Procedure and House Affairs Committee on Nov. 6th, 2014

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

I call the meeting to order. Committee, we are in public today.

We have our colleague Kennedy Stewart with us to talk about his private member's bill. He's going to give a five-minute opening statement, and then we're going to grill him severely on his topic.

Let's go ahead and get that done.

Mr. Stewart, at your leisure.

[Kennedy Stewart, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Mr. Chair, it's a great privilege to be here today. Thanks very much for taking the time to listen to me.

On January 29, 2014, members from all parties in the House of Commons passed my private member's motion M-428. Motion M-428 instructs this committee “to recommend changes to the Standing Orders and other conventions governing petitions so as to establish an electronic petitioning system”, as well as to consider the possibility of triggering a debate in the House of Commons “when a certain threshold of signatures is reached”, and finally to “report its finding to the House” within 12 months with proposed changes to the Standing Orders and other conventions governing petitions.

I hope today to provide you the information you need to carry out these instructions with my presentation here this morning and through the testimony of expert witnesses. With my few remaining minutes, I'll outline the current petitioning process and provide more detail as to new measures I think should be adopted.

By way of definition, electronic petitions, or e-petitions, follow the same rules as our current petitioning system, using modern technology to enhance but not replace paper petitions. E-petitions are available to residents of other democratic countries, including the U.K., U.S., Germany, Australia, Scotland, Wales, and Canadian legislatures in Quebec and the Northwest Territories.

Canada's current paper-based petitioning system only allows Canadians to draft and sign petitions in hard copy, which will only be ruled eligible for submission if they: one, are addressed to the House of Commons, government, a minister, or member; two, contain a clear request to remedy a grievance; three, concern a subject within the authority of Parliament, the House, or government; and four, do not contain improper, disrespectful, or unparliamentary language. Paper petitions currently garnering 25 valid signatures receive a written response from the government within 45 days of being tabled.

Motion M-428 proposes that our new e-petition system follow many of these existing paper-based petitioning rules, as well as rely on existing staff and infrastructure, but allow Canadians to draft and sign petitions using electronic means, and that those garnering a certain number of signatures trigger a debate but not a vote in the House of Commons.

I'll end my statement by reviewing the table on page five of the handout that I provided to you. As proposed, e-petitions will help more citizens engage in the democratic process between elections using a very low cost procedure with no fewer than four safeguards built in to ensure only the most serious of issues are ever debated in the House of Commons, with low cost but effective security measures put in place to protect the integrity of the process and privacy of Canadians.

The table details 11 steps by which e-petitions would be drafted and follow through the process.

In step one, much like the current petitioning process, instead of drafting a paper petition and submitting it to an MP, a petitioner would visit the Parliament of Canada website and fill out an online form. This form then would be submitted to a member of Parliament, just as currently, so that the member of Parliament would serve as a sponsor for this e-petition. Without a sponsor, it could go forward no further, so this is a check. The sponsoring MP would notify the clerk, and then the clerk would certify this petition according to the existing rules that we use already. If the wording of the petition meets House standards, then the clerk would post this on the website of the Parliament of Canada, and then, of course, Canadians would be invited to sign this e-petition. They would include as much detail as we do on the current petitioning process, as well as a random security code to make sure there are not more signatures than there should be there. Also, an e-mail would be sent back to these petitioners to make sure that it actually is they who are signing, to work as a check on their signatures.

In this proposal, the e-petition would close after 90 days, with no more signatures added. Then the clerk would review results and send them to the petitioner and the member. If the petition online received 1,000 signatures, in my proposal here, then that would work much like a paper petition. The sponsoring MP would be notified and then the MP could table this in the House for a response. It's almost exactly as we do now. However, if under this proposal, if a petition received 100,000 signatures, MPs would be invited to endorse this e-petition as worthy of debate. If at least 10 members, which is a very high threshold, sponsored the e-petition within 45 days, then the Speaker would schedule a short take-note debate outside the regular hours of Parliament within 30 sitting days.

After all this is done, of course, the petitioners and the sponsor would be informed of the outcome of this procedure.

That, in a nutshell, is the summary of the motion and what I'm proposing. I'm happy to take your questions and discuss how we might move forward with this.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you, Mr. Stewart.

We will move to a seven-minute round with Mr. Lukiwski.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

Thank you very much, Mr. Stewart, for being here. I have a number of questions that I hope to get in on the seven-minute round, but throughout the course of the hour that you're here, hopefully, we'll get them all in.

The first one is about some privacy concerns. I'd like to hear your views and see whether you agree that the privacy of the information that would come through this electronic petitioning format would be secured. Primarily, every political party does data mining; we all harvest names and everything else, through normal means, so that we are able, come election time, to have a pretty good database of people who we consider to be either supporters or accessible or potential. The potential for the number of names coming through electronically I think would far surpass whatever we've seen during the current system with paper petitions.

Would you agree that there should be some sort of a guarantee or a protocol built in to protect the privacy of those people who sign electronic petitions to prevent others, whether they be politicians or other members of the general public, from getting that information, addresses and names and things like that? Does your system address that?

[Kennedy Stewart, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

The motion I put forward is instructive in that we have to consider this, but again the details are left to the committee. I think this is the perfect committee to review this because you're doing lots of work in this area at the moment.

I did go to the U.K. and talk to the House leader's office there and the backbench committee that looks after this. They've gone through a number of iterations of this process. Initially, the e-petitions in the U.K. were housed in the prime minister's office. Prime Minister Tony Blair had put it in place explicitly for this reason of harvesting data. It was then moved out of there under David Cameron, to further protect people's privacy.

When you look at these various petition systems, for example, what shows up online often is the name and city and that's it. Sometimes nothing shows up online, like in the White House system; they don't provide information online. I think that is probably something that will have to be debated here, and again, this is the perfect place to do so. I would err on the side of privacy for Canadians.

The thing is, what has happened in Australia, for example, where they've had this in for about a decade, is they have done minor tweaks as they've gone through this process, so it would be worth talking to some people who have used that system and ask about the kinds of things that they've done and how we could tweak this to make sure it meets your privacy concerns.

For me, the important thing is that Canadians have their voice heard, not that parties harvest data.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

Thank you for that. I think we're on the same page there.

I'm not sure if I heard you correctly. I'm sorry, I was trying to read some other information, and I wasn't paying the attention I should have to your verbal presentation.

How do you envision petitions being generated initially? I think I heard you say something about if an MP wants to sponsor a petition, that sort of thing. Do you see a provision within your motion that would allow petitions to be generated from members of the general public? The slight concern I have there is the fact that in some cases—we've seen this down in the United States—some frivolous petitions come forward, like the infamous Star Wars petition.

[Kennedy Stewart, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Sure.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

Do you see this being a system in which only legitimate—if we can use that term—petitions are generated, or is there a way in which, if anybody just wants to be a mischief-maker and enters a frivolous petition and probably gets more signatures than they would in a legitimate one, we could deal with that? How does your motion deal with those types of aspects?

[Kennedy Stewart, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Well, I think that is a very important concern. This is a serious place of business, and it should be treated as such.

We have a lot of experience with petitioning in paper form. Rarely do you currently get frivolous petitions when you are sitting in the House of Commons. That's because, although the public generates the initial petition, it is sponsored by an MP, and I think that as MPs we all take our reputations very seriously. If we put in frivolous petitions....

That is the first check that I envision for the e-petitioning system: the sponsoring MP would be the initial filter and guardian to stop that.

The second check is that the clerk would still have to review any petition sponsored by an MP. There are rules outlining what can be in a petition. For example, if somebody is swearing in a petition, even if an MP does sponsor it, the clerk would say, “I'm sorry, this is out of order.”

The third check, of course, is the signature threshold, which is high. I think it is 1,000 to be treated as a paper petition, but 100,000 to have a debate in the House.

The last and final check, which I think is quite strict, is the requirement for 10 members of Parliament to sign on to any petition that gets more than 100,000 signatures. The U.K. has a permanent backbench committee that sifts through all these things. We don't have a backbench committee, so these 10 MPs would in some way act as a floating or ad hoc backbench committee. I think that would really stop it.

Concerning the death star example, we have checked with the clerk's office, and we doubt that it would even hit the floor in Parliament here, so it wouldn't hit as an e-petition either.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

Okay. Maybe I'll just make a comment and then come back to questions after.

I know that in 2003, the procedure and House affairs committee undertook a study on e-petitions. I wasn't a member of Parliament; that preceded me by about one year. My colleague Mr. Reid might have been part of that committee.

I know that they concurred in their report; however, members of the procedure and House affairs committee still had a number of concerns at that time, and therefore, nothing really was done beyond concurring in the report. There was no movement. Obviously, we haven't adopted this system to date.

What I'd like to suggest for the benefit of the committee is that we perhaps get a bit of a briefing on what some of the concerns were and maybe try to discern exactly why this didn't move forward, because it is not a new proposal.

[Kennedy Stewart, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

No.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

It may be a good one; it may not be. I would like to get a little more information.

When we start to have witnesses here, the obvious choice of somebody to come forward would be the Clerk and probably someone from IT. I'm assuming you've anticipated that what would have to happen is that the administration of the House would have to build some sort of portal to receive these things. I don't know how that works, frankly.

Have you been made aware of any concerns from the 2003 report on e-petitions?

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

We'll let you answer that under Mr. Scott's questioning.

Mr. Scott, you have seven minutes.

[Craig Scott, NDP, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Well, we have lots of time in the hour, so if you could, quickly answer Tom's question.

[Kennedy Stewart, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Sure.

Have I been made aware of any concerns? They are the ones you have already raised of the nature of frivolous petitions using up House time. The proposal I've put forward with the four checks is specifically built to make sure that doesn't happen.

Was your second question regarding whether there had been any other concerns?

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

There had been other concerns in a previous report from this committee, and we were wondering whether you had looked into those.

[Kennedy Stewart, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Yes, we have. That was 10 years ago. Many other countries have put this system in place since then, so there is plenty of experience out there, even within Canada with Quebec and the Northwest Territories. The clerks of those legislatures would be excellent to talk to as well, if you're willing to hear them as witnesses. I think they could provide lots of expertise, as could people from other countries.

[Craig Scott, NDP, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Great.

Kennedy, you mentioned that if 100,000 signatures were reached, there would be an after-hours take-note debate. Then you say that the petitioners would be notified of the result, of the fact that there was a debate. I know that in some systems when that takes place an e-mail goes out with a link to the URL, so that people can actually see the debate. To me, that is a very concrete way for people to feel that Parliament took the petition seriously, and they can judge the debate.

Is that something you would contemplate, sending out the video?

[Kennedy Stewart, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Absolutely, and when we talked with House leader's office in the U.K. and with the Hansard Society in the U.K., probably the best part of the whole process was that citizens were able to get direct feedback on their concerns.

If you've taken the trouble to get 100,000 signatures on a petition on very serious issues, and Parliament of course takes it seriously and has the debate, what they do is they post it online, all the debates as well as the response from the government, and then send an e-mail back to folks saying where they can go to look at the debates. In fact, the call has been to try to enhance that to make sure citizens get more feedback and then they tend to participate more. That has been a huge highlight of the process.

[Craig Scott, NDP, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

With that feature in particular, I personally see this as...I wouldn't call this transformative. It's building on what we already have, but it's also at the same time quite positive, an incremental change towards a more collaborative element in our democracy. We will remain a representative democracy, but the participatory side can only help.

When it comes to youth engagement, do you see any particular benefits to this? We often focus on youth engagement as being made—or make it or break it—at election time and the rates of voting often disappoint, but maybe we're not doing a good enough job engaging. Do you see this as a youth engagement reform as well?

[Kennedy Stewart, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Yes, and I actually think your first and second points are tied together. I think that the take-note debates we have in the House are tremendous. Because there are no votes attached—and that's my proposal as well; there would be no votes attached to these—they're a chance for people to have some of the best orators in Canada talk about issues that are important to people. They could see that connection, that they have signed a petition about a certain area of interest to them and then they see parliamentarians taking it seriously in an hour's debate. It's easily accessible in that they could watch it on their phone rather than going to the House of Commons. I think that would do something to help. I don't think it's a panacea, but I do think it's a step in the right direction, and again, with very little effort on our side to do so.

[Craig Scott, NDP, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

In another study on the Standing Orders, we're looking at whether to clarify that the clerk of petitions should be accepting petitions, or signatures on petitions, from Canadians living abroad. I believe that's one of the issues. Do you have any thoughts on this? If we were to move that way in the current petition process, would there be any problems on this side with that? Would there need to be specific safeguards to make sure the people signing from abroad are actually Canadians?

[Kennedy Stewart, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

To just back up a little bit, with the current paper-based petition system we have, those signatures are currently verified. How the clerk verifies them from my understanding is, they are just looked at to see whether all the signatures look the same, whether it is the same handwriting for all of them. If so, the petition is ruled out of order. It is kind of a quick eyeball test.

If you do the electronic petitions, of course, you have this wonderful thing called an IP address that you can study. With the addition of e-mails being sent back, you can verify where people are from. It actually is a more robust signature than what we currently have.

Depending on what rules you deem to adopt, the way I was looking at this it would really be people only from within Canada. If the committee were to change the Standing Orders to say that it could be from Canadians outside of Canada, one way the U.S. deals with that is to make people pre-register before they sign up. They just indicate their country of origin, that they're Canadian, that type of thing. In fact, I think this would make it a little easier if you're registering things online, just because of the IP address and the ability to use e-mails as a kind of a proxy signature.

[Craig Scott, NDP, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

I was once tempted to sign—I will not say I signed—a petition to change the name of a former respected colleague, Stockwell Day, to Doris Day.

[Kennedy Stewart, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Right.