I will start with a couple of questions for Mr. Lortie, if I could.
I want to start by going back to page three of your report. I think it's also page three in the French version. You cite section 3 of the Charter of Rights, which I'm going to read here. It says:
Democratic Rights Every citizen of Canada has the right to vote in an election of members of the House of Commons or of a legislative assembly and to be qualified for membership therein.
There has been a debate in the Supreme Court going back to a number of decisions, as far back as the 1990s, as to what this right means and whether it should be interpreted narrowly or broadly. I think the chief justice has incorrectly tried to interpret it narrowly. The majority in the case of Opitz v. Wrzesnewskyj felt that it should be interpreted broadly. They didn't actually address the constitutional question overtly, but they indicated that merely technical or bookkeeping violations of the Elections Act ought not to invalidate a vote, thereby indicating that voting is a right, not a privilege, that the right cannot be restricted for bookkeeping reasons without legitimate overriding concerns. I think all of that fits in neatly with the Oakes test, the normal application of our constitutional rights as being purposive and therefore subject to a larger liberal as opposed to a narrow technical interpretation.
I say all of this because I want to set up the fundamental problem that I think exists with regard to the whole issue of vouching, and it's this. I think we suffer from a database issue here. Elections Canada has, following the law, shifted from doing an enumeration that provided it with a fairly up-to-date database of information—very few people had moved and could not be recorded when the old system was used—to a new system based on what we thought back in the 1990s would be systems that would allow us to keep up with where people are. It hasn't worked out, and we know from Elections Canada's reports that they have an error rate in excess of 20% in 10 ridings across Canada. They won't tell us which ones those are. For the country as a whole, the preliminary voters list has an error rate of 17% with regard to people's addresses. But the preliminary list is what's used for voter information cards. That indicates that they largely don't know where people live.
The question is, how do you deal with this?
They have not unreasonably said that there are going to be fewer fraudulent voters or even mistaken voters who go to a poll where they couldn't legitimately vote than legitimate voters who aren't on the list. Therefore we try to expand things as broadly as we can to allow as many people to come in to vote. We try to find ways of facilitating that, thus the long list of ID, thus the proposed use of the voter information card nationwide as an identity card that can be used. All you need to do is turn up.
It doesn't get away from the fact that the card has a 17% error rate, higher in certain ridings and it doesn't get away from the fact that vouching also has problems, one of which is that it actually can't be used in many places where people are least able to have ID, such as people in long-term residential care.
All of this makes me think that the real solution here is to move away from vouching or the use of the voter information card for identity purposes to something else. One of the ideas that has been discussed on a number of occasions in this committee by witnesses is the idea that we would move to a model that's used in a number of jurisdictions. It's been described here as the Queensland model because I gather they use it in the Australian state of Queensland. If you show up and you don't have proper ID, your ballot is treated as it would be if it was a mail-in ballot. It's placed into a blank envelope to ensure anonymity. It is then placed into a second envelope upon which some sort of declaration of identity is made. Then afterwards there's an attempt to match this up with the voter. This allows people to show up who don't have proper ID. It allows a kind of post-fact enumeration of people who were left off the list. It essentially prevents the possibility of an invalid vote being cast, whether fraudulently or by accident.
Accidents can happen. I tell everybody the story of my ex-wife being told to go vote at a different poll from me, in a different riding, even though we lived at the same house.
What would your view be? Mr. Conacher, you can answer this as well, seeing as I've used up almost all of my time. What would your view be as to whether this system would work to resolve the problems that would exist if vouching and the voter information card were both removed as possible uses of identifying people's names and addresses?