Procedure and House Affairs Committee on April 2nd, 2014

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Thank you, and thank you to our guests for coming in.

I'm going to start with Ms. Mangat. You said something earlier about the charter and the right to vote. I just want to take out two quotes here from the Supreme Court decision when it comes to Etobicoke Centre. I think this bolsters your case because I think it's very poignant:

If elections can be easily annulled on the basis of administrative errors, public confidence in the finality and legitimacy of election results will be eroded.

Also, from section 8, the judgment says they:

...found that the word “irregularity”, an undefined term in the Act, should be given a broad interpretation....

Would you agree that this no longer has a broad interpretation, at least from the analysis of doing this bill, and it has just been quashed outright? That is a disservice, going back to what you said, to section 3 of the charter.

[Raji Mangat]

Yes, I think that the way that irregularity or serious irregularity has become conflated with fraud is a problem. If you look at all of the evidence that has been put forward and look at all of the studies that have been done—and this goes back even to 2007 when the voter identification laws were made mandatory—there was no evidence at that point. There has remained no evidence that there is any kind of isolated incidents—forget wide-scale—of people pretending to be somebody else at a polling station, which is what voter ID can only get at. That's one very limited way in which someone could defraud—

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Sorry to interrupt, so the fixes in 2007, in your opinion, did not even fix the symptoms that they prescribed back then.

[Raji Mangat]

I don't think I answered Mr. Reid's question properly, but the BCCLA was opposed to those voter identification rules when they came into force. In fact there is a charter challenge that has gone through at least two courts in B.C. and an application was just made this week for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.

In both of those cases, in the lower court and at the B.C. Court of Appeal, the voter identification laws were found to be prima facie, on the face of it, a violation of section 3. Where the rubber hit the road, so to speak, was in the section 1 analysis. The justification of those laws, where the government bears the onus of showing why these laws are necessary, was where both courts upheld the laws. But in our view, we felt that there was too much deference paid to the government there, considering that, as Cara had mentioned earlier, there had been no evidence of what we were trying to fix. Back in 2007 we highlighted this problem. We see now in 2014 that even vouching, which the Attorney General himself said was a safeguard, is now being removed or it's proposed to be removed.

So we're seeing this sort of chipping away happening and we're very concerned that it's going to keep going.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

This must be alarming to you because this is now the hammer that's going to kill the mosquito, in this particular bill.

What I want to get also before I run out of time, Ms. Farha, is that when we asked the Minister about situations where people are in shelters and seniors' residences...obviously that excludes your expertise. But when you're dealing with shelters in major urban centres, and I think somebody said that this primarily relies on people in suburbs who have one of the 39 IDs, a lot of this stuff, such as the basic health card, does not have an address on it, which is so necessary. But the minister talks about attestations.

Can you comment on the usage of attestations in order for people to vote or do anything for that matter?

[Leilani Farha]

Yes. I think when you're talking about attestations, you're talking about when someone's in a shelter, or they are using a food service of some sort, a food bank, and then they go to an authority within that and seek an attestation.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

What about low-cost housing?

[Leilani Farha]

Yes, or in low-cost housing....

It's very difficult for low-income people who are in those circumstances to go and ask for an attestation. There's a humiliation involved in that. There is often a lack of desire to speak to your landlord to receive an attestation, or to speak to the supervisor of a mission, etc. Sometimes, too, if you're looking at the homeless population, you're on the streets for a couple of weeks, you're in a shelter for a couple of nights, you're crashing there, and you don't know the people running the place. You're not going to ask for an attestation.

As I said, there's a humiliation there. There's an awkwardness and lack of human relationship there that's going to lend itself to that.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Thank you very much.

How much time is left?

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

You have two minutes, almost.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Good.

To the CCLA, there's something you said earlier about wanting from a constitutional perspective. Were you just focusing in on the vouching issue alone?

[Cara Zwibel]

Yes. I think the vouching issue is what presents the clearest problem from a constitutional perspective.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Sorry to interrupt again.

Can you give me examples across this country where in some provinces—others may want to weigh in on this too—they must have felt the need to fix vouching, or to say they are worried about the potential of fraud even though we don't see a lot of evidence?

Have they put forward a substitution that you think is a reasonable way of doing this? I believe in the substituting system; I don't believe in getting rid of it.

Go ahead.

[Cara Zwibel]

I don't know if I can answer that question. I don't know that I'm knowledgeable enough about the different provincial acts to know what they've dealt with.

I've been watching these committee hearings, and I know there have been some witnesses who have suggested other possibilities. I know some of the committee members have asked questions about other options, and I certainly think it's worth exploring some of those options. I'm all for adding different options into the current elections act to facilitate the right to vote, but I would say that those things should be done in addition to what's already there.

Until we know that something is working, we should not remove vouching as an option. We don't want to disenfranchise people in hope that what we have replaced it with will fix it. If there's an attempt to fix the problem, let's fix it and make sure it's working before we remove anything.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you, Mr. Simms.

Mr. MacKenzie, you have four minutes, please.

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Oxford, ON]

Thank you, Chair. I'd like to share my time with Mr. Richards.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

If indeed you have some left, I will give it to him. If not, he will wait for another round—

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Oxford, ON]

Thank you.

I appreciate the witnesses being here. You speak from the heart and with emotion.

But I have heard these same numbers come up from other witnesses, and it seems that everybody has a number of 100,000 people who are going to be disenfranchised. Where would that number come from?

[Cara Zwibel]

I think that number comes from the Chief Electoral Officer attesting to how many times the vouching procedure was used in the last election.

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Oxford, ON]

If I told you they had opened so many bags, and they made that presumption going forward, how would you know who those 100,000 people were? You seem to feel they are all marginal people, or the vast majority are.

Do you have any records or any indication that those were the people who needed to be vouched for?

[Cara Zwibel]

I suppose my assumption is, if you had a piece of identification, you would prefer to use that than to rely on someone else to vouch....

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Oxford, ON]

Right. If I said to you that I was at a polling station, and a business person and his wife who I knew showed up without their ID because they didn't think they had to bring it, and they required someone to vouch for them.... They weren't marginalized people.

I don't think we know who the people are. I don't think there's any record of it. I'm not being challenging, but I don't think there's any record to know who the people are who are vouched for.

[Raji Mangat]

I think nobody on the panel is saying the individuals who would require vouching are only going to be marginalized people, or only vulnerable people. I don't think any one of us is saying that. And as for—

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Oxford, ON]

I think that's what we're hearing. It's this constant number of 100,000 people who are marginalized that are going to be—

[Raji Mangat]

I think what we're saying is that we know for a fact that those people are the most likely to not be in the circumstances of that businessman and his wife who could go home, get their ID, and come back.