premature question—but in light of the experience that you've garnered, have there been any proposals received for amending the process to date?

Do people think it's working quite well, or are there any changes your experience would suggest that we might consider?

[Mike Winter]

There have been several changes to the system already. There have been some relatively minor ones in terms of the wording of the website. There have been some procedural ones. At the start of the process, the government did not respond to e-petitions and about 18 months into the process we decided that having a new threshold, the 10,000 threshold, would elicit a government policy response to that petition. That's something that was introduced during this Parliament to change the interaction and help improve the engagement.

In terms of the parliamentary handling, the House has approved a specific time, outside of what was otherwise allocated, to allow for the debate, specifically, on e-petitions. That was new time that was found to debate e-petitions.

There have been several changes, some minor technical, some procedural, in terms of how we engage with petitioners, and some from the Parliament end in terms of the time allocated.

The current process, following the debate in May where we worked with the House of Commons Procedure Committee, has thrown up some new challenges, particularly relating to some of the points that have been made with regard to how you engage petitioners, what the member involvement is, and how you might use the technology to show which petitions are particularly popular in a certain area by postal code. Probably the biggest one that the House is considering would be the establishment of a petitions committee that would allow better member input into the outcomes that are available following the engagement.

It's certainly been an evolutionary process since 2011, with some changes already made and some in the pipeline.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Mr. Lamoureux, you have seven minutes.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

I'm going to give you, Mr. Winter, an example, and I'd be interested if you can provide an explanation of how it would actually work.

If I'm sitting down, watching the news, and I'm really upset because I see this issue on the environment, and if I want to do a petition—and I'm convinced that I'm going to do a petition—what do I do in terms of getting the petition onto your website?

[Mike Winter]

At the moment, it's relatively straightforward. A quick Google search would take you to the home page. There are prompts on the home page that encourage people to search for that subject. You'll appreciate that quite a few petitions are rejected because they're duplicates of existing petitions. It's relatively easy. It only takes, at the moment, one person to come up with a title for the petition, to put in the subject, and choose the government department that they think is responsible for it. It then goes to the government department for moderation and then goes live once it's been moderated, usually in one week, allowing other people to sign it.

I would just add, we find that most people signing e-petitions, about half of them, come on to the system not through the home page but come on to a specific e-petition via Facebook apps or mobile. We find that a lot of petitioners are signposted to the petition site by other people who are starting campaigns, or by their friends who have set up a petition and shared it throughout the system and said, please sign this petition. I say about half, 48% of people, actually enter the site via a mobile app, via Facebook.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

So the essence of the beginning is when I notify your office, it takes about seven days and then it appears, as long as it's not a replication of another petition that is out there.

From the day in which it appears on the website, does it stay live indefinitely, or do you have a timeframe that after 60 days of being dormant the petition is closed off? How does that work in terms of timeframe?

[Mike Winter]

Currently there's a choice of three, six, or twelve months, which the petitioner chooses. We thought it was important at the start to give petitioners that choice. But I think it's one of the things, through experience, we've discovered is probably more problematic than it is helpful. Most people, if they put three months, then get to two and a half months, and think I'd actually like a longer time to gather more signatures. So I think we're going to go for a standard length, but it will probably be towards the longer six or twelve months. But that's one of the issues that's currently being discussed with the Procedure Committee in the House, as to what a sensible length of time would be for a petition to remain active.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Could you give a guesstimate in terms of what you think of the number of petitions that are actually live, that would have less than, let's say, 25 signatures? What percentage of those petitions?

[Mike Winter]

I could give you some actual figures.

Less than 25 is going to be a very large proportion. I don't know if I have that exactly at hand. We know that about 30% of approved petitions have two supporters or fewer, and about 58% have five or more supporters. So I can't give you the figures off the top of my head in terms of 25, but you'll recognize from that there is quite a significant proportion of approved petitions that have relatively few signatures, I would say.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Right. I can't recall how many petitions you get in the year, but you're saying about 30% of those petitions would have two or fewer signatures.

[Mike Winter]

Yes. We have about 15,000 petitions submitted each year. About 50% of those, about 7,500 petitions a year, so 30% of those 7,500 would have two or fewer supporters.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Can you give us an idea of how many would have more than 10,000 signatures?

[Mike Winter]

I think the figure was given earlier. About 150 have reached the 10,000 mark at which the government provides a policy response—so it's about 150.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

What about third-party agencies such as, let's say, labour groups or chambers of commerce? Do you find they will often engage the petition process as organizations through individuals?

[Mike Winter]

I don't think that's been a particular feature. There are other organizations out there that are known for their petitioning and their lobbying through that route. There are some examples. The biggest petition we had was about cancer screening for young women, which received 325,000 signatures, and that was supported by a local regional newspaper and got a lot of publicity that way, and then through national media. There may be evidence in some of the petitions, but I think most of them are just picked up through social media and other things. I'm not aware of a particular organization having specific issues in the way that you mentioned.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Just so I'm clear in my own mind, once the mandate of the current government is over, then everything is deleted, so it's based strictly on election cycles. If one petition starts six months before the mandate comes to its conclusion, that petition—everything—comes to an end upon the election being called and the writ being dropped.

[Mike Winter]

That's correct. We have already started alerting people to the fact that we will take the site down when Parliament is dissolved on March 30, which happens automatically now under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act.

The obvious administrative problem would be that if you had a new administration coming in and there was a live e-petition site that had e-petitions with a government response, it wouldn't necessarily reflect current government policy. So it was felt that having a cut-off point that was linked to the electoral cycle made administrative sense in terms of operating the system.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

So then there is no expectation or obligation whatsoever that a new government would respond to any of the petitions that would in fact have been signed?

[Mike Winter]

No, I think, particularly given the desire to see the site more jointly hosted by government and Parliament, we've used this election as a suitable point at which to stop the old site and launch the new site with some changes. I think the electoral cycle process would inevitably be a sensible one. In any case, anyone signing a petition is told that they can submit a new petition once the new site is up and running, but the new administration would not be expected to respond to the old petitions.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you.

We'll go to Mr. Richards for four minutes, please.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

Thank you for joining us today.

Something we've had a little bit of discussion about is residency requirements for petitions and how we verify residency on petitions. I don't think I've heard you address this at all. Do you have residency requirements for your petitions, and if so, how do you enforce that residency in the case of electronic petitions?

[Mike Winter]

We require a signer of a petition to declare that they are a U.K. resident or a British citizen. They can be living abroad. They also need to have an active email account. We require those who live in the U.K. to provide a valid postal code, which is checked against a Royal Mail database for validity. I guess the question is whether someone from abroad who isn't a British citizen could sign the site. I guess the short answer would be yes, but we do ask that a signer make a self-declaration that they are a British citizen or U.K. resident.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

So they do make that self-declaration. You said that the postal codes are checked. Is just a random sample of postal codes checked or are all postal codes checked when the petitions are submitted?