Mr. Chair, the purpose as I understand it of the section of the amendment that would become the new proposed subparagraph 143(3)(b)(ii) containing the words “they know the elector personally”, is to make sure that some of the basic qualifications one must have in order to vote are fulfilled.
Knowing that someone resides in a polling division is also required, and this is of course a good start. We need to know as well that the individual who is being vouched for is eligible to vote based on their criteria. You have to be 18 years old to vote. You have to be a Canadian citizen to vote. Now I will grant that there are many people who are obviously over the age of 18. I might submit myself as a case study in this regard. I do want to say for the record that I was carded once after I reached the age of 40—true story—but I have a suspicion that I looked not like a youth but rather like a liquor inspector. Anyway, that's my guess.
Be that as it may, there are people, and students are an excellent example of this, who may or may not be of voting age. Often they will look younger than the voting age when in fact they're over, and the reverse. This is a reasonable thing. You have to know the person personally in order to determine that. A person can easily establish their identity through a piece of identification without being able to establish their age. Likewise, considering the large list of types of identification that are acceptable, including everything down to utility bills, most of these things do not include date of birth, nor do they include citizenship. Indeed I am hard pressed to think of anything other than a passport that actually serves as identification as to your identity that also indicates whether you are a citizen of Canada.
These are two things that are accomplished in this particular case. I, too, kept careful records of the witnesses who came before this committee raising concerns about individuals who would not be able to vote if vouching were removed and not replaced with something. I am hard pressed to think of a plausible example that qualifies. The example that had the greatest resonance with me was the example offered by one of the witnesses who asked what happens to a woman who has left a violent and abusive husband and is now residing outside her home. Initially, I thought she was making reference to somebody residing in a shelter for battered women, but she said later on that what she meant was someone who's living with her sister.
Using either of those two examples, the individual is unlikely to have literally no identification at all. In the event that she's at the shelter for battered women, she is very likely to have or to be capable of getting an attestation from the administrator of that home. In the event she's with her sister, there are any number of pieces of identification that don't attest to her address but do attest to her identity that she would either have or would be capable of getting in fairly short order. Remember, the CEO has the ability to create new identification that would allow her to establish this. I'm not actually saying he will do this, but he could do this if he wanted to. For example, he could allow that famous prescription bottle that is used in British Columbia to be used. I'm not recommending that necessarily, but it was suggested to us as a possibility.
Establishing some form of identity is fairly reasonably established. Remember that her sister, using this example, can vouch that she is indeed someone she knows personally. The only people I can imagine falling into the category of where no one knows them personally.... It doesn't say intimately, you'll notice. It says personally. The person is not just introduced to you that day.
I'm struggling. You have to be literally outside your community and outside your community in a way where you have not established any knowledge because you are an extraordinarily recent arrival, as in within the last few days or less than a week, I would think.
I'm struggling here. I guess one could argue that a homeless person who has just arrived in a municipality has this problem. But don't forget that for all people, including homeless people, there's the option of voting at the returning office, at the advance poll, and on polling day, to say nothing of a number of special balloting options.
I am not suggesting that these are easy options to access. Nothing is easy for you when you're a homeless person, but the point about them is that they're spread out over time chronologically, meaning that you're not likely to be someone who is not known personally to anybody at all, even if you're a homeless person.
I suppose if we conjured up an example of somebody who lives in the woods, unknown to other human beings, and who emerges on voting day, we would indeed have hit somebody who would not qualify to vote under this.
Now I want to go back and point out what is fundamentally wrong with Professor Scott's argument and indeed with the entire argument that the opposition has been making from the start. Their argument is that the right to vote under section 3 of the charter is sacrosanct, and I'm willing to concede that is true. It is so sacrosanct that if we can find one example, no matter how preposterous, anywhere in the country, we should therefore expect the Supreme Court to overturn every single measure required to ensure that people who are not eligible won't be voting. We have to strip away all security, all potential to avoid fraudulent voting.
I know their argument, their additional argument, that there is no electoral fraud in Canada—none, zero, nothing, nada, rien, ever. They point, I suppose, to the 2011 election from which there were no prosecutions, and the 2008 election from which there were no prosecutions.
But I make the humble suggestion that in a country where many millions of people vote across the country, with inadequately trained personnel—we all concede that occurs—with inadequate voters lists—we all concede that, including the CEO, who points out that the voter information card has a 14% error rate with regard to identity.... The voter information card is issued on the basis of the preliminary voters list, not the final voters list, which admittedly is improved. The rate is over 20% in ridings he has chosen not to identify for us. I would argue that there is indeed, in some situations, fraudulent voting. We just can't track it.
Numerous members of Parliament, from literally all parties—Liberal, NDP, Conservative, and Bloc Québécois—when we were dealing with the piece of legislation that came prior to some amendments to the Elections Act that came in 2006, all stated that fraudulent voting was a concern. All of them did.
This is the goal: to strike a reasonable balance. I think we have gone an extraordinary distance to ensuring that no plausible scenario can exist, as opposed to the implausible, and we can always invent something. Another example that occurred to me was that of someone who was kidnapped by aliens and returned to Earth just on election day, and their ID was out of date or was kept by the aliens. Who knows? But no plausible scenario exists in which an individual will be unable to cast a ballot during the writ period given all of these safeguards that are in place, including the ones that are here, including the numerous safeguards that have been in existence for some time, such as the existence of advance polls, voting at returning offices, and so on.