Well, I appreciate the concerns being expressed. I have a couple of questions for the panel.
One is an observation that I think most Canadians are comfortable with having their birthdate appear on official documents. We certainly have that with our driver's licence and things like that. It aids authorities in being able to ask you a question about whether it's actually your identification. Because if you don't know your birthdate, then obviously you're not that person.
I remember the discussion we had on this very point, and it was to aid poll clerks themselves, so that when an individual was in front of them, it would give them further assistance when looking at the person. Obviously, if the person's name was exactly the same.... Take the case of a father and son, if for some reason the son was going to cast a ballot for the father. If on the list the person's name is the same, but their birthdate shows that they're 60 years old, and the person in front of you is obviously not 60, you'd be able to catch that.
My question, then, is whether there's some way we could still have that aid, for lack of a better term, available to the polling clerks to be able to accurately identify the citizen who's in front of them without having it on a list, that list being the same list that's distributed, if that's the concern.
In other words, the list that's distributed to campaigns or candidates or anywhere other than specifically to Elections Canada polling clerks would not have the birthdates on it. Because I don't see any reason why, as a candidate running my campaign, I would need to have that information in addition to the identity of the citizen on the voters list.
Would that be possible in order to address this? If it's not, then obviously, for the same reasons that have been expressed by others, I'd probably err on the other side of caution and say we'd better just drop this idea of having that available to the poll clerks.