Yes.
Thank you for inviting me.
I'm an assistant professor in the Sprott School of Business.
Tonight I'm only going to address the issue of vouching, digital identity, and risk management. I'm going to narrow in on that as it is in reality a debate concerning identification policies and risk management practices of large public and private institutions in a modern complex society and the extensiveness and pervasiveness of these multiple overlapping personal digital identification systems.
Restated, the allegations of voter suppression are completely dependent on the unstated, implicit assumption that there are significant numbers of Canadians with zero identity cards.
In my judgment, Mr. Mayrand, Mr. Neufeld, and the political science professors have unwittingly significantly overestimated the number of Canadians with zero identity cards due to their apparent lack of familiarity with all the identification systems available today in Canada and risk management principles and practices.
I argue that it's impossible today in Canada to be digitally invisible with a zero identity of any kind in any database, i.e., not being recorded or tracked by any government or private firm anywhere. Of course voting will be suppressed for those with absolute zero digital identity, if identity is required for voting, but I'm going to introduce evidence that suggests that all Canadians have some form of identity.
I will now highlight the empirical evidence very quickly.
In Canada today, enormously powerful, real-time, connected mainframe computers and modern bureaucracies, public and private, create massive interconnected databases on we the people. Hospital databases register an electronic hospital record the very moment we are born. Birth registration is registered in a provincial records database and a birth certificate is issued. Social insurance numbers are registered in a federal database. Within six months of our coming into existence on the planet, we are already being measured and tracked. Education databases record when we start elementary school. Health ministry databases record immunization shots. Municipal databases record library cards. Another education ministry records when we start high school, and identity cards are issued. This is Michel Foucault and governmentality with a vengeance.
Most important of all, unlike the U.S., we've had our universal, singular, public health care system since 1965 that issues our universal personal health care photo identity card. I reviewed the health care ID policy of Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, Nova Scotia, Nunavut, Yukon, and Northwest Territories and discovered that it is mandatory to have a health care card to access any health care of any kind. If you don't have a health care card, you can't use the health care system, and we don't have private health care. According to the logic of the critics, this would be health care suppression.
Then we open bank accounts, and massive bank databases require two pieces of primary, i.e., government, ID—no utility bills, please—under the Bank Act, which was passed by MPs. According to the logic of the critics, this would be bank account suppression. By the way, 96% of Canadians have bank accounts per the FCAC established by this Parliament. So you MP suppressors are doing a pretty poor job.
Some of us get a passport requiring two pieces of primary government-issued ID—no utility bills, please. Indeed, since 2008 the U.S. demands a passport to enter the United States, and this is a direct quote from Homeland Security:
The Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative was designed to address the risks posed by accepting oral declarations and the many potentially unsecure documents that were being presented at U.S. ports of entry.
By the way, U.S. border control does not accept utility bills. Presumably this is foreign travel suppression.
According to the latest Passport Canada annual report, passport possession went from 45% to 70% of Canadians in a very short time, four years after the rule change.
Some of us get credit cards. The Canadian Bankers Association reports that Canadians hold 71 million credit cards: more identity; that's a lot of identity cards.
Today, an increasing number of Canadians go to post-secondary education. According to StatsCan, in 2013 there were two million students registered at colleges and universities where everyone is issued student photo ID, but in the immortal words of Senator Duffy, “Wait, there's more.” It gets better.
Every university and college that I checked requires photo ID to sit every exam in the multiple thousands of courses across Canada. This policy likely extends to those political science profs outside Canada who oppose ending vouching. By the way, I would encourage each of the 170 profs to publicly condemn their dean, their provost, and their president for such suppression of education freedom in requiring photo ID to write exams.
A final example is the delightful experience of modern air travel that starts with entering your passport in the airport kiosk. One minute later, you're asked again for photo ID to check the luggage—no utility bills, please. Then you go down to security to be groped, squeezed, and fondled, but not before being asked for your photo ID for the third time, and then finally to the gate where you are asked for the fourth time.
But wait a minute: Mayrand and the critics argue that we should not be adopting more stringent identification measures in the absence of evidence of voting fraud.
Excellent point. Where is the evidence of terrorism in Canada? There are no planes that have been hijacked and blown up in Canada. According to this curious logic, we must stop requiring photo ID to board planes in the absence of evidence of planes being blown up. And we should stop demanding student photo ID, as there's no evidence of exam fraud; of course not, because we demand photo ID.
In fact, this debate has been hijacked by an absurd test that undesirable risks must be experienced before prophylactic measures can be adopted, contrary to all principles of risk management.
Forgive me for this humour, but I'm trying to use humour to make my point.
The critics have causality upside down and backwards, and it can be reduced to the following proposition: one, have unprotected sex, and two, if a partner becomes pregnant—the evidence—then, and only then, number three, start using a prophylactic device. Clearly this is absurd. No, Mr. Mayrand. No, Mr. Neufeld. No, 170 political science profs. One uses a prophylactic device before sex, not after—and that's in all of the sex education manuals across Canada in the high schools—to ensure that the baby or the evidence does not materialize in the first place.
For the identical reason, we demand photo ID to cross the border; for the identical reason, we insist on photo ID to fly on a plane, write an exam, or open a bank account: because it is prudent and responsible risk management to adopt anticipatory precautionary measures before bad things happen, not after bad things happen.
This is exactly why the U.K. Electoral Commission, in the oldest democracy on the planet Earth, 90 days ago recommended mandatory photo ID for voting by 2019. They are following Northern Ireland, which adopted mandatory photo ID for voting in 2003, and pursuant to their study, found that mandatory photo ID does not suppress voting.
Thank you.