The process would be the following: an individual goes on the website, sees a petition that he or she would like to sign, and pushes the button “I would like to sign the petition”. After that you would get a form that you would need to fill out with your name, your phone number, and your address, and you would have to have your e-mail address as well so we could provide you with more information afterwards. Then you would have to check a box that says, “I am a Canadian citizen and I understand I'm signing a petition”, all those things. Afterwards at the bottom you check “I want to sign this petition.”
Sorry, I forgot to say that you would also have to fill in the box where there is a random number so that you would not be able to multiply the signature with a robot. You would have to fill in that box.
This is the first part of it. You push the button, and this sends you to our system. An e-mail would go to the individual saying, “You have signed a petition and, if you confirm that you want to sign the petition, please push this button—click here”. That would be the way to authenticate it.
That is probably the most cost-effective way to authenticate a signature.
Again, as I mentioned at the end, the e-petition system has challenges, some of the challenges that paper petitions have. As you can imagine, today the authentication of paper petitions is not even that thorough.