Procedure and House Affairs Committee on Nov. 22nd, 2007

[Keith Archer]

It's been a while since I looked at data on the accuracy of our register of electors. The provision that we have in this country that allows people to register at the polling station I think provides an important safeguard to some inaccuracies that we have in our voter register. So that's certainly one of the administrative changes that Elections Canada has introduced to try to be responsive to a voters list that, quite frankly, is really difficult to maintain at a high level of currency and accuracy.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

I think we are all agreed on the notion of the efficacy of advance polling, that people like it, it works. There is a percentage of people who just wouldn't be able to get out and vote otherwise, so we are perhaps gathering a certain percentage of the voters.

Where this issue comes down for us is we are setting up a number of advance polls, but we are also setting up two full election days, and one of those election days is Sunday. I have had concern expressed to me from people like Professor Franks. They are already cynical of politicians who believe that getting called on Sunday, having the full political machine rolling out on their day off, is not something they seem favourable to. In fact they seem very resentful when I mention it, and these are not necessarily even people of Christian background. It's people who just don't like to be bothered on a Sunday.

Would the overall effectiveness of the advance polls work sufficiently without that final full-out Sunday election voting? I put it to the witnesses.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Would anybody care to respond?

Mr. Franks, please. We have about a minute and a half.

[Ned Franks]

I'll jump in. My guess is that it's less important than the others. There is a whole other set of issues that come in on it. What about people who work on Sunday? Are they going to have the right to have two hours off during the day to vote, and so on? Are we making it a real voting day or a pretend voting day?

I can't answer the question. As I said before, I think it's up to this committee to give its views to Parliament on it, because that, to me, is the only contentious issue in the bill.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Anyone else?

Mr. Archer, you're okay?

Any other comments from the other witnesses on this particular question?

[Peter John Loewen]

We're not certain what the answer is to your question about the precise impact of Sunday alone.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Thank you.

Colleagues, we have time for one more round, a five-minute round. The reason I try to focus members to stay on the particular topic is really just out of respect for the witnesses, who have been told what to prepare for. If the witnesses want to stray a bit, that's entirely up to them. Sometimes I'll pull them back as well, but that's just to remind members of that.

Madame Robillard, five minutes, please.

[Lucienne Robillard, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you for coming today, despite the storm.

I would like to ask Mr. Loewen and his colleague for some information on the study they conducted for Elections Canada. You seem to have compared what was going on in other countries with regard to advanced polling. In your study, did you take into account the fact that there are other voting measures in Canada besides advance polling, which isn't the case in other democracies? There is special polling, which enables a person who will be travelling, for example, to go to the returning officer on any day and vote. That person may also vote through the mail. Certain other systems do not allow this flexibility.

Is that one of the factors you considered in the methodology of your study?

[Agnieszka Dobrzynska]

Yes, these are factors that we considered in another study that we conducted for Elections Canada a few years ago. Proxy voting, advance polling and postal voting are three measures that, taken together, increase voter turnout in the world the most. For the same sample as the one we used for this study, there was an impact of 11 percentage points. Those three measures taken together, in the countries where they were in existence, increased voter turnout considerably.

[Lucienne Robillard, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

Was one of those measures more effective than others?

[Agnieszka Dobrzynska]

Advance polling is the most effective of the three measures.

[Lucienne Robillard, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

You told my colleague Mr. Angus that you had not studied the Sunday factor. Did I understand correctly?

[Agnieszka Dobrzynska]

We studied that factor. There's no impact if the day considered is a Sunday or a statutory holiday, because there can be two options, depending on the country. That measure had no significant impact on voter turnout. In most of the studies conducted by other researchers, there is a consensus that there is no impact.

[Lucienne Robillard, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

I have another question for Mr. Archer.

It seems to me you concluded your presentation by saying that other studies might perhaps be necessary to determine the positive impact of this measure contained in Bill C-16 compared to the relative cost.

Could you clarify your thinking? What would those studies be?

[Keith Archer]

Yes, well, that's a good question, and I've not spent a lot of time thinking about what that would look like. But I think if one were to imagine what kind of study would be useful, one example would be to put in place the proposed change--let's say we're looking at advanced polling on the Sunday prior to the election and on the Sunday prior to that--in selected constituencies on a trial basis and actually measure the impact on voter turnout in those constituencies relative to constituencies overall. I mean, you would design a research study around the election event itself and be in a position to get a better estimate of the impact of that change.

Another could be to introduce an initiative like, oh, I don't know, Rock the Vote, for example, which is increasingly widely used by election administration authorities. They sponsor music events that are designed to encourage young people to come to those events and then use those events as opportunities to increase political awareness. You would look at the effectiveness of participation at an event like that in respect of the cost of the event.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Thank you very much.

We'll have Mr. Reid, please. You have five minutes.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all of our guests for being here.

I have one general comment, and then I have two questions. I certainly agree with the comment that was made by a number of the witnesses, perhaps by all of you, that in addition to what's being considered today, there is value in looking at other actions that might have the effect of boosting voter turnout. A couple of my own favourites are the idea of greater enumeration by Elections Canada, particularly in areas with high levels of transients. Areas that are populated by students come to mind as an obvious one.

Another one is for Elections Canada to concentrate on putting out advertisements that are fact-based. I encourage the Chief Electoral Officer to redesign some of their forms that would be less likely to have incorrect address and voting location information. That obviously affects voter outcome.

Professor Archer, I thought your comments regarding Australia were interesting, and I'll be interested in finding out more. As a former resident of Australia myself, I find a lot of what they do there with regard to elections is very interesting.

That being said, I turn now to the questions. I think I can state fairly accurately that if we were dealing with a calculus as to where the cutoff is, where it stops being worthwhile in a democracy to spend more money in order to get out more voters, we could probably all agree that if it cost a million dollars to get an additional vote it wouldn't be worth pursuing. At the other end, if it cost say $1, it would be worthwhile. I would go so far as to say that I suspect if it were $10 we could all agree. I base that on the fact that the $1.75 subsidy per party for every vote they get, times four years between elections, boils down to about $7 per vote per party. The parties were all happy to vote for legislation that put that into place, so clearly a $7 or $10 number is not considered illegitimate.

I did a little calculation. If we make the assumption--perhaps I'm being optimistic, but I don't think so--that it's a 3% increase in voter turnout that we get for our $34 million, 3% times the 14,800,000 votes that were cast in the last election amounts to 444,000 additional voters. If it's only 2%, it would be a smaller number.

If that number is right, 444,000 votes boils down to $76 a vote. I think the question for all of us is whether that is a justifiable amount to get that number of people out. I realize the witnesses may have some resistance to answering questions of that nature.

The third thing, and I do feel quite strongly about this, is that this is not something that will cause an equal rate of increase in voter participation across the board. And here is the part I'm really asking about. I would assert, and I'm anxious to see whether you agree, that there are certain areas where it's predictable that voter turnout will increase. Those are the areas where it is not easy to get to the advance polling station.

We are talking about universal advance polling stations. I once represented a suburban area, Kanata, in the riding of Carleton—Mississippi Mills, which incidentally in the last election had the highest voter turnout at the advance polls in the entire country. Typically the advance polls are at the same location where the actual polling will take place on election day, so it's easy to get to the advance poll. You just go from one poll in a high school gymnasium to having seven or eight polls there.

After redistribution I went to a rural area where the advance polls are frequently far removed from each other. We have a lower rate of voter turnout at the advance polls. When I look at the numbers for the last election, I noticed the lowest areas in the entire country for overall voter turnout were in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories. In remote communities, frequently there are no advance polls. You can't have a grouping of polls together, so effectively you lose that ability to vote in advance.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Mr. Reid.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

I'm about to wrap up.

My question is, do you agree that rural or remote areas are likely to see a greater percentage increase than urban and suburban areas in voter participation as a result of the proposed legislation?

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Thank you.

If we could just get a yes or a no, that would be great.

Please, Mr. Loewen.

[Peter John Loewen]

We found no difference in the probability of voting in advance between people who lived in rural and people who lived in urban settings in 2006.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Yes, but you would find that because you didn't have advance polls at all locations.

[Peter John Loewen]

Yes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Goodyear]

Are there any other comments from the witnesses?

Mr. Franks, then Mr. Archer, please.

[Ned Franks]

I'll just make a short first comment. I think we know enough that we don't need to do more studies. I think you've been given very good evidence of what the consequences of this are, and I don't think you need to go much further.

The second one is that the factors that affect the vote in Nunavut, in particular, are linguistic and cultural, I think, even more than remoteness, because a majority of the population there does not speak either official language, at least not with any comfort. That in itself is a huge barrier towards participation.

Thank you.