I want to make one comment.
Prior to our last discussion, Mr. Mayrand, we were talking about how my contention is that if people are compelled to provide proper ID as opposed to vouching, the potential for fraud would be lessened. I think that's quite obvious. You responded by saying if we did that, then people in my riding would be turned away because they didn't have the proper ID. If you recall, sir, and I'm sure you do, in the act, it requires that the advertising that Elections Canada does is to tell people where, when, and what ID to bring in order to vote. That's why we put it in there, so people would be informed and would bring the proper identification. I agree with you, sir, that lots of people who have been vouched for probably had the proper ID, but they just didn't know. That's all we're doing here.
My question is simply this. This was before your time, but it goes back to the 2006 election where we had an incident in northern Saskatchewan. A Conservative candidate, Jeremy Harrison, who was the incumbent at the time, was leading throughout the evening in all polls. With one poll remaining, all of the newscasts were reporting that Mr. Harrison had won the election because he was up by about 600 or 700 votes. Three and a half hours later, the last poll came in—it was a northern riding on a reserve—with a 105% voter turnout and every single ballot was in favour of the Liberal candidate. Obviously, there was a request to the commissioner to do an investigation. He came back to this committee. I remember asking him why he didn't find what seemed to me to be obvious fraud. His response was that they didn't think so because they were, first, encouraging the first nations people to get out and vote and so that 105% was a good thing since they didn't know how many people lived on the reserve to begin with; and second, it's not unusual to have 100% voting in favour of one candidate since he was well-known and a former chief in a band close by.
My concern, sir, is if the investigations come back with that kind of result, I don't know what we need to do other than what we're purporting to do in this act, give the commissioner of elections clear autonomy and independence—because he currently reports to you—and more authority to impose greater penalties and greater fines, including jail time, so that we can try to crack down on those fraudulent occurrences that we do know about.
Finally, sir, I will simply say this in response to a conversation you had with Mr. Reid, where Mr. Reid pointed out that over the last several elections there have only been eight prosecutions. That's quite true, but how many instances of fraud have occurred that have not resulted in prosecutions? The ones Mr. Reid was referring to were people who deliberately voted twice, who deliberately flouted the election law and told people about it. I just have to say, sir, that I believe there are—I wouldn't say widespread; that's an exaggeration—many more cases of fraud that we do not know about, and many of them come down to the fact that there's vouching, or poor rules, set up or at least administered by Elections Canada.
The clearest, cleanest, and most effective way to ensure that voter fraud does not occur is to make sure that people coming to a polling station have proper identification, not a VIC, but a name and address in proper form. That is the only way to ensure that voter fraud does not occur, sir. That's clearly what we're suggesting in this legislation in allowing voters to have a choice of 39 different types of documents. Only one of those 39 requires an address on it; the other two need to have names.
I've made the point before that if someone wants to bring testimony here saying they were prevented from voting because they couldn't comply with the 39 documents, I would suggest they probably weren't planning to vote in the first place.