Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think the professionals at Elections Canada would be the first to admit they can improve in that area, and they are making plans to do that in the next election. Voting locations on campus preceded by advertising and making people aware of the requirements to cast a vote, all of that has to go on.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes. I think the bill that arose out of the previous election and former CEO Marc Mayrand's report could have been dealt with a long time ago. The government's management of this file has been very poor, in my opinion. If that sits on the Order Paper for 18 months, it says something about the commitment of the government to get this moving ahead, and we have had the holdup with the appointment of a permanent CEO.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes. The U.K. has gone with the idea of a caretaker period, where, as you approach election day, the government has to stop certain types of activities that may work to their partisan advantage. There may be a whole host of things. Travel may be among them, especially if travel involves high-profile announcements that redound to the credit of the prime minister and so on.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Professor is fine.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes, I like the idea of restoring the use of the VIC for purposes of voter identification at the polls, and I like the idea of vouching. I haven't seen persuasive evidence—I've seen almost no evidence—that people impersonate other voters or vote more than once. The studies done both here and elsewhere suggest that is not a widespread problem.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  That's in the United States. I think there are 15 states in which they have registration of young adults who are approaching the age to vote, and that's brought an increase in that voting segment of the population at the next election. People get into the habit of not voting. It's a bad habit to encourage.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The provision in the Fair Elections Act that narrowed considerably the mandate of the CEO to engage in outreach and educational activities was wrong, in my opinion. There is a line that needs to be drawn. You can't try to target your appeals to particular segments of the voting populations—groups that might be described as marginal—and encourage them alone to get out to vote.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  This debate was actually taken up in the U.K. when I did a background study for Elections Canada, and they tried to draw that line. It's not a bright line; it's a blurred line between encouraging the motivation to vote and informing people so they'd be inclined to vote. It's across the board.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you very much. I have submitted a brief to the committee, and it has been translated and circulated. I will try to stay strictly within the five-minute limit and make five brief points in five minutes so the chair doesn't have to bring down the guillotine on me. The first point, and an integrating theme of my brief to the committee, is that Bill C-76 is an excellent illustration of how technical and complicated election law has become in response to changing social, technological, and political activities within Canada and elsewhere.

Industry committee  Thank you.

Industry committee  Well, on whether the census should be legislated, I think we're trying to get away from an overly detailed prescriptive act, to give the chief statistician more autonomy, while at the same time resetting the relationship between the agency and the government. It is interesting that the decision in 2011 led to such a wide outcry across the country.

Industry committee  I've tried to make the case that the chief statistician position is different from that of the regular roster of deputy ministers, in my opinion. That individual needs to be part of the deputy ministerial community, meet regularly with the clerk of the privy council, and be involved in the discussions of the statistical needs of the various departments and agencies of government.

Industry committee  Yes, I said that there's no clear dividing line between policy, operations, methodologies, and so on. What you don't want is to give the ministers the best of both worlds, what I would call “discretionary accountability”, where, when it pleases them, they can intervene and get their way through dinnertime directives, as I used to call them when I chaired the boards of crown corporations.

Industry committee  Yes. There's no foolproof way of stopping a minister from trying to do something either for political reasons or because they have a different substantive judgment from that of the chief statistician.

Industry committee  Absolutely not, but you could say that the chief statistician and the advisory networks they have in place create a narrow perspective on some of these issues. The minister and the government bring a broader perspective: what does this mean nationally or regionally for different segments of Canadian society?