I think the remarks by my two colleagues illustrate the difficulty of commenting on this bill. We have very general or broader comments about the nature of the bill itself and then we have a lot of specific items, and I presume there are many other specific items that haven't been commented on.
In deciding what to focus on today, I thought about picking some of the smaller things, but really, the things I am concerned with are some of the broader, more general questions that other people have mentioned. I've read commentary and I'm sure you've heard commentary, so I doubt if any of the things I'm going to say are particularly new.
I've been involved with studying elections in my own research work since the 1970s and 1980s. I did studies for the Lortie commission and I've worked on many things since then. One of the things I've been interested in from the very beginning is voting participation itself—who votes and who doesn't and why this is. I was concerned about that even when the voting turnout rate was rolling along at about 75%, as it did in federal elections until 1988. Of course, I and a lot other people, have become much more concerned as things have declined since then. We know that the voting situation has gotten worse in terms of turnout.
At the federal level in most of the provinces, although there are exceptions that are related probably to the degree of competition—that's why we can look at Quebec, for example, and if you were to predict the Quebec turnout in next week's election, it would probably be reasonably high because of the nature of the competition in that election—but in general, the trends are down. People like me who are concerned about this have focused on a variety of things, focused on institutional changes that could possibly be made in order to try to make voting more accessible and perhaps more convenient, and educational initiatives and ways to encourage non-voters to vote.
Good citizenship, and I make no apologies for talking about things in those terms, requires participation. It's part of it and to be the good citizen, according to democratic theory and all conceptions of it, requires people to take an active interest in public life and to participate in politics, including elections and to follow it.
Research on political participation shows that virtually all acts of participation are connected with each other. So on the one hand, the seriousness of the turnout decline means that other elements of participation are also being affected by the decline we see in voting participation. On the other hand, if you want to look on the positive side, encouraging people to vote will also encourage them to do other things, so it's doubly important that we try to do that.
This piece of legislation is evaluated by people like me and I'm not a partisan, I don't take a partisan stand on this as to whether it provides institutional changes, educational opportunities, and encouragement to vote to improve the voter participation situation. My conclusion, along with other people that I'm sure you've heard from is that it does not. The changes regarding access to the vote, if anything, will likely work in the opposite direction.
I was here some years ago—and I was just reflecting on it today—testifying before this committee, not in this building but in a committee room, about another bill and I'm afraid I don't remember the number of the bill and I don't even remember what year it was, but maybe some of you here do. It proposed, among other things, a substantial increase in the advance polling days, the advance polling opportunities, to the point, I believe, where it was proposing opening all the polls days prior to the actual election day, which would amount to having a second election day and maybe that's the reason that bill wasn't proceeded with. But at any rate, those were the thoughts behind it and the direction it was trying to move forward on the participation front.
A little bit of that remains in this current bill. I noticed there's a provision for an additional day of advance polling. We know people are making increased use of advance polls, so this is a step in that direction. These increased voter identification requirements that are proposed here are likely to work against people for whom, perhaps, voting is a bit of a marginal activity, and there are a lot of people in that situation. It'll be a deterrent from voting.
I want to mention the electronic voting provision in this bill, not that I propose to debate the whole question of electronic voting here or act as an advocate. I'm fully aware of all the issues surrounding the whole question of electronic voting. It's available in many Canadian municipalities, as I'm sure you know, and other places in the world. Where it's available, it makes voting more accessible and it is used. This bill provides that any trial of this is likely to be extremely difficult now, at the federal level, if not impossible; so it's kind of a clue as to the direction of the actions proposed here.
On the educational front, the bill proposes explicitly removing the ability of Elections Canada to promote voting. It can inform people about voting, but it can't promote voting. These campaigns to get out the vote have been run by EMBs in Canada at various levels and in a lot of other countries in the world with a variety of messages. There's no reason, it seems to me, why this should be curtailed. This has been mentioned by others.
Then there's research. The bill proposes that, while Elections Canada can do research, it can't publish research; so its research is not allowed to be put out to the public. Why is this? I simply do not understand that provision, suppressing research. Why would you do that?
There are many aspects to this bill, and I won't go on. In general, I feel it needs a lot more additional thought and discussion before it's proceeded with.