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.