Procedure and House Affairs Committee on April 9th, 2014

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Thank you for joining us.

Thank you for joining us from British Columbia as well.

I want to go to Mr. Allen first, because I was very taken aback by what you had said about how it works at Pigeon Park Savings. I'm going to quote from what you said:

How do we open accounts for people without ID? As in the Elections Act, we rely on vouching. We rely on vouching from neighbours, financial assistance workers, housing providers, clinical workers including doctors and nurses, and so on.

This is where it's very important:

In over 10 years of operations, having opened accounts for more than 10,000 individuals, we have never had one case of fraud as a result of a falsified identity.

Mr. Allen, that's a pretty strong statement and we're talking about banking; we're not talking about a constitutional right, which is section 3 of our charter, when we talk about voting.

Our previous witnesses talked about not really seeing an incentive to commit fraud. But for some reason in this debate that we're having here, there is always this nefarious assumption that is tagged along with vouching, as if it's something we should be suspicious of as opposed to encouraging people to vote. Would you agree with that?

[Nathan Allen]

Yes absolutely. As I was saying before, if someone has an account with us and we know their account history, similar to someone being on the voter list, I believe that is enough trust for me to allow an account to open and for that person to deposit cheques, to deposit cash, to have money transfers go into the account and then to receive an ATM card and continue to have financial services.

We have to have this rule at Pigeon Park Savings Bank because otherwise we wouldn't have any account holders. Initially almost all of our accounts come from people who are very disenfranchised, homeless individuals who have experienced financial exclusion from other institutions, which have very strict identification requirements of having current ID, similar to what the rules would be if Bill C-23 is able to pass.

We have files on thousands of people. We do what we can to help people find identification, but as was mentioned by the other panellists, it does take a lot of effort to find someone's birth certificate, find someone's SIN card, find the money required to buy a B.C. identification card. So for people with mental health issues, it's very challenging to have the patience to do that. As you can imagine, people with addiction issues have other concerns as well.

I don't want to argue that some folks don't deserve the right to vote. I think that someone who is a mentally ill drug addict who's homeless still deserves the right to vote, even if some people don't think they are deserving of anything. I believe they can and should participate in the democratic process. Without much conversation saying what's at stake in some elections, people are very mobilized around things, and to deny them that franchise I find depressing. It's a great injustice when you see it at a systemic level where, in the Downtown Eastside, it's a high concentration of poor people.

Already I think the rules are very restrictive for people, with a lot of hoops to jump through in order to vote. To deny even the hoop to jump through to vote is a tragedy.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

This is disenfranchising on a major scale to you. This is going to be a real noticeable difference in this next election if this legislation is carried through in its current form. Is that correct?

[Nathan Allen]

I believe so, yes.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Okay.

Mr. Oudshoorn, I'm going to ask you to comment on what I just asked about vouching. But there is something else you said that actually caught my attention. You said there was a big gap with the attestation. We have heard a lot that attestation is going to be the cure for most ills when it comes to vouching. Can you elaborate a bit more on that big gap you're talking about?

[Dr. Abram Oudshoorn]

Sure. When you look at the terminology “ordinarily reside” and you look at the definition of homelessness, those two don't usually go hand in hand. Because of the services we're able to provide with shelters, for some that works. But for the majority, they're homeless because they have lost the place where they “ordinarily reside”.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Sorry, Ms. Mulholland, I didn't mean to exclude you. Do you have any comment on what's been discussed?

[Wanda Mulholland]

I'll just add that the idea of people being excluded from voting in their own country because of poverty and the complications connected with it is very discouraging. It does a disservice to everyone I work with.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Thank you very much.

Do I have time or not?

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

You have a minute and a half, Mr. Simms.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Oh, goodness.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

There are others who would take it.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Your generosity knows no bounds.

One of the issues we haven't discussed too much in this conversation is that we're now restricting Elections Canada to only provide the perfunctory information about where to vote and when to vote, which is fine. But the role of enticing and inspiring people to vote, to communicate, and to gather information will be hindered. Is that something that concerns you as well, Mr. Oudshoorn?

[Dr. Abram Oudshoorn]

Yes. Obviously people need to be aware of what's going on. I think one of the things, though, that stands to be mentioned to this committee is that, in my experience, people experiencing homelessness are quite aware. One of the things we do see is very high uptake of consumption of local news, so you see lots of access to newspapers in soup kitchens and shelters.

I would suggest that people experiencing homelessness are actually quite political and quite informed. These issues are very pertinent to them. It's their livelihood that is often at hand when we compare different policies from different parties. I believe, obviously, that the advertisement around elections is an important piece, but perhaps not for the population that I'm most familiar with.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you, Mr. Simms.

We'll go to Mr. O'Toole for four minutes, please.

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Durham, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you all for your work and for your appearance here.

I would suggest that the issue here, really, is voter participation. Elections Canada, in a 2007 study, identified homelessness as one of the areas where there's a significant barrier. They described it as one of three groups of persons with special needs impacting voter participation.

What you're saying, and what our previous witnesses said is that so much is going on, turnout is extremely low. But we've also heard from expert witnesses in both Canada and the U.S. who have said that voter participation has very little to do with identification or administration barriers and more with a variety of socio-economic and other aspects.

Mr. Simms said there's a nefarious assumption associated with vouching. The Neufeld report from Elections Canada said that 46% to 80% of vouching transactions have errors or are done incorrectly.

Finally, Mr. Oudshoorn and Mr. Allen have both talked about how challenging it is to work within vouching. Mr. Allen, you said it takes a lot of the day. Mr. Oudshoorn said that when a person experiencing homelessness but without identification enters an agency and expresses an interest in voting, they are connected with someone who can vouch for them. So this connecting people with vouchers, as Mr. Reid said, seems extremely difficult, much more than the burden of doing an attestation.

I've heard here the concerns about using attestations and whether one is ordinarily residing within a polling area. What if Elections Canada were to simplify a one-page attestation and make it much more simple for someone to qualify as ordinarily a resident, even if they haven't been seen in the shelter in some time? Would it not be easier for groups like yours on the front lines to use these simplified attestations to encourage more participation rather than matching vouchers on election day with T-shirts? I'd like your thoughts on that, please.

[Dr. Abram Oudshoorn]

I would agree. The vouching process is more effort than the letter of attestation. Currently, it fills in a gap when the letter of attestation doesn't work, so when someone comes in and we can't provide that, we can work with the vouching. A change to the letter of attestation would make it easier. So, for example, if all that was required was proof that this person receives services regularly rather than ordinarily resides, then that would definitely make the letter of attestation easier to use. But in the current structure with the letter of attestation not working for everyone, then the vouching does definitely fill in for that.

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Durham, ON]

My colleague Ms. Latendresse said that using the attestations is an enormous burden, but if we simplify it then what I'm getting from you is that it could actually be easier, less of a burden, than pairing up vouching people.

[Dr. Abram Oudshoorn]

I would highlight that it is just a one-pager right now. The form itself is fairly simple. It just asks who I am, where I work, who this person is, where he works, and where he ordinarily resides and receives services. It would require a change of the language to make it more effective.

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Durham, ON]

Mr. Allen or Ms. Mulholland, do you have any thoughts? If we simplified this, would it make it easier to raise participation rates?

[Nathan Allen]

I think doing anything to increase participation rates is a good thing. I don't think it's either/or though. I don't know why it needs to be exclusive so that we'd do vouching or we'd do attestation. Having both in place is probably for the best.

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Durham, ON]

If I can speak to that, I think participation—

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

You could if you had more time, but you don't, so we're going to move on to Mr. Scott for four minutes.

[Craig Scott, NDP, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

What I would say to Mr. O'Toole's question is that if he and the government side were willing to engage in a discussion on redefining what “address” means in the act, so that the letter of attestation...for people who are only receiving services and can't, in a reasonable sense, be said to reside there—then sure, why not? Let's do that.

At the same time, as Mr. Allen said, why not keep vouching as the final safety net and not get rid of the voter information cards? They do come from an intersection of databases that have not been shown to be liable to produce fraud.

Professor Oudshoorn, I'd like to just compliment you and your colleagues in London for what you do. The description of citizens helping citizens and the way you do it is absolutely inspiring, and I guess all I would do is echo Madame Alexandrine Latendresse's comments that the idea of adding extra burdens by getting rid of vouching, without anything that would be a sure replacement, does not make sense.

Mr. Allen, you used another amazing metaphor. You said there are already lots of hoops to jump through and that taking the hoop away is just too much to accept. I thought that was an amazingly accurate and poignant image, so thank you for that.

I did want to ask you just a little bit more, because Mr. Reid started on this, and he asked some very good questions on the bank account opening. I just want to point out an irony here. At some level, vouching to open a bank account—and you said that in 10,000 or so cases there has been no instance of fraud as a result that you know of. In the end, you're a bank, and presumably if paper forms of the bank statement were available, those could turn into proof of address within the current system, if you had a second piece of ID, which people may not. So why not allow vouching in the first place if that which produces a valid address in the system is vouching?

[An hon. member]

Hear, hear!