Welcome, Minister. It's excellent to have you here today. I'm glad that we're going to have lots of time for questions and answers on both sides of the table today.
Minister, you may be aware that prior to my getting elected to Parliament, I was for 12 years the president and chief executive officer of the Greater Toronto Apartment Association. The members of that association were owners and operators of multi-family apartment buildings throughout the greater Toronto area.
I certainly heard anecdotally from members about voter information cards that are mailed into apartment buildings. Residents will go to the mailroom, open their mailbox, and pull out whatever is there. Often a lot of it is flyers, but there's also the voter ID card, or the voter notification card, as I prefer to call it. It really isn't identification; it is a notification card. This card is often discarded in the mailroom, in a garbage can or a blue box, as the case may be. I have heard anecdotally that other individuals have subsequently gone into those mailrooms, have grabbed those voter notification cards, presumably for a reason, and I assume it's to use those cards to vouch for an individual to vote in place of the real voter, the tenant in that unit.
Therefore, I am very concerned about the vouching system. I think it needs to be cleaned up, because I think these kinds of abuses do take place.
By changing the system as you have proposed in the bill, Minister, do you agree that this is one of those things that will be rectified? The voter notification card will have to be accompanied by a proper piece of identification in order for that individual to exercise their vote.