Evidence of meeting #5 for Procedure and House Affairs in the 40th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was voting.
A recording is available from Parliament.
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
Guy Lauzon Conservative Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, ON
One of the things that seems to be a problem, and not only at election time, is the receipts. Right now, for anything over $20 you need to have a receipt or a cheque, right?
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
Guy Lauzon Conservative Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, ON
Especially during elections, it's so complicated to take a donation from someone because they can't give it to the Guy Lauzon campaign. It has to be to some official agent, the riding association, you know, and it's just very complicated. I wonder if there isn't a way for donations under $50 or under $100.... There has to be a way to--
12:45 p.m.
Chief Electoral Officer, Office of the Chief Electoral Officer
It would require a change to the legislation. That's prescribed by the act.
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
Guy Lauzon Conservative Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, ON
I think maybe we want to take a look at--
12:45 p.m.
Liberal
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
Guy Lauzon Conservative Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, ON
We might want to take a look at that, because there again, for all these receipts that people are filling out, both with our people doing them and your people confirming them, it's time-consuming.
Those are my comments and suggestions.
12:45 p.m.
Chief Electoral Officer, Office of the Chief Electoral Officer
If I may address the issue of additional offices, I just want to point out that we think of 308 ridings, but we have in addition 119 offices in 77 ridings that are larger, with distributed population centres. So we will authorize up to four offices in large ridings to supplement or complement their returning office. For your riding specifically, I'm not aware of the circumstances.
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
Guy Lauzon Conservative Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, ON
It might be interesting to know those ridings where you have more than one. You have one because of the geography.
12:45 p.m.
Chief Electoral Officer, Office of the Chief Electoral Officer
Geography, yes.
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
12:45 p.m.
Chief Electoral Officer, Office of the Chief Electoral Officer
We can look into it...special ballots.
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
Guy Lauzon Conservative Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, ON
If the turnout is better, maybe this does make sense.
12:45 p.m.
Chief Electoral Officer, Office of the Chief Electoral Officer
We could look into it.
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Joe Preston
Before I move to the last round then, I just want to make sure of everybody who had a question or wanted to ask one. Mr. Reid, did you? I know I have Mr. Proulx on my list too.
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON
I did want to ask a question, yes.
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Joe Preston
Then I will go to you quickly, with Mr. Proulx's permission. You've not asked anything today.
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON
What I wanted to do is just follow up on Mr. Lauzon's comments, and this relates to the conversation you had when you came by my office. Actually I should start by saying I very much appreciated your going to our offices that way. I know your predecessor went to one member of each party, which was a good idea. I think by going to every member of the committee you set a new standard, and I applaud you for it.
The issue of having advance polls or other easily available places to vote in advance of election day, such as the returning office, I think really does make a difference. We actually went through the exercise of measuring this in my riding. When my riding was redistributed, I lost the suburban part of the riding in the city of Ottawa—Kanata—and retained the rural part. We noticed the obvious thing, which was my next-door neighbour, Gordon O'Connor, getting a much higher turnout at the advance polls than we did. At first we couldn't explain it. It certainly couldn't be personality-based; at least we don't like to think that's the case. But then we also noticed similar results related to the fact that advance polls are in our towns but not in our rural areas. So there is something there.
Here's a thought, maybe, for the other members here. We worked with our returning officer over a period of time to change the locations of some of the advance poll locations and to get an additional satellite office put in, on which she was very helpful. She was very good. I expect other members might find the same thing if they tried doing that with their returning officers. That's advice from us.
The other thing I was thinking of was that after we had our conversation I realized that there's rural, where we can do this sort of thing, and then there's remote. It seems to me that maybe there's merit to some kind of special effort, perhaps a special advertising campaign advising people in really remote areas. Remote is where you simply can't drive to an advance poll and you can't set up an advance poll. In our office I discussed the idea of how you deal with a place like Nunavut, where a community is isolated by hundreds of miles from the next community. That doesn't prevent from engaging in a wider use of mail-in ballots, for example. I don't know if you do anything of that sort, but if you don't I think there would be some merit to thinking about that as a way of boosting voter participation from folks who live in remote areas. Obviously I don't mean just in Nunavut. There are wide swaths in the country where that might apply.
12:50 p.m.
Chief Electoral Officer, Office of the Chief Electoral Officer
Absolutely. That's something we will certainly consider.
12:50 p.m.
Conservative
12:50 p.m.
Liberal
Marcel Proulx Liberal Hull—Aylmer, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I read the reports; that's the difference.
Just as a quick comment, I'm not sure I enjoyed what Mr. Reid was just saying about manipulation of the local Elections Canada representative in deciding or influencing the choice of locations of advance polls. I mean, Elections Canada is definitely at arm's length, especially from the MPs. If we are to approach your representatives in each and every riding and make suggestions as to where the polls should be, I'm not particularly certain the law allows us to do that, and I'm not particularly sure you would want your representatives to be allowed to accept these recommendations. But that's for another discussion.
I have three quick points.
12:50 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Joe Preston
Just really quickly, I'm going to recognize Mr. Reid. You did mention him in your dissertation.