Procedure and House Affairs Committee on Oct. 26th, 2006

[Karen Redman, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

He's fast.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

You can't possibly do it. You're down to ten seconds now.

On a lighter note, I am sure the folks in prison aren't going to have a problem with the photo ID.

[Marcel Proulx, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Are you telling me you just took my 30 seconds?

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

I took your ten seconds, Monsieur Proulx.

Mr. Reid, please.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Thank you.

I'm not sure whether the chairman's point was that your picture on a wanted poster qualifies as photo ID. There are any number of good ideas coming out of Cambridge nowadays.

I want to make an editorial observation and then I have a question for the Chief Electoral Officer.

We are talking in this country about going to fixed election dates. This, if it occurs, will give people extra time to get photo ID—those who are in a position to get it, if they don't already have it. While that won't resolve all problems that relate to photo ID, it does mean, first, that people will have the opportunity, and second, that we can work on ensuring the opportunity is taken advantage of to the widest extent possible. That's, I think, a responsibility we as parliamentarians would have.

I want to talk a bit about the whole concept of voter ID and the concerns of people with no fixed address—homeless people—and how this relates to them, because of course we're not doing this in a vacuum in this country. It has been done in Quebec, and my impression is that, as with many things when it comes to electoral law, Quebec is doing a very good job.

I'm not a Quebec resident, but my understanding is that what they've done is recognize the fact that homelessness as a large-scale phenomenon tends to occur more in some areas than in others. They're able to ensure, in certain polling stations where you're likely to get a large number of homeless people—at a federal level one could identify an area like the area Libby Davies represents—that you could set up polling stations that deal with this. You essentially take people who don't have the proper ID and don't have fixed addresses and stream them towards elections officials who have special training.

In an area such as the area I represent, there is a small amount of homelessness, but it tends to be people who are couch-surfing—teenagers who can't live at home with parents who are abusive, and that sort of thing—and it's much more small-scale.

What I'm getting at is I think there is some beneficial experience from Quebec. The question, Mr. Kingsley, to you is whether it would be possible to identify the areas where this is likely to arise and to deal with this problem in a manner that ensures that the kind of concerns Ms. Davies has expressed can be minimized as much as possible.

[Jean-Pierre Kingsley]

Mr. Chairman, it must be kept in mind that in Quebec they don't have polling day registration, so the issue is not a timing one, as it is under the federal regime, where you have it.

The solution that is alluded to by the member of Parliament is one we could look at, because we can identify the places where the homeless are likely to vote. We can identify the homeless shelters. That is something we do now. That's why we sometimes authorize returning officers to hire special persons—community relations officers—to go out specifically with the idea that they reach out to the homeless. That is something that could be worked at.

In Quebec they have to do it before polling day. We could also be doing it before—we do it now before polling day—but we don't see the need to get them to do anything before polling day, because we rely on the fact that where they slept the last night before the polling day is the important date. But it's something we could be working on.

I will make one further comment, and that is to say—I forgot to mention this—that when we come to fixed election dates, I indicated when I appeared before you that the quality of the list will be significantly enhanced if we do targeted registration before, if we know it's going to happen. We could be doing it in the month leading up to the start of the election, and that would increase the quality of the list very significantly.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

This raises the question, with targeted enumerations—I always think of them as being done in new subdivisions, for example, for that's where it happens in my own constituency—whether a kind of enumeration could occur, for the sake of argument, in an area where there is homelessness.

[Jean-Pierre Kingsley]

Yes, it could occur there. As a matter of fact, we do it when we do targeted revision. We're changing the term, because revision can only occur during an election. It would be the same thing, but it would occur before. We would call it targeted enumeration.

We would do high-rise apartments and student residences. We would do the same thing we do during the election, but do it before, so that the preliminary list you get would have all these changes.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Right, thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Thank you very much.

Madame Picard is next, please, and then Monsieur Proulx.

[Pauline Picard, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Mr. Kingsley, I’d like to ask you a brief question. What do you think of the possibility of providing lists of electors to the parties that include dates of birth?

[Jean-Pierre Kingsley]

I had recommended that, on the lists provided to the parties, the year of birth and not the date of birth be included. That is a problem for me. I have been made aware of the fact that many people, when verifying our identity, ask us for our birth date. That is a very important piece of personal information. If we need to give something to the candidates, I would prefer that we indicate the year of birth and not the date of birth. That is what I had recommended.

To judge by its answer, the government has decided to not do this and to include the full date of birth on electoral lists for election officials only.

[Pauline Picard, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Thank you

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Thank you very much.

Is there anything further, Madame Picard? Okay.

Monsieur Proulx, what do you think?

[Marcel Proulx, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

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.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Do you want to comment?

[Jean-Pierre Kingsley]

I've already addressed all of these issues this morning.

[Marcel Proulx, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

That's fine. I'll look at the transcript. But I just wanted to make sure that my colleagues, without going through translation, would understand exactly how this would work technically.

Thank you very much, Mr. Kingsley. I know you're going to help us.

I apologize for being late, but it's getting cold and I had to help some homeless people fight our government.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Mr. Preston, please. He's the last questioner.

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Thank you very much, and I won't take all of the time.

My questions are about voter ID cards. I wanted to ask in what size font we will be putting on the voter ID card that this is not identification. We've had many instances in this committee when we talked about voter identification cards going out and people going to the polls and using them as identification. Obviously, now, if there's a change in identification, they'll have to show something else.

You said you were talking to Canada Post, or attempting to talk to Canada Post, about the security of the cards. That is needed. We've talked about high-rise apartment buildings and super-boxes and the security there, but you didn't tell us what you're doing about multiple cards being sent to individual voters. We heard many, many comments from people who received more than one card, in any one of their aliases. I believe that Mr. Reid received four.

[Jean-Pierre Kingsley]

First, we have responded to Mr. Reid, Mr. Chairman, to explain to him what had happened and how this had happened. Of course, it will continue to happen in isolated instances.

What we also make clear is that you can only vote once, and that the voter information card is a voter information card. But we're going to be instituting procedures that are even clearer, whereby the people at the polls will ask for the voter information card to be handed to the poll officials, and not used as ID, before they go to the deputy returning officer. And the returning officer will have to follow the procedure and ask the person to state his or her name and address.

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Perfect.

[Jean-Pierre Kingsley]

And we will be reinstating this no matter what happens to Bill C-31. We'll be making sure that this happens, as it should have been happening. And where it has not been happening, we want to make sure it happens.

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Okay, that was one question.

I have one last thing on the voter identification cards. They are first-class mail. We pay an awful lot of money to send them out to everybody in this country who's a registered voter. And as we've seen, there are stacks of them that may collect. Are they returned to you? Will you now institute a program of having whatever is returned to you deregistered, or will you assume that the person no longer lives at that address or...?

[Jean-Pierre Kingsley]

We can give you more of an answer. There are cards that are returned to us as unmailable by the postperson--the postman or the postwoman--and we pursue that with the returning officer. The returning officer has an obligation to pursue that to find out where that person is, because if the person is on the list, they're supposed to be an elector. So we exhaust all those possibilities. I could even present to you statistics, if you wish, at some moment, on how we do that, how many cases there are, how many we don't resolve, and what happens to those cases. Okay?

But we try to get to the electors. It may be a bad address, but the elector still exists, so we have to do that.