Procedure and House Affairs Committee on April 10th, 2014

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

The reason I asked the question is that I'm struggling to see where there would be an issue for a student to be able to prove their residence. Here's how I come to that.

When you're a student and you're attending a post-secondary institution away from home, you have a choice on where you're voting. It's determined by where you consider your residence to be, where your permanent home is. That home is either going to be the home that you grew up in with your parents, where you're going to return in the summer, like in most cases, or it's going to be where you consider now home at the place where you're attending the academic institution, if that's what you consider to be your permanent residence.

What we've heard from many people is that in the case where they are attending the school away, but their parents' home is where they are receiving all their correspondence, to me that would indicate that is in fact their home. I think one of the problems is that Elections Canada is doing a very poor job right now of letting people in those kinds of situations know what all the options are for them, because there are a number of options. There is, of course, a special ballot that someone can have through the mail.

I also believe that they can appear at any returning office anywhere in the country, so at the place they're in school, prior to advance polling day and cast a ballot for their home riding. So there are plenty of opportunities. If your residence is there—

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you, Mr. Richards.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

—and you're able to prove it, you can cast one there. At school, of course, you would have a residence there, say they're in residence, or you'd move your mailing, obviously, to your permanent residence.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

I'm rather liking my invisibility.

Thank you, Mr. Richards.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

You were worried about there being too long an answer.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Yes.

We'll move on to Mr. Scott for four minutes, please.

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

Great, thank you, and thank you, all three, for such powerful and articulate presentations.

I particularly want to recognize Leadnow with respect to this particular bill. Right from the beginning you helped raise the alarm with Canadians and you said something very important, Mr. Shedletzky, near the beginning of your presentation. You said there are many problems in Bill C-23 and a focus on voter ID risks diverting our attention from those other elements. I'll come back to that because I'd like you to, after I've made a couple of other comments, just to summarize what you think really needs attention beyond the voter ID stuff.

On the encouragement of voting, it's also worth noting that this bill makes it much harder to do experiments with online voting. It's singled out for not just full House of Commons approval and thus, blocking, but Senate blocking of any such pilot projects, which I would have thought from the student perspective is not something all that welcome because I hope students would want us to be ready when the technology and public confidence level is there for online voting to be used at least in a supplementary way.

The last thing is that I very much hope that at some point we will have a fair elections bill that's about fair voting, that's about making every vote count, and that it would include proportional representation within our electoral system, which we know more or less can increase the vote by 2% to 5% as well.

That said, Apathy is Boring, this is an amazing document, this card, but the irony is that if we were to look at this in terms of post Bill C-23, it's not even clear Elections Canada would be able to partner with this at all, because the new language of proposed section 18 talks about an exclusive list of things that Elections Canada can do, and, “The Chief Electoral Officer may provide the public...with information on the following topics only”.

Those topics include this side, but they would never include this side:

The future is ours: 50% of the Aboriginal population is under...27. It's up to us to own it.

Elections Canada would be banned from helping with this side. They might even be banned from helping with this side because the language in the existing act of, “The Chief Electoral Officer may implement public education information programs”, is removed, and the provision that says “The Chief Electoral Officer may, using any media or other means” is removed. So it's not at all clear that the current provision will even allow partnerships with bodies such as yourselves. I think that should be a real concern given how you are advancing the ball down the field with this kind of stuff.

Back to Mr. Shedletzky. I'm wondering if you could just tell us what you think we should be paying attention to. You have about a minute.

[Adam Shedletzky]

Well, in our opinion this bill is a battle between talking points and reason. On the one hand, you have the government saying it is fair and reasonable that Canadians should have to show ID to vote. That's a good talking point. That's what they want to make this bill about. They don't want to make it about not giving the power to compel testimony, about exempting fundraising costs, about muzzling Elections Canada, about not permitting voter-engagement campaigns, or about appointing central polling officers in a partisan manner rather than in a neutral and unbiased way. They want to focus it on their talking point.

I think it's important, and our community thinks it's important, that we focus on the broader bill, the challenges we face in not having an all-party process and of having the perception of bias, in addition to actual bias, in this bill, which is going to stack the deck in the favour of the Conservative Party for 2015. That's why we need to focus on the entirety of this bill and work as hard as we can to stop it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you very much.

I have one more speaking spot for the government side.

Mr. Lukiwski, go ahead.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

Thank you very much, and thank you all for being here.

I honestly don't know the answer to this and that's why I'm going to ask the question.

During your presentations you've all talked, in part, about the need to try to increase voter participation from young people. Elections Canada, over the past number of years, has had initiatives to try to increase voter participation, yet the statistics show the participation of the younger demographic, I think from 18 to 25, has actually gone down, and gone down significantly.

I'm not saying that their advertising is pushing people away, but I'd like to get your views on why you think young people now, after an extensive advertising campaign and voter information campaign from Elections Canada.... It is actually proving to be ineffective.

[Youri Cormier]

Yes, I can start with that one.

The question is extremely wide. Obviously, we're seeing something that's international not just here in Canada. A lot of factors are at play including, for example, youth poverty, youth unemployment, and youth education levels. More people are going to school, which has the impact of making people move a lot.

Also, one generation ago our parents were a lot richer than current youth are. There's been a 12% decrease in the accumulated wealth of people under the age of 30 in the past 30 years, despite the economy having grown considerably since then. This is in real numbers and in real, constant, dollars. The impact is that youth don't own homes at the same rate as their parents would have back in the seventies or sixties. That's one of the factors that increase voter participation and civic engagement. There's research that shows that if you're a homeowner, you're more engaged in your community and you're much more likely to be on the registration list because you're stable in your living place.

Now, I will give you an example of what this means in B.C. I don't have the numbers for the federal government, but I encourage you to search them out. People over the age of 60 in B.C. are 91% likely to be correctly on the registration list, whereas that drops to 72% for people who are under the age of 30. The accuracy of the list itself is much lower for younger people. Then, add to that the fact that a lot of young people are simply not on the list at all. In B.C., 55% of youth are either not on the electoral list or incorrectly on the electoral list.

If we're going to talk about getting people out to vote for the federal election in a year from now, we have to start figuring out how we're going to get people to be correctly on the list, and that means a huge brainstorm, nationally, to fix that problem.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

You have about a minute left.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

One of the provisions in C-23 is the requirement for Elections Canada to communicate with Canadians as to the methods and how to vote. This would address some of the concerns, as you're saying, that a lot of younger people in particular aren't aware not so much as to whether they should be voting, what their constitutional rights are, and the benefits of participating in the voting process, but as to the nuts and bolts of how to. That in itself would be a promotional campaign, because any time you're talking about voting in an election in general, you're promoting the fact that an election is imminent.

In other words, a concentrated campaign directed, perhaps targeted, towards younger voters on the how-tos, the nuts and bolts of what you need to do to be able to vote, when the election would be held, where the voting would be held, how, and what kinds of ID you would need to vote—would that be effective, in your view?

[Youri Cormier]

It's only part of the answer, because—

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

Would that portion be effective?

[Youri Cormier]

Would that portion be effective? Not unless there's motivation backing it, so that people want to find out how to vote.... If you don't make that first leap, you're not going to do the extra mile to find out.

[Éliane Laberge]

That was something we observed quite clearly in talking to the thousands of students we met in the past few weeks. If they don't know why they should vote, who they should vote for, as well as when and how to vote, they won't bother to find that information. From a voter's perspective, knowing what the platforms of the various political parties are and why voting matters are equally as important as knowing when, where and how to vote.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

I could go on longer on this, but we're going to have a bit of committee business, and I must leave at one o'clock today. I have a Skype interview with a high school class, which I've been looking forward to.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

That will get them out to vote.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

That's it.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

You're doing your part.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Okay, make fun of the chair, it works.

So we will adjourn and thank our guests.

No, we won't adjourn, we won't do any of that. We'll suspend while our witnesses leave.

Yes, I better suspend now that I have gavelled. So suspend just for a minute while our witnesses leave. Then we'll come back for committee business very quickly, folks. Thanks.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

We're back and we have exactly three minutes until the chair must leave.

Madam Latendresse, I believe it's your motion.

[Alexandrine Latendresse, NDP, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Yes, it is.