I'm Simon Rowland, founder of Direct Leap Technologies, which is a telecom engineering and voter contact firm. We have developed a lot of telecom equipment over the years.
The first point l want to make is that the scope of the crime in terms of the national election fraud investigation is breathtaking, and this is an important context to keep in mind when looking at reforms to the Canada Elections Act.
I have a few points. It needs to be an offence to hire an unregistered voter contact firm so that the onus is also on clients to verify the registration. SMS, Facebook messages, and a huge list of other communications technologies aren't adequately regulated as voter communications. This list of technologies will evolve over time as communication with electors moves from in-person canvassing over time to jump from technology to technology, but SMS is essentially totally unregulated.
Elections Canada needs to have a much easier way to request telephone records. Imagine if Revenue Canada needed to put forward evidence in a 50-page brief in order to get access to the basic books and receipts to begin an audit. The current process to obtain digital phone records of an essentially public act, an essentially public communication, is the same process that detectives are required to follow in order to forcibly enter someone's home. Given that modem investigations are going to often involve the telephone, investigators need to have either the same powers as the CRTC to simply request records from carriers, or similarly, to have the right to request records of intelligence databases that match voters' complaints.
These CRTC-type tools to request calling records also make it easier to audit evidence provided by voter contact firms, simply by requesting the matching records from the carriers they send calls to. If a call centre that's subject to an investigation produces a table of calls as evidence, for example, as RMG did during the Federal Court challenge, it would be nice to be able to easily verify that there aren't any calls missing from the list. The ability to more easily cross-reference these records would add to the evidence value of these computer files.
The fact of a voter complaint must be enough to retrieve the relevant telephone records by canvassing major carriers to determine if the listed calls had transited their network. This allows the calls to be traced back to their call centre of origin using billing records. There has to be a change in the law to make it easier for Elections Canada to request telephone records. Like the CRTC, it is now in the 21st century, essentially a telecommunications regulator.
Investigations will end up requiring cooperation of international enforcement bodies, which must be facilitated in advance.
Election fraud at a sufficiently serious industrial scale may need to be declared to be at the level of priority as national security to permit international cooperation in tracing fraudulent calls to their originators, as this status is normally what is required to get other countries to process our subpoenas.
Imagine a foreign call centre distributing misinformation to influence the outcome of a foreign country's election, or simply debasing the integrity of the process. Offences that are now quite imaginable have the potential to be very serious, and require an appropriate framework for investigators.
Another point is that every piece of telecom equipment is designed to collect calling records in real time, as this is needed to do billing. These records from voter contact firms should be streamed to a secure records archiving facility at Elections Canada as a part of the voter contact registry. Contacting voters with a political message is fundamentally a public act, and making these records automatically available to Elections Canada for investigation or audit and archiving is simple transparency that would allow investigators to find a call that matches a voter's complaint with a simple search.
There is a great deal that can be done to facilitate the investigation into telephone voter fraud. For example, voter contact firms should essentially be auditable. What they do is a public act. Grant Elections Canada the power to audit the technical infrastructure and financial records of voter contact firms. They can start by simply auditing every firm that does voter contact and that did it in the last election.
I find it curious, after Parliament unanimously voted to provide new powers to Elections Canada following the revelations of the industrial-scale voter fraud that took place in the last election, that this bill instead would take relevant powers away.
Thanks, Mr. Chair.