I'm back, Minister, on this thing with what Mr. Guimond has qualified as a “bingo card”.
Unfortunately, the figures given to you by Mr. Kingsley are based on the wrong description of what we explained to him. He's referring to the possibility or...the use of photocopiers in every voting station; that's not at all what we had explained to him, and it's not at all the system that is being used.
We will have witnesses at our next meetings; we have a witness from the Quebec election system, and we also have a witness who's been summoned from the City of Gatineau, which uses the system.
I just want to take two minutes of the committee's time so that you realize Mr. Kingsley was wrong.
What we're looking for is a system in which we have, as you were mentioning, what we may call voter tracking. As voters proceed during the day, on a multi-copy form, whether it be carbon or non-carbon, the clerk or somebody else--but the clerk would do this--would strictly check off the numbers. We call it a bingo card because we use little cards that are the same size as a bingo card, and they're numbered from 1 to 300. As the voters come in, the clerk would just check off voter number 34 or voting number 56--whatever--and then every hour or at a predetermined time you'd pull off these copies and give them to each representative of each candidate. Then they come back to our election office, “our” meaning the partisan election office of each party. This way we can do the tracking of the voters as the day continues.
We will be having witnesses, as I said, and you will realize that the system is so much simpler than what Mr. Kingsley has been proposing. Whether he misunderstood or whether he wanted to misunderstand, I don't know, but we'll explain through these witnesses that it's very straightforward and very simple.
I wish we could have your commitment today that you will look a second time at this, based on the testimonies we will be getting next week. Then you can see on your own, not through Mr. Kingsley's eyes, that this system is fairly simple and not that expensive.
Thank you.