Mr. Chair, I'd like to speak against this amendment.
As I've pointed out on a number of occasions in the past, notwithstanding the strange claim that this is the most accurate piece of identification in the Canadian arsenal of identification, the reality is that the Chief Electoral Officer, in his own report following the last election, observed that there was a 14% error rate as to addresses in the voter information card. He indicated that there was about a 10% error rate as to identity, so for one in ten persons, the system has the wrong person.
He also indicated that there was over a 20% error rate in 10 constituencies across the country. He did not specify which those constituencies were, but in the past we've seen that in Trinity—Spadina, just to take one example, where there was a special investigation subsequent to the 2006 election, there were literally thousands of people who had to be dealt with and signed up on election day because they weren't on the voters list.
Remember that the voter information card is, by definition, only as good as the voters list. What the CEO seems reluctant to state, but it's a fact, is that the voter information card comes from the preliminary voters list, not the final voters list, which actually is more accurate. But the voter information card, if it's used as information.... You know, something that tells me I should go and vote at this poll and that has an 80% chance of being right is.... In fact, I don't think it's that good, but it has an 80% chance of being right as to where I should go to vote. That's the information function.
As an identification function, what if your driver's licence in certain parts of the country had a 20% chance of identifying you not as Joe Preston, but as some other person, and some other person as Joe Preston, not you? You might be upset when you learn that you have had your driver's licence and your ability to drive revoked because somebody else was caught driving under the influence one time and was fined. That's pretty significant.
The voter information card was never intended to serve this purpose. The CEO conducted a series of experiments in its use as a kind of identification in a number of locations, as he said, on aboriginal reserves—not all aboriginal reserves in Canada, but some of them, quite a large number—in some seniors residences, in long-term care residence facilities, and finally, on campus. He reported considerable success in two of the three locations.
The success rate was very low for students, but it was interesting to see how he calculated his results to give the illusion that they achieved greater success than they actually did. He said, “Here's the number of people who turned up to vote, among these groups that we were testing, who carried the voter card with them.” That does not mean that x% of these people, of potential voters, were identified using this card. What it means is that of those who actually turned up to vote, x% brought it with them. I can't remember the exact numbers. It was in the 70% to 80% range, I believe, for the first two named groups. It was much lower for students.
Now, if you take another survey instrument that was done by the CEO, the study of youth voters and why youth do not participate, lack of a voter information card was cited as a reason that they don't vote by three of the five subgroups of young people who were not voting.
The voter information card is useful only for those who get it. There's a high error rate, where those who are getting it are not actually getting a correct card. Others are not getting it at all. They don't seem to be included at all in the CEO's statistics. It's yet another frustration for us, as the de facto board of directors trying to watch the professional management of Elections Canada, when we get these statistics that are denying us information that seems to be designed as much to hide that agency's incompetence as to reveal what it's doing.
In short, Mr. Chair, I was alarmed to learn that the CEO was intending to expand this experiment to the entire country. I am relieved that the option no longer exists.
On that basis, I'll be voting against this proposed change.