Thank you very much, Chairman
Good evening, everybody.
My quick presentation this evening will focus basically on one major element of the bill itself, Bill C-23. I will focus on civic participation in the electoral process and particularly refer to the experience of Ethiopians in Toronto. This is all based on my observations and my engagement within the community.
My role in the community is president of the association. I'll just give you a quick briefing about the association. It has been serving Ethiopians and other newcomers for the last 34 years. It was established in 1980, and we have been providing services for settlement, crisis, for seniors, for youth, HIV/AIDS, and all other types of community initiatives within the community. Although our capacity has been significantly reduced recently, that's part of our mandate and focus, the community service we provide, and again, we are not limited to providing service to Ethiopians. We provide service to all other eligible newcomers as well, based on the specific program or service we offer.
To give you a quick profile of the Ethiopian community, although we don't have a very clear number, we estimate that about 50,000 Ethiopians reside in Toronto and the GTA. Some of the challenges in the community, based on some of the research, are the huge unemployment and underemployment in the community and some barriers in terms of access to services and programs in very specific areas.
The community is relatively new to Canada, here for the last 30 to 40 years. As a community, although we are trying to address the specific needs of the community, there is a huge gap, and there are a lot of areas that still need to be addressed, one being the active participation of community members—Ethiopians—in the electoral process of different levels of government in Canada, the municipal, provincial, and federal governments.
So on this line, I will just quickly go through my presentation about the bill itself. I would like just to quote the remarks given by the Chief Electoral Officer to this committee, I believe, the Standing Committee on Procedures and House Affairs on March 6:
It is essential to understand that the main challenge for our electoral democracy is not voter fraud, but voter participation. I do not believe that if we eliminate vouching and the VIC as proof of address we will have in any way improved the integrity of the voting process. However, we will...have taken away the ability of many qualified electors to vote.
So with this quotation from the Chief Electoral Officer, I would like to emphasize the key wording about voter participation. I will quickly go through my points: one, how we can engage a community like the Ethiopian Association to be actively involved with voting and the whole electoral process; two, the community engagement that we already have—we engage our community members—could be an opportunity to disseminate and educate the community members with civic education about the Canadian political arena; and three, how we can encourage voters. I don't have concrete data or figures to use here, but from my understanding and observation, I would assume not that many Ethiopians really vote, again, because of factors like social exclusion or inclusion elements, employment, time spent with the family, and time spent at work in support of families.
These are generic features that we hear of in other ethnocultural groups or ethno-specific groups, but again, this is true also in the Ethiopian community. So we need to have a strategy here, along with Bill C-23, which I understand has quite a broader scope than what I'm trying to present here.
But in the participation of our community, the community engagement work can really be done through another organization like the Ethiopian Association in partnership with the electoral office and other relevant organizations. For example, Canada's democracy week in September could be an opportunity where we can educate our community members in the electoral process.
I was involved in training with the Maytree Foundation here in Toronto. It started in 2011 to educate community members on how the different levels of government work. That type of model is also very important in tapping into the existing resources.
I know there are a lot of documents and resources in civic education but there also needs to be access in appropriate language and cultural ways because one of the elements here is the experience of new Canadians. For example, Ethiopians in their home country or in the country of origin and their political culture...political participation has oftentimes a negative impact on the participation of these new Canadians in the Canadian political system. Their experience may not have been a positive one. That will leave them in a situation where they always behave indifferently to the political system. They think their voice wouldn't make a difference or generally they are more reluctant to be part of any political engagement.
The education process has to be customized in a way to address the uniqueness of each community, and each voter as an individual or as part of a group or community. It is at that level that an organization like the Ethiopian Association could be a resource or a potential partner with other existing resources to disseminate education.
Again, first-time voters are also an issue. We need to work at the early stages in engaging parents and young voters within the community to get this education and awareness. That's actually another element. We know that parents and schools are playing a very significant role in the decision-making of their young children in the voting process. So we need to spend resources and effort in educating parents because it will have a compound effect. Although children can get some basic civic education in the schools, which also has an effect in educating their parents, we need to work at both ends to make it really significant and meaningful.
I am aware of the time so this would be my opening remarks.
Thank you very much.
