Thank you.
This amendment takes into account a recommendation made by the Chief Electoral Officer in his report on the 38th general election, which was the basis on which we had prepared our report to the government.
As things stand, under subsection 101(1) of the Canada Elections Act you can be added to the preliminary list of electors in a variety of different ways. One way, of course, is if enumerating agents come to your door, or revising agents come to the door of your home. When they're there, you answer the door, and they ask to see some sort of demonstration that you are who you say you are. And then, having been provided with that information, they put you on the voters list.
It's a fairly frequent occurrence that someone will be at their home without ID, and certainly without full identification for all persons resident in that home. An easy example to imagine would be in a subdivision, such as the ones that are being built in the town I live in, where the people were not there at the time of the last election and a targeted enumeration takes place in a neighbourhood. Mr. and Mrs. Smith are a family in which Mr. Smith goes off to work and Mrs. Smith stays home and takes care of the baby, or the reverse as the case may be. But at any rate, one of them is at home and one of them is not at home. Let's work with Mr. Smith going off to work. Off he goes and he takes with him his driver's licence, which is his photo ID. It's very difficult for Mrs. Smith to register Mr. Smith and get him on the preliminary list of voters in the absence of the ID that he has taken with him in order to go to work.
The Chief Electoral Officer pointed to this problem, and he pointed out that it's inherently implausible that people will be at home waiting for the revising agents to show up in order to register a whole bunch of people who don't actually live at that address in order to commit voter fraud. This is by way of contrast with somebody going down to the office of the returning officer and engaging in registration at that point for themselves or other people without full identification.
If you're looking for a difference between G-6 and NDP-3, that's the fundamental difference. Under NDP-3 you can register yourself or someone else who you say lives at the same residence by means of a written affirmation. Under the NDP motion, you can do it at the returning officer's office. Under our amendment you must do it at home. It seems unlikely people are going to wait passively there in order for someone to show up so they can mark down people who don't actually exist, or who aren't citizens, or who aren't yet old enough to vote.
I think that what the government is proposing will actually eliminate a large number of people being left off the list who otherwise will be left off the list, and it will not in any serious way challenge the overall objective of this piece of legislation, which is to of course reduce and eliminate electoral fraud as much as possible.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.