Procedure and House Affairs Committee on March 29th, 2012

[Marc Mayrand]

Yes.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

Okay.

In the media, of course, we have heard about the famous Monsieur Poutine and about how there was a transaction through PayPal. PayPal had provided a copy of that transaction, and RackNine, through which the calls went, provided an IP address.

Is that information going to allow the elections commissioner to identify Monsieur Poutine?

[Marc Mayrand]

I will not comment on the investigation. This information was publicized by the media after notice was taken of documents that were presented in court. I can only say that the investigation is following its course.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

I have to admit I'm curious to know whether the IP address came from an Internet cafe and the credit card was a disposable credit card.

[Marc Mayrand]

Many of us are.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

Yes, but at this point you're not free to share that information with us.

With respect to the court challenge that has come forward, at what point would Elections Canada become involved? Does this await the ruling of a judge before anything happens, or is Elections Canada brought in to check on whether there's any validity to the complaint?

[Marc Mayrand]

We were served yesterday with the proceedings there, so our counsel is looking into that.

On those matters we act very much as an amicus curiae, so we assist the court in its hearing of the matter and we provide information the court finds necessary to conduct the hearing.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

As a final question, are you able to share with us how many actual specific discrete investigations are under way within the office of the elections commissioner? We all know about Guelph, of course, and we've heard about Thunder Bay and things like that, but do you know how many are...?

[Marc Mayrand]

The only thing I can say for our purpose today is that there are roughly 250 files open in the commissioner's office.

I would caution, however, against drawing too much from those things. Many complaints may be combined in a single file or may be combined in a single investigation.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

And that was really what I was getting at in one of my earlier questions.

You mentioned that you have all the resources that are available. I have a question of interest here. Some of these investigations require people who have expertise in doing investigations. Is that a limiting factor here, or has the elections commissioner been able to identify the right people with the right experience to do this kind of investigation? It's obviously a specialized task.

[Marc Mayrand]

I'm confident the commissioner has the required expertise, the qualified and very experienced investigators to look into these matters. As is the case for any investigation, where there is a need for special knowledge, you can contract resources and acquire that knowledge.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

I have one last question. You mentioned that there are potentially as many as 200 ridings, and that there are 250 files. If anybody in those ridings feels that, yes, there definitely was something that should not have happened, are they free to go forward and as an individual elector go to a court and challenge the result, or do they have to wait for your report?

[Marc Mayrand]

No, the mechanism provided is totally separate from my office and the commissioner's office. That's a remedy available to all electors, in accordance with the Elections Act.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

So they don't need to wait.

[Marc Mayrand]

No.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Mayrand.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you.

Mr. Williamson, go ahead for a four-minute round, please.

[John Williamson, Conservative, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Monsieur Mayrand, thank you for being here today.

I appreciate your comments. I'm a new member of Parliament and have just gone through an election. You have now kind of boiled this down to 800 complaints you're investigating.

When we receive information from Elections Canada in New Brunswick Southwest, there are roughly 50,000 to 60,000 voters on average in New Brunswick. But mistakes do happen. Can you talk about that briefly?

I recognize that you are constantly updating your data between the start of the election and voting day, and that you nail it down near the end, but of course we're using the data provided by your office initially. So is it possible that a name or two from another riding, from a neighbouring riding, or from another province can inadvertently get put in New Brunswick Southwest? Do mistakes like that ever happen?

[Marc Mayrand]

Errors could happen. It's not an error-free system. You can imagine that with 24 million electors, yes, there will be some errors from time to time, but there are mechanisms to identify them and correct them.

I would point out that candidates play a key role there. If they see errors in the list, they should bring it to our attention.

[John Williamson, Conservative, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

I agree, and I saw a lot of the work that is done by volunteers provided by the parties. But if the local campaigns themselves are taking the data provided from Elections Canada, loading it into our computers, matching those names with phone numbers, and then working off that, either communicating with live calls or autodials or mail....

In New Brunswick Southwest, for example, it's conceivable I could have contacted a number of voters, particularly in the early days of the campaign, who didn't have the right to vote for me. Is that a possibility?

[Marc Mayrand]

It's always a possibility. I don't know how those various databases are working and how well they're working together.

[John Williamson, Conservative, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Okay. Fair enough.

I mean, in a campaign we're moving quite quickly as well, trying to correct data. We see errors, and I know we send it back to your office. That happens officially through Elections Canada offices that are set up in the ridings and as well from our campaigns, working together. At the same time, we're still campaigning. We're still sending out literature, making calls, identifying voters, contacting them, and urging them to get out to vote.

Now, 800 strikes me as potentially just a few errors per riding in the grand scheme of the number of potential voters. What's your sense of the number? When you look at this 800, do you think it's a...?

[Marc Mayrand]

Without speculating too much, there are maybe two points I would make.

We know in the case of Pierre Poutine that there were at least 6,700 calls placed. Again, if I look at the complaints received, there's quite a gap there.

The other thing is that, yes, there could be errors, and very legitimate and good-faith errors. What is troubling here is that there were definitely calls that were placed on behalf of people, falsely placed on behalf of people, including Elections Canada.

[John Williamson, Conservative, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Sure.

[Marc Mayrand]

So error or not, in the addressing of the phone numbers, it's a—