Procedure and House Affairs Committee on June 5th, 2014

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to return to the matter of the $340,000 in illegal contributions received by the New Democratic Party. The contributions are illegal under subsection 404(2) of the Elections Act, which reads inter alia:

If a registered party...receives a contribution from an ineligible contributor, the chief agent of the registered party...shall, within 30 days after becoming aware of the ineligibility, return the contribution unused to the contributor or, if that is not possible, pay the amount of it...to the Chief Electoral Officer....

I've looked at how these were received over a period of three conventions, a period of a number of years, and looked at the very limited commercial value associated with the contributions; basically, it's this billboard at a convention centre. It is hard to believe that any person could have received this money and have accepted seriously that this was full value for money. Therefore, I would contend that the relevant officer or officers of the New Democratic Party were in contravention of subsection 404(2) of the Elections Act.

Not only ought these funds to have been returned but it seems to me that a prosecution ought to have occurred for the violation of that section of the act. They did not return those funds, clearly, within 30 days of having received them, not even within several years of having received the initial funds, let alone even the last funds.

I wonder if I could get your response to that.

[Marc Mayrand]

The only comment I can make is that the matter of enforcement is the exclusive jurisdiction of the commissioner. The decision to authorize charges lays with the DPP.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

You refer matters to the commissioner. In fact, the bulk of these cases were referred by you—I grant not all of them—but is it not the case that you could have referred this to the Commissioner of Canada Elections?

[Marc Mayrand]

The matter was referred, but the decision and what to do with the referral lies exclusively with the commissioner. The decision to allow charges or not allow charges is the responsibility of the DPP, as is the case in the current regime and it will be in the next one also.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

The decision to accept repayment, but to not place the relevant charge under subsection 404(2) was then, and to sign a compliance agreement which has not been made public, all something that the commissioner did subsequent to a referral from your office.

[Marc Mayrand]

Yes.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

That's very helpful, thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Madame Latendresse.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair. You know full well that I always have questions for the Chief Electoral Officer.

Mr. Mayrand, I would like to go back to some of the points I raised a little earlier.

In your presentation, you mentioned that one of your priorities is going to be to make sure that your office will be ready for an election called after April 2015. I would like to know why you mentioned that date specifically. Is it because, in your opinion, that would be the earliest date on which Elections Canada would be ready to supervise a general election under the new provisions to be put in place?

[Marc Mayrand]

Yes, that is a factor. We also look at our assessment of the environment and of the time we need to mobilize the resources. We have to deploy them before an election is called. When we say we want to be ready, we mean that, starting in April, we want to be ready to mobilize the necessary infrastructure across the country in order to conduct an election in an orderly fashion.

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

I did a comparison of the program you provided us with; it looks very interesting. I really liked the notes on the side, showing the time lines you are going to communicate to the voters. Having a communication plan as specific as this one is a very good use of the information for a fixed-date election.

Do you have any other plans? I assume that there is still a problem with communicating with people who are not yet voters, those who are under 18 years of age.

[Marc Mayrand]

Yes, we still do not have the power to collect data on Canadians under 18 years of age. We do not have that information. However, we do have information about almost 646,000 Canadians who have not yet agreed to be registered on the voters' list. Those are the people we would like to reach before the writs are issued.

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

When you say that some people have not consented to being on the list, do you mean that, at present, they are not on the list?

[Marc Mayrand]

At the moment, they are not on the list, but we know who they are and where they live. We have that information because it has been sent to us by the Canada Revenue Agency, by vehicle registration offices or by provincial electoral agencies. We know that they are voters and we know how to trace them. We communicate with them. We recently sent out 400,000 letters to them as a group, but the response rate is still low,

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

Going back to those under 18 years of age, do you have strategies for reaching those people to make sure that they are registered on the voters' list?

The principle is much the same. We know the date of the election and we know who will be 18 on that date. Are strategies possible that would allow—

[Marc Mayrand]

I do not know who will be 18 at the time of the election. Of course, our civics education programs will help to make young people and those around them aware of the use, and the importance, of getting on the list for the election.

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

Thank you, Mr. Mayrand.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

We'll go back to Mr. Reid for four or eight minutes. There are two spots in a row here, whichever you'd like to take.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Are there two spots for the Conservative party?

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Yes.

[Brad Butt, Conservative, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

You can start now, and then I'll go after you.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Let me start now before I use all the minutes up trying to figure out why that is.

Mr. Mayrand, you were before this committee on March 29, 2012. At that time we were looking into the question of robocalls.

As everybody recalls, there were two separate issues at work here. Issue number one was matters going on in Guelph. I'm well aware that these are now before the courts; in fact, I think they are before the courts this very day. I won't ask you to comment on them, but separately, there was an investigation into the accusation, which turned out to be an entirely unfounded accusation, that there had been a widespread nationwide robocalls attempt to mislead voters and guide them to the wrong polling locations.

It turned out after the fact that it was actually a group called Leadnow that was trying to encourage people to phone in. There were thousands of calls, mostly expressions of concern or e-mails, and most of them turned out to be template letters. Nonetheless, this created a media storm over an imaginary scandal.

You came before the committee and gave some testimony at that time on the subject. You said at that time, around 11 a.m., “We have added sufficient resources to deal with the inflow of communications and to contact electors who have specific factual allegations”, in other words, not the ones for addressing concern as a Canadian, but those who had specific allegations. That was subsequently something that was turned over to the commissioner who reported that in fact there were 1,700 actual complainants making 2,448 complaints, a substantial number of which turned out to be on an unrelated phishing scam that was confused in the minds of those electors.

At any rate, what I wanted to find out is, how much in actual resources was devoted to this? How many actual dollars wound up being involved?

[Marc Mayrand]

I'll get back to you on that; I don't have that detailed information today. That's two fiscal years ago. I'll be happy to come back to you.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Fair enough. This comes back to the issue of the commissioner's budget versus your budget, and now they are being separated out. Would these have been resources that were allocated from the consolidated revenue fund and went to the commissioner? If you were to go back and forensically examine it, would that be the case?

[Marc Mayrand]

It was statutory funds used to recruit individuals to basically deal with the take-in of information that was coming in, making sure that there were proper coordinates for those who were filing complaints, and providing that information to the commissioner so that he assigned it to investigators, so it's the incoming and managing the incoming.