Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Ilona is just proving, I think, that apathy is not totally boring.
My name is Rick Anderson. I spent a few years around here, about a decade in the 1980s, as a pretty active, younger Liberal, and most of the 1990s as a pretty active, less younger Reformer, a combination of resumé credentials that has managed to aggravate many of the partisans of both of those organizations.
More recently what I do in terms of my political activity is through an organization that I started, called the Fireweed Democracy Project, which is loosely aimed at addressing the range of issues that are generally gathered under the umbrella of the democratic deficit and working with people across party lines who share a common concern for strengthening the democratic qualities of our national institutions and electoral processes.
With respect to the bill before you today, I would just offer three brief comments.
First of all, I think it goes in some very positive directions.
Secondly, just as a warning note, I think there is a larger problem than has yet been publicly acknowledged by Elections Canada or by the Canadian body politic of cheating in national elections at the local level. Those of us who have been involved in internal party politics for years know that this is not entirely uncommon in the internal contests that occur in parties, and I think in the opening up of the rules in terms of people being able to show up and literally testify as to who they are, swear out an affidavit, and so on, and get themselves on the voters list, we are approaching the edge of going too far and putting temptation where we should be careful not to put it. To my knowledge, this problem has not been studied in any detail by anybody yet, but somebody should start taking a look at it, because I think we're going to start finding ourselves embarrassed by things that we learn after the fact in elections in this country.
Thirdly, the progress that this bill represents in terms of facilitating people's access to the voters list and opportunities to vote in terms of advance polling is positive. They address what I would call “the convenience factor”, which is the business of making it easier for people to access the polling station and the vote at times that are convenient for them. But they don't actually address—neither could this bill, really—the more contextual issue, which is, I think, the larger issue driving declining turnout patterns and what Ilona here is calling apathy, which is this larger sense of people being disengaged from the process, and that leads me into areas such as electoral reform, the sense that people have that their vote doesn't count, because literally, mathematically, in half the ridings of the country that's true.
Thank you.