Okay. Just for the record, NDP-30 and NDP-31 would have been the NDP's amendments to restore the Canada Elections Act to the vouching provisions that are there, that we've lived with in this country until Bill C-23, but by virtue of the line conflict, we won't be able to move them so we'll discuss vouching in the context of this amendment. I wanted to be on record that those two amendments can't be put forward.
This is welcome, although it also has problems in scope. It's welcome in the sense that the committee did indeed hear among its 71 witnesses a lot of groups and representatives of groups who very articulately set out why it was that removing vouching from the Canada Elections Act could impact them, large numbers of different sectors of society. We already knew about 120,000 people had vouched in the 2011 election, and a face was put on that in committee, I would say, for a good chunk of the folks who would have needed to vouch.
At that level the outcry across Canada about the removal of vouching appears to have had an effect. I can only say I welcome and am glad the government is putting forward an amendment to their withdrawing of vouching that institutes a vouching by address system whereby one piece of ID plus vouching is going to allow people to vote.
I have a couple of concerns I want to flag and see if we can talk through them and get to the point of a possible very small amendment.
I'm not sure if people following the committee remember we had testimony from a Professor Abe Oudshoorn, who works with the homeless in London, Ontario. He described an organized process of vouching in London. Social workers and community workers on the day of the election will take clients who show up at their agency to polling stations and vouch for them. He later explained this meant they would obviously have to pair them up for their specific polling divisions because you can only vouch within your polling division.
This was made easier for a number of elections in one of our biggest agencies. The London InterCommunity Health Centre was a polling station, for example. Staff there were kept busy vouching. He predicted by the end of the day it was very hard to find a London social worker who hadn't vouched for somebody.
He explained it as follows. This was part of our testimony:
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.
The reason I've taken the time to set this out is that one of the provisions in amendment G-5 that sets out the conditions for vouching adds a threshold that doesn't currently exist in either the law or the practice of vouching under the Canada Elections Act.
I'm referring to new proposed subparagraph 143(3)(b)(ii). It basically says that one of the conditions of being able to vouch for somebody.... Actually, there are two paired together on the second page of the amendment:
(ii) they know the elector personally,
(iii) they know that the elector resides in the polling division,
At the moment, the law effectively is only the second one, (iii). They know that the elector resides in the polling division because it's taken as a given that when you know that, you actually know the person sufficiently to know that. There's no test for how well or how much better you know the person other than knowing that.
By introducing “they know the elector personally”—