Procedure and House Affairs committee  I would have to say it's about fifty-fifty. We set up tables in high pedestrian areas, put up signs, and sometimes say, “Hey guys, can we give you a hand with voting?” A lot of people are attracted to anything happening on the street, and they will ask us what we're doing. We exp

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I guess if someone were really committed to voting twice, they could come to one of our stations and then drive to another riding to try to find someone else to do it for them. To be quite honest, the majority of the people we're helping in the downtown eastside are too busy look

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Other people who have more resources won't have to rely on a statutory declaration. They're going to be able to create identification for themselves that will be acceptable in a poll. They'll have access to utility bills and things like that. The more resources a person has avail

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Exactly. Unless you require everyone to have a driver's licence, which just isn't practical, I don't see how you can fix some of these problems.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Precisely, and how many people don't get a driver's licence at all?

Procedure and House Affairs committee  That's a very good idea, and we have informally adopted that already. What I have my lawyers do is keep a listing of each person they've sworn the statutory declaration for and how they were able to confirm that this person is who they say they are. So they would keep track of wh

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I just have one brief point. We've talked a lot about the downtown eastside and this centre of poverty. But this is of course not limited to that one particular area. As the statutory declaration program has become more well known, I've been contacted by a number of other ridings

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I'll speak first to this and anyone else can jump in. As a commissioner for taking statutory declarations, I am not required to be a detective, to be 100% sure that this person is who they say they are. However, I have to feel comfortable in taking the oath from that person. Whe

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I would say that probably a third of the individuals, approximately 100 to 125 people, in each of the last two elections have had no identification whatsoever. The remainder, a couple of hundred people, have or can come up with something; it wouldn't be enough to get them through

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Absolutely. That's already the process we're utilizing in order for us to be comfortable swearing the statutory declaration for that person. There are two groups of people. There are people who have some kind of identification, but it wouldn't be sufficient to go to the polls.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I can speak to the first group. When a person takes their statutory declaration into the polling station, it's actually taken away from them; they don't have the ability to take their statutory declaration from poll to poll to poll. It's taken away from them, and it has their add

Procedure and House Affairs committee  That would be a good idea; however, when people attend at a polling station, they're going to be asked to produce some kind of identification before they're going to be given their voter's card. Unless Parliament is prepared to give people their voter's cards—

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The downtown eastside has so many people in such a small area that there are usually three to four polling stations within a block of each other. I'm not sure I understood the question. They will be placed in things like community centres in areas where the shelters are, so the p

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It would reduce some of the problems we face. The problem is that if you do pre-register someone on the voters list and a voter's card is mailed out to them, most of these people aren't going to get their voter's cards. The cards are simply either going to be lost in the mail or

Procedure and House Affairs committee  My position is that we're trying to fix something that doesn't appear to be broken. Maybe you've heard other evidence that there is prevalent fraud out there. I haven't experienced it on the ground or at the polls. I've spent numerous hours, all day during election day, moving in