Fantastic. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
It was a good idea of yours to keep my minutes. Now I have five.
Good day, Mr. Kingsley, good day, Ms. Davidson, good day, Mr. Molnar.
Mr. Kingsley, it is my understanding that you had already been told that the decision you made regarding what is commonly called, in electoral jargon, bingo cards, was a problem for us. If you will permit, I will proceed in English regarding my complaints. With all due respect to the interpreters, I believe our English-speaking colleagues have difficulty grasping the details when they listen to the simultaneous translation, and I will be using highly technical election-related terms.
When we talk about bingo cards for the province of Quebec or elsewhere, we are talking of our voter tracking system. In other words, Madame Tartempion goes to the poll. She happens to be voter number 33 on the list. Somebody checks off a little card. We call it a bingo card because originally it was a little piece of paper with numbers from one to 300, or the number of voters in the poll. It was numbered with little squares from one to 300, let's say, so it looked like a bingo card but it wasn't a bingo card. You don't win anything, except maybe your election.
Mrs. Tartempion goes in the poll. She's number 33. She votes. Somebody checks off number 33, and so on. Then every hour or two these little cards are sent to our headquarters through our representatives and runners. Once they get to our organization office we know that in the poll voter 33, who turns out to be Mrs. Tartempion, has already voted. Therefore our telephone operators, our election workers, our candidate do not need to continue asking, phoning, or sending somebody to Mrs. Tartempion's door for her to vote. It's what we call the voter tracking system. It's the progression of votes during the day.
You said in your reply that to do this you first need a photocopier in every polling station. You don't need that. Second, in our reply you referred to the list of voters we'd be circulating and a certain danger for personal information. You don't need that. It's totally different from that. It's a piece of paper with numbers only, so somebody who does not already have the list of voters has no clue who belongs to that particular number. So you don't need a photocopier; you need NCR paper. You don't need to worry about the personal data. It doesn't go anywhere. It's strictly the numbers that travel.
I recommended to this committee that we invite representatives of the City of Gatineau, because it is just across the river. They have a system where on election day candidates don't need representatives in the polling station. As the day goes along, they automatically check on the list for the numbers that correspond to the voters. Every hour or two they hand it out to all of the candidates' representatives so that everybody knows about it. This is very inexpensive. They're just across the river, and if they want to charge you cab fare I'll go and get them myself. They could come to explain it to you.
I understand now that the committee will be inviting the Province of Quebec to send their election.... The committee will have to decide on this, and maybe we can have you here at the same time so everybody is on the same wavelength, as far as what the score is on this, to see if there's a possibility for you to accommodate this request.
If it's a multi-million-dollar expense you will not want to do this, the government will not want to do this, and I can appreciate that, But I think if we copy either the Province of Quebec or a municipality like Gatineau, we could do it for just about no additional cost. It would help, and it would make sure we wouldn't need all of these representatives at the polling stations.
Thank you.