Yes, I would understand any government would be concerned about fraud in any election process. To make sure things like that don't happen, Canada has travelled all over the world to supervise elections in much more critical circumstances than we have in a sophisticated western society. I'm surprised we're not learning any lessons from some of those experiences to reflect in this bill.
You can bring in a mechanism whereby.... I have professional credentials. I'm not prepared to put those on the line for anybody. I also receive various levels of government funding that prohibit me from explicitly involving myself in politics at a particular level with a particular candidacy. It is my job, and I am expected by the City of Ottawa to be a source of education, a source of awareness, to highlight where there is no accessibility or there are problems and barriers for people, and to try to either resolve those myself or bring them forward. That probably is the same for people who work with the homeless, so several checks and balances are in place.
If you made a process whereby people have to identify them as a way to vouch and have to come through an organization, those organizations will not be willing to risk their very existence to perpetrate frauds of any kind. It would be a great help because we have people who move a lot. I don't have homeless families I'm in contact with on a daily basis, but I certainly have people who move. We have a very high rate of turnover in social housing, so it can be very difficult and frustrating.
The voting process is a fragile process. One of the greatest gifts you can have in a democratic society is the right to vote. I spend a lot of time talking to people who have had their lives threatened in other countries over voting. We have to get their courage back to vote. We have to encourage them to believe that what they do today is important for their children.
We're talking about youth having the ability to vote. That's building a lifetime of participation in the very life and fabric of your community, so we want to get mechanisms in this bill that will help us move that process forward.
I don't like the latitude of the Chief Electoral Officer to pick and choose documents. You have to have something more explicit there to get at what Mr. Reid is saying he wants to get at, make that explicit so people can't play with those kinds of things. With a little more thought, a process can be put in place that would allow a great many people, who are either put off by process or are completely disenfranchised and can't meet these requirements, to get past that. One person vouching for one person isn't going to do it.