Procedure and House Affairs Committee on April 9th, 2014

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Yes. But first of all, why vouching? Clearly even when it's made very general it doesn't seem to actually resolve all problems, and then the problem the prescription bottle resolves.

[Leslie Remund]

There are lots of problems to getting out the vote in low-income communities, especially given the high needs of that community to start with. Our position is that vouching is not the solution, nor is the voter identification card a solution to something. But when you look at the list of all those options and what is realistic in the hands of the people we know.... I went through the list and among them there were eight or nine that I've regularly seen people having versions of in my 18-year career. So our issue is that taking two more reasonable options away from people limits the ability to vote in our community. That's why the prescription bottle.... We didn't expect everyone was going to go with the prescription bottle, but it was one more realistic option that people had in their hands.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you very much.

We're going to stop right there, and we'll suspend for a couple of minutes.

We'll thank our guests. Thank you very much for your help tonight and for the information you were able to share with us.

We will suspend for just a couple of minutes while we change to our next panel.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

We'll come back to order, please. We'll go to our second hour. We have two guests on video conference from Vancouver, British Columbia, tonight. We have Wanda Mulholland, a community development coordinator for the Burnaby Task Force on Homelessness, and we have Nathan Allen from the Portland Hotel Society.

Welcome to you both.

Then we have Abram Oudshoorn from the great city of London and the London Homeless Coalition.

We welcome you all. We're going to start with opening statements from our guests on video conference. I always like to do that, and then if we lose the connection or something, we at least have your opening statements in.

Ms. Mulholland, would you like to start off for us tonight?

[Wanda Mulholland, Community Development Coordinator, Burnaby Task Force on Homelessness]

Thank you very much.

Thank you for the opportunity to present a submission to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs regarding Bill C-23, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act.

I specifically wish to speak to the importance of vouching in the election process.

My name is Wanda Mulholland. I am the community development coordinator for the Burnaby Task Force on Homelessness, which was formed in January 2005. The task force is non-partisan and comprises representatives from government agencies, the health authority, RCMP, social service and community organizations, business improvement associations, housing providers, faith communities, and concerned citizens, who are all committed to working together to identify and address issues of homelessness in the city of Burnaby.

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 25, section (1) states:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

I speak on behalf of Burnaby citizens who live in extreme poverty and homelessness. These Canadian citizens do not benefit from many of the basic rights proclaimed in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

We know that poverty is the leading cause of homelessness. Twenty per cent of the homeless are visible on the street. The other 80% are the hidden homeless, staying temporarily with friends or on a couch.

Many of the men and women living in poverty are employed—the working poor—or are students or citizens living on low income. All are living in temporary and unsuitable locations, facing challenges regarding safety, adequate sleep, clothing, food, access to medical care, and access to suitable housing.

Each person has his or her own life circumstance that led to homelessness. Some of the influencing factors include loss of employment, fire, illness, traumatic incident, disability, family issues, mental illness, drug addiction, or combinations thereof.

Many people who are currently homeless have led what others would consider to be productive lives until something caused their life to unravel. These are people who held careers that included firefighter, teacher, business owner, successful university student, published author, loving parent. Many have, through homelessness, lost their families, their community, and their sense of self-worth.

At every turn the homeless are ostracized from mainstream society. People living in poverty have obstacles in utilizing public transportation because they do not have the funds for the transit fare. People living in poverty are prevented from using washrooms in businesses because those facilities are only for paying customers. People living in extreme poverty are isolated and rejected because they often do not conform to society's expectations of hygiene, appearance, and behaviour. People living in poverty are often fearful for their own safety because they do not have the security of a home to protect themselves from the vengeance of others.

People who are homeless frequently are without identification with which to access medical or government services. The lack of identification also impedes a person's ability to vote. In municipal, provincial, and federal elections, the Burnaby Task Force on Homelessness has worked with a member agency to offer assistance to marginalized people interested in voting. We have offered the use of attestation forms to vouch for a person who is without all of the proper identification required for voting.

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms states that

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.

Removing the option of vouching prevents marginalized people from exercising their right to vote as Canadian citizens. It is yet another way of ostracizing people from the rights of citizens in mainstream society because they are poor.

On behalf of Canadian citizens all across the country who are living in extreme poverty and homelessness, including citizens from Burnaby, British Columbia, the Burnaby Task Force on Homelessness recommends that the House of Commons Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs view the proposed amendments to the Elections Act as unconstitutional and undemocratic, and as a significant infringement on the basic rights of many vulnerable Canadian citizens.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you, Ms. Mulholland.

We'll go to Mr. Allen now for an opening statement, if you could, please.

[Nathan Allen, Manager, Pigeon Park Savings, Portland Hotel Society]

Thank you.

Thank you to the committee for allowing this time to provide some on-the-street information about some of the challenges faced by low-income Canadians in providing identification credentials.

I've been a resident of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside for more than 12 years. Most of that time I've worked as a manager of Pigeon Park Savings Credit Union, which is also branch 48 of Vancouver City Savings Credit Union and run in partnership with the PHS Community Services Society. Pigeon Park Savings opened more than 10 years ago to provide financial services to low-income residents of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, containing within it the subdistricts of Gastown, Chinatown, and Strathcona.

The Downtown Eastside is Vancouver’s oldest neighbourhood and was once a work camp with a high concentration of hundreds of units in what are now called single-room occupancy hotels or SROs. These rooms are 10 feet by 10 feet with shared bathrooms on each floor, about six-storey buildings, and 100 years ago SRO hotels provided working men a place to stay between jobs in the forest. Some might be familiar with the Canadian country music legend Ian Tyson's song Summer Wages, which is about life in Vancouver at that time.

Over the years of course that resource-based work moved farther away from the cities, services and businesses left the Downtown Eastside, and these hotels became home to Vancouver's poorest residents. Vancouver, with an important shipping port, major airport, and close proximity to the United States, saw an increasing availability of illicit narcotics, and these drugs flooded into the Downtown Eastside, where alcoholism was already endemic. Initially these narcotics were opiates like heroin, and now for the last 20 years or so there's a high prevalence of crack cocaine and more recently crystal methamphetamine.

While this influx of narcotics on the street increased, police engaged in a containment strategy of herding drug dealing and prostitution out of other more affluent areas of Vancouver and concentrating the drug and sex trades in the Downtown Eastside. At the same time, governments moved toward the deinstitutionalization of mental health services, without providing sufficient alternative resources in communities, resulting in an influx of unsupported mentally ill people into the Downtown Eastside. Also, the legacy of policies of residential schools is keenly felt in the neighbourhood, where for example nearly one in four homeless people identify as aboriginal. They're 2% of the population.

Meanwhile, senior levels of government got out of the business of building housing, and increased development pressure in downtown Vancouver has driven up housing costs, further decreasing affordable housing stock. Additionally, as Vancouver does not have the freezing cold winters of the rest of Canada, it also does not have the same shelter infrastructure as eastern Canadian cities do.

What does this have to do with voting?

Because of all that I just referenced, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside has an exceptionally high number of eligible voters who do not have the identification necessary to participate in a Canadian election.

Pigeon Park Savings has served the Downtown Eastside community since 2004. The bank was a necessary intervention, as it is very difficult for low-income citizens to obtain financial services. The biggest challenge in doing so is producing the adequate identification required to open an account. This adequate identification is the same as is required to vote.

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. 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.

Why is finding adequate identification a problem?

The number one reason is cost. Photo identification such as a B.C. ID card or driver's licence costs at least $40, and for someone living on income assistance of around $200 a month that cost is out of reach for many people, and effectively acts as a poll tax on citizens.

Insecure housing and homelessness make it very difficult for people to hold onto their possessions as well, and depressingly, people who are found asleep outdoors will often have their pockets picked, or if living in insecure housing like those SROs available to very poor Downtown Eastside residents, their rooms are often robbed.

Finally, mental health and addictions remain in a crisis situation in Vancouver. My experience working with people who struggle with mental illness is that it is often a challenge to navigate bureaucracies like those required to acquire identification documents. Also, for individuals struggling with acute mental health issues, it is difficult to keep documents, as they are often misplaced or lost.

In conclusion, I can only state from my experience that voters living on the margins of our society—people who I believe should be voting, as public policy directly affects them—require another mechanism to exercise their right to vote. For thousands of very vulnerable citizens, producing the credentials required may be impossible.

I urge the committee to think about the tens of thousands of homeless Canadian voters when amending laws governing our elections, and consider ways to ensure all eligible voters have access to our democratic system.

Thank you again.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you, Mr. Allen.

Mr. Oudshoorn, your opening statement, if you would, please....

[Dr. Abram Oudshoorn, Chair, London Homeless Coalition]

I also extend my thanks to the committee for having me here today.

I present to you today on behalf of the London Homeless Coalition and the London Community Advocates Network; however, my comments also draw heavily on my experience working front-line as a nurse with people experiencing homelessness at the London Intercommunity Health Centre and on my current position as an assistant professor in the Arthur Labatt Family School of Nursing, where my research and teaching focus on the intersections of poverty, housing, and health.

There are two brief pictures I hope to paint for you, to in some small way bring you the realities, as the other witnesses have, of Canadian citizens experiencing homelessness. These are obtaining identification and then a picture of what happens on typical election day in London, Ontario.

Maintaining and obtaining identification is one of the key challenges faced by people experiencing homelessness in terms of barriers to exiting homelessness and exiting poverty in general. Both qualitative and quantitative research studies have continually highlighted the rapid decline of possessing current and accurate identification starting from the date of first homelessness. That is to say, the longer one is homeless, the exponentially less likely one is to have current and accurate identification. This particularly impacts those living with a mental health challenge as well as women fleeing domestic violence.

How is identification lost? Unfortunately, as others have said, it's frequently stolen along with one’s personal possessions. It's also lost in the chaos of people's lives. At times it's left behind if a person is unable to return to a shelter where their belongings are temporarily stored or if women fleeing violence are unable to go back and access their possessions.

Once identification is lost, as has been mentioned, the process to replace it is laborious, expensive, and long. Individuals often have to start right back at connecting with their community of birth to obtain a birth certificate, then wait four to eight weeks for this to come in before accessing the next piece of identification. This process is also a challenge as one requires a permanent address throughout the process for where that ID is going to. Fortunately, many agencies that serve people who are homeless are well-equipped and used to serving as a permanent address on a temporary basis. Unfortunately, due again to the chaos in people’s lives, the process of replacing lost identification is often interrupted. There are many times when pieces of ID, after being ordered, end up sitting unclaimed as the person enters a new cycle of distress. Therefore, on any given day a significant number of people experiencing homelessness in Canada find themselves without identification.

This is a challenge, but historically in London we've been able to rise to that challenge. Health and social service agencies in London mobilize every election day to ensure, as much as possible, that citizens who want to vote are able to in spite of their housing status and identification challenges. This community-wide mobilization focuses firstly on ensuring that individuals are using an agency for their permanent address and are thus able to obtain the voter ID card. For those who have not received that or if it's gone to a different place, the next level of mobilization is with the provisions under 143(3) of the Canada Elections Act, known colloquially as the vouching system.

As you are aware, under this section of the act, those with proper identification are able to vouch for another citizen within their polling area. Part of what we do is first make sure that the agencies serving the homeless know how it works—so, workers across health and social service agencies are made aware of these provisions and people self-identify who live within polling areas where many people who are homeless are located.

When a person experiencing homelessness but without identification enters an agency and expresses an interest in voting—often the agencies have a sign that says, “Ask us how you can vote”—they are connected with someone who can vouch for them, whether it's someone who works in the agency or another person who's homeless who's also said that they would like to vote. They will be accompanied by someone who can vouch for them at the polling station. This is made simpler in our community because one or more of the serving agencies use our polling stations and it makes it a little easier for everyone in terms of the walking.

So this gives you a bit of a picture of what we do.

To this statement I would like to add a bit of a clarification on the letter of attestation because this is something that, unlike the previous witnesses, we do use quite frequently within London. Unfortunately, the wording is that the person ordinarily resides and receives services at such-and-such agency. That works well for some people. If people have been in a shelter for a while, that works. For others, whether they're sleeping rough, transient from city to city, couch surfing and their address is changing, or whether they're recently admitted into social housing so their housing status is changing, that doesn't work. Although we do use the letter of attestation quite a bit, it still leaves a big gap, which is where the vouching fills in.

Under Bill C-23 the provisions of subsection 143(3) are removed. This will present a very real challenge to people experiencing homelessness across Canada and disenfranchise them from a significant part of the democratic process. Unfortunately, a full identification replacement is simply not achievable on time, in most cases. As hard as we try, it just often isn't there on time, and the agencies do try their best. This means that if Bill C-23 proceeds as written, a particular subset of the population would be adversely impacted. In any policy analysis, when a particular subset is affected, that is a red flag.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you very much.

We're moving well on time.

I'll go to Mr. Reid, for seven minutes please.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I'll start with you, Mr. Oudshoorn.

You talked about the attestation forms and your use of them. I gather that if someone goes in to vote with an attestation form, they also require another piece of identification. That form on its own is not sufficient. Is that correct?

[Dr. Abram Oudshoorn]

I would have to defer to a social worker to answer that question.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

The reason I ask is I was basing it on what the Chief Electoral Officer puts out on his website about what you need to have. He says that an original document with name and address is required, but it's in a category that says “Show two pieces of authorized identification. Both pieces must have your name and one must also have your address”.

I gather that this is one of the two and it's the one with the address.

The reason I ask is, that piece of identification, if we treat it as unique, one that would serve on its own, would it be helpful? I gather you're not actually able to answer that question.

[Dr. Abram Oudshoorn]

One thing I do know from my colleagues who provide the direct service, the social workers, is that it's that “ordinarily reside and receive services from” that's the bigger issue. They do give out the letters of attestation as people request them. But they can do it only if they are able.

For example, if someone comes to the Intercommunity Health Centre, which provides a lot of the services, the centre doesn’t necessarily know where that person ordinarily resides. So it would be dependent upon a shelter. it could be a shelter where the person may have just come in that night or it could be a shelter that provides a nightly service, like a managed alcohol drop-in or recovery situation where people come and go.

Again, it's the “ordinarily reside” that becomes an issue. That letter is helpful for some but not all.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

I was about to interrupt you. I hate it when people do that, so I'm glad you finished because now I don't have to interrupt you.

Wouldn't that be a problem with vouching anyway? If a person is in a sense “in flux” as to where they reside that very day, then finding someone who resides in the same poll to vouch for them becomes an issue, I would think.

[Dr. Abram Oudshoorn]

It's different then because…say I'm the nurse at a health centre and someone I know walks in. I've seen them and I know their name. If it matches up with their file of providing services and they happen to live in the poll that I live in, then that is a requirement that is met.

I think what you'll see in these situations is that each part of the system, whether it's the vouching or the letter of attestation, has a bit of a different scenario for the individual, and the current suite of options provides the most ability for everyone to vote.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

As you can see, one thing I'm trying to figure out is whether that letter of attestation can be adjusted and made more useful.

I don't know if you know the answer to this question. If you do, I'll keep on asking you questions. But if you don't, I'll turn to one of the other witnesses.

Does Elections Canada provide a standard blank form?

[Dr. Abram Oudshoorn]

Yes, it does.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Then they do have one and that's what you use.

[Dr. Abram Oudshoorn]

We print it off, and there is a section for the individual to fill out and a section for the service agency provider to fill out.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Right, and they keep a list of the authorized signatures of people who have worked at the shelters, is that how it operates?

[Dr. Abram Oudshoorn]

That's a detail I would not know.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Maybe I can ask Ms. Mulholland, then.

You had said, and I actually wrote it down, that, “We've offered the use of attestation forms to vouch for persons who have no ID”.

I want to ask you about something in that quote. But first, I'll ask about the forms you're using. As I was asking Mr. Oudshoorn, do you know the answer to that?

[Wanda Mulholland]

Yes, the forms we've used have been provided by Elections Canada. The way we've been instructed to use them, through our member agency, is that the address on those forms would be the address of the agency, for people who are of no fixed address. That's how we've been able to identify that we know the person, that this is their address, and that it fits within that catchment.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

So you don't actually know their address, in the sense that they are of no fixed address. But essentially you know they're local and likely to be within that poll or couple of polls, that sort of thing.