Procedure and House Affairs Committee on May 29th, 2012

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Mayrand, for being here.

As a result of an NDP motion several months ago in the House to address some of the concerns in your report with regard to the authority of your office to review political parties, to oversee them, and to deal with voter contact and some of the voter suppression issues we saw in the last election, Parliament passed a resolution calling on the government to address those issues within six months.

Have your offices been contacted by the government for any input as to the types of remedies, the types of legislation or regulations that could be put in place to address some of those issues?

[Marc Mayrand]

Not to my knowledge at this point.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Would you expect that you would be consulted before legislation of that nature would be coming forward?

[Marc Mayrand]

I would certainly like to be.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Mr. Mayrand, with regard to the estimates, the main estimates have a figure, with regard to the regulation of electoral activities, of some $46 million. But in your report, your figure for the same item is $38 million. Could you explain the discrepancy of $8 million between those two figures?

[Marc Mayrand]

Which report are you referring to?

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

I'm sorry. It came out of your office. It's “Table 2—Planning Summary Table”. This is the projected spending for 2012-13. Your figure is $38,675,000. The government figure is in excess of $46 million in the main estimates.

[Marc Mayrand]

You're talking about the regulation of electoral activities.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

It is the regulation of electoral activities.

[Marc Mayrand]

That's a reflection of the reduction in the vote subsidy, which was not included in the main estimates at the time because the act was not in force. It's now reflected in the RPP, and it shows a reduction of $7.9 million or so as a result of the reduction in the vote subsidies.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Based on that projection, the actual expected expenditure this year—what's in the main estimates—will be less by $7.9 million.

[Marc Mayrand]

Yes.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Can you give me a quick overview of where those cuts occurred in your office?

[Marc Mayrand]

It occurs across the organization. There's a fair amount that's coming from IT--IT infrastructure and IT efficiencies. There's about $2 million in that area where we have reduced our expenditures.

The remainder of the amount comes from various efficiencies across programs, as well as a reduction in services. For example, in international affairs, we've stopped providing bilateral technical assistance to various countries. In the field of political entities, we will no longer be offering training sessions across the country. That will be offset by some tutorials online, but we will not be in a position to continue offering service face to face.

It's these types of efficiencies. Again, we've tried to keep the reduction of services to a strict bare minimum.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Given the outcome of the decision in Etobicoke, one of the conclusions I came to was that we don't have enough staff when we run the elections, and we don't have staff who are well enough trained to deal with the particular issue the court found they were confronted with on May 2. How are we going to be able to cope with that if we're reducing budgetary items?

[Marc Mayrand]

As I indicated earlier, the budget and the reduction won't apply to election delivery. The budget for election delivery is not affected by the proposed cuts.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

But you're not augmenting your budget in that regard either, are you?

[Marc Mayrand]

At this point, no, but it's something we have to look at. Most of the costs will be in relation to the delivery of the election.

As I said, we need to do a rigorous analysis of how we can improve process and procedure at voting places, and there will be a cost to that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you.

Mr. Garneau, for five minutes, please.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm interested in where the cost associated with running the Commissioner of Elections Canada is identified as a program activity. Under what does that come?

[Marc Mayrand]

It would come under program activity number two, regulation of electoral activities.

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

Thank you.

Given the fact that, as you pointed out, there are a large number of investigations that potentially will occur—you mentioned the number has gone from 800 to 1,100—it seems to me that those costs could be increasing in ways you may not know about right now.

We're told that the commissioner gets whatever funding he requires to do his investigations. What happens when all that money is used up?

[Marc Mayrand]

There are two distinctions to make. As part of the operating budget, the ongoing budget of the organization, there's a budgetary envelope of slightly less than $2 million for the commissioner's office. That keeps the core team in place.

In addition, the commissioner, for any particular investigation, may need additional funds, depending on the circumstances, and that's funded through the statutory authority outside of the ongoing budget. If he needs a few more investigators, that will be paid out by the statutory authority, and it will be shown in the supplementary estimates.

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

So that would appear in supplementary estimates.

Okay. Thank you.

You said that the operating budget of $94.1 million was then reduced by $7.5 million, and that you found four ways to apply those reductions of roughly 8%.

You also talked about achieving efficiencies. The government is constantly telling us that most of the reductions across government are linked to efficiencies. I would like to know, then, what your calculation of that number is, in terms of the four methods you are using to cut costs by 8%. How much of that percentage is linked to efficiencies?

[Marc Mayrand]

It's around $2.5 million, but we had to reduce costs by $7 million. The biggest chunk of those reductions are on the IT side, as we have made considerable efforts to use our resources more efficiently.

We have also applied this rule: any additional costs arising from these new initiatives must be counterbalanced by cost reductions elsewhere.