Thanks very much, Chair.
I've been impressed that all of you have said in different ways today that we should be cautious about over-regulating with regard to the digital world, social media and accumulated individual data in the elections process. I'm wondering how much transparency should be made available to individual voters about what political parties have on them or what political parties consider their voting inclination to be.
After all, door-knocking, face-to-face contact, is still here today. It used to be telephone as well, but with the absence of land lines that's pretty much gone the way of the dodo. When we knock on doors throughout one riding or another, we find out who is inclined to vote for the party during the writ period or during the entire parliamentary session.
On election day, we're interested in getting out the vote, so our encouragement, our messaging one way or another, is to those who we know are likely to support whichever of our parties exist. It's not that we're discouraging others who at the door have told us that they're not voting for us but for party X or party Y. It's simply that we go where the votes are. We don't waste our energy trying to encourage people at the moment of decision to go to the polls and vote for us.
Again, coming down to the thorny concept of who owns my identity in the digital world or the accumulated data world, would it be necessary to tell a voter that we would consider them to be unenthusiastic about supporting me as a candidate or perhaps even hostile and very unlikely to ever vote for me or my party? How would one divulge that information? Also, wouldn't there be an awful lot of make-work if everyone is demanding to know what the party thinks of them or how they consider them?