I am also an assistant professor of applied ethics at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, and I am here as a research associate with the CCPA. I'm also—some of you may know this—a co-author with several Canadian professors of an open letter concerning Bill C-23, published in the National Post earlier in March.
The views I express today, though, are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of my co-authors or of the 180 signatories to that letter. Of the many difficulties presented by the fair elections act, I’d like to focus on just one, which Mr. Quail has already talked about, and that is the way in which it would undermine political equality in Canada, by making the right to vote more difficult to access in general, and most particularly but not exclusively, for vulnerable Canadians.
It does this—as we've already heard today—by proposing to eliminate vouching and by imposing stricter voter ID requirements. Let me begin by pointing out that Canada’s voting ID requirements are already more restrictive than in many countries. Indeed, in leading Westminster democracies, the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand, all that is required is that one be on the voter registry; no identification is required. In other democracies, vulnerable citizens are exempt from identification requirements entirely.
According to international best practices of electoral law, governments that require ID should ensure that these are provided to citizens free of cost, as with the VICs that this bill would disallow.
The purpose of beginning here is simply to highlight that the proposals to eliminate vouching and to impose stricter voter ID requirements will move us away from widely accepted international best practices by which states protect the right to vote of their citizens. In Canada—we already heard this today—the right to vote is protected in section 3 of the charter. In my view, the constitutional protection of this right imposes a duty on all of us, particularly our government, to protect that right for each one of us.
In my view, the proposed fair elections act is anything but fair. As we've already heard, it risks excluding some of Canada’s most vulnerable citizens such as seniors and students, first nations' citizens, low-income Canadians, and homeless Canadians. We know from Elections Canada that these groups relied on vouching most frequently in recent elections. It should go without saying that in our Constitution, these citizens’ right to vote is no less important than that of any other Canadian. This bill, regrettably in my view, makes it necessary to underline this point.
In its recent decision in the Etobicoke Centre case, the Supreme Court acknowledged the multiple values at stake in elections such as integrity, transparency, and efficiency. It then gave pride of place to the constitutionally protected right to vote. I quote from the decision:
...the Act seeks to enfranchise all entitled persons, including those without paper documentation, and to encourage them to come forward to vote on election day, regardless of prior enumeration. The system strives to achieve accessibility for all voters, making special provision for those without identification to vote by vouching.... The goal of accessibility can only be achieved if we are prepared to accept some degree of uncertainty that all who voted were entitled to do so.
In other words, our electoral system relies on a certain amount of trust in our fellow citizens not to abuse our most basic democratic right. In my view, this bill rests on the false premise that we should distrust one another.
Bill C-23 will effectively take the right to vote away from some Canadians. How then can we claim to be a democratic country?
The right to vote is not something the government grants us permission to do, like driving, hunting, or practising medicine. It belongs to each of us by virtue of our citizenship status. The job of a truly democratic government is to protect our right to vote by securing the conditions that make it possible. This act does the opposite.
The government’s reason for restricting the right to vote rests on the importance of eliminating fraud from our electoral system. As has been said repeatedly in the media and before this committee, there is no evidence of fraud, only of record-keeping errors that can be dealt with in ways that do not threaten the integrity of Canadian democracy.
So let there be no mistake. The government proposes to protect against imaginary dangers by creating real and significant harms. There is something gravely wrong when we plan to turn away citizens at the voting booth because we imagine they might be trying to cheat the system. There is something wrong with a policy that slanders hundreds of thousands of Canadian citizens as potential fraudsters because they are vulnerable in ways that make it difficult to get a driver’s licence or to have a stable address.
The so-called fair elections act is inconsistent with a commitment to political equality on which Canada’s democracy is built. In my view, Bill C-23 should be rejected.
Thank you for listening.