As long as you have one of the authorized 39 pieces and the VIC, which was primarily authorized to show address, then you could vote.
One of the reasons for the project was that in fact the requirements for the new ID requirements only entered into force after amendments in 2006 and 2007 to the Canada Elections Act, before which there actually was pretty much a trust-based system of voting in this country in terms of ID not being necessary.
What it did is it produced enough evidence that people were not voting, not even going to the voting stations, because they were either confused or couldn't find the pieces of ID to put together, and it was decided that the VIC, which already existed as a notification of registration, could be used and authorized as a form of identification for this purpose. It worked as a major initiative. It led to—now didn't lead directly to, but in Mr. Neufeld's report, he had two corresponding recommendations. He had a bunch of recommendations about how to deal with irregularities, including better training and recruiting, but he ultimately said that one of the other goals should be to reduce the amount of vouching needed, not to get rid of vouching but to reduce the need, and one way to do that was to increase the availability of the VIC as a second piece of ID to show address, and that led to the Chief Electoral Officer saying It is indeed his intention to authorize the use of voter information cards in the next general election.
Perhaps completely unrelated to that, Bill C-23 was tabled in the House of Commons and eliminated the ability of the Chief Electoral Officer to authorize VICs, not just in the case of the 900,000 who were able to in 2011, but every Canadian who would have been able to use it in 2015.
The last point is that one of the kind of anecdotal scenarios in the last two months has been the multiplying VIC, the VIC that ends up in somebody's hands with the name in more than one way, with the formal possibility being suggested that the person could thereby try to vote multiple times. Another scenario has been the VIC that travels in groups, in lobbies of residences, and is picked up and somehow or other, in the fictional imagination of one Conservative MP, is then distributed to others who can then vote with them.
The problem with these scenarios, apart from there being no evidence it ever occurs along those lines, is that you need a second piece of ID to vote. You need to produce the ID that shows your name, your identity, that then gets used with the VIC. You would have to be motivated not just to say, “Ah, I can vote with this VIC, and I'm not going to vote in my own name.” You'd have to be that kind of person too, because you're not going to show up at the same polling station and vote twice under different names. The VIC would have to have been sent or get in the hands of somebody who otherwise can't vote, or doesn't want to vote in their own name, and then you'd have to be motivated to forge the second piece of ID.
Not likely, and so therefore it's not that surprising that the minister in the House, I believe it was Monday, giving all the examples to back up his claim that people receiving multiple VICs voting multiple times could not be backed up by virtue of the fact that the only two examples he continues to be able to give is of a satire show, Infoman, charting two people who ostensibly tried to vote with two VICs, but—you know what?—could not, and I won't go into the details about why they could not. So there are, in fact, no examples available to the minister of people using VICs fraudulently.
Yet, we have a proposal by the government to get rid of, certainly, the most accurate piece of federal ID as one piece of ID that can be used in tandem with another. It cannot be used on its own, according to the current system.
All this is, really, is an attempt to return the law to where it was and also, I hope, to avoid huge chaos in 2015, when all the people who were first introduced to the fact they could formally use VICs as part of their voting will now have to be reprogrammed to make sure they do not try to vote in that way this time and instead look for other pieces of ID. Many of them will be able to find these, with different degrees of effort, but certainly, let's say, at least in the thousands will not.
I'd like to move this amendment NDP-27, to achieve the return of voter information cards as something the Chief Electoral Officer may authorize.