Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, and ladies and gentlemen of the committee.
My name is François Arsenault and I am the Director of Parliamentary Proceedings at the National Assembly of Quebec. First of all, I would like to thank the committee for having invited me to appear, and I hope that what I have to say will be useful to you as you continue your work.
Since the 2009 parliamentary reform, it has been possible both to start and to sign an e-petition on the National Assembly of Quebec's Web site. This option is in addition to signing a paper petition. One reason for this reform was to make the National Assembly more accessible to Quebec residents and to make it easier for them to participate. It was also important to ensure that the e-petition process was secure.
An MNA who agrees to present an electronic petition must submit a signed notice to the Secretary General of the National Assembly and include the following information: the period of time during which the petition will be posted on the assembly's Web site to collect signatures, between one week and three months; the full name and contact information of the person initiating the petition; and the text of the petition. A ruling on whether the petition is compliant must be given within seven days of receipt of the notice submitted by the MNA.
An e-petition is non-compliant if it was not initiated and signed on the assembly's Web site, the text of the petition exceeds 250 words or it contravenes Standing Order 35 of the National Assembly. Standing Order 35 provides that a petition be rejected if it addresses a matter of sub judice—so a matter that is before a court of law—it imputes improper motives to a member, or it fails to use acceptable language—so it contains violent, abusive or insulting language. An e-petition is non-compliant with the Standing Orders of the National Assembly if it does not seek to redress a grievance that falls under Quebec jurisdiction.
Once a petition has been considered, if it is ruled admissible and compliant, it will be posted on the assembly's Web site to collect signatures. No other electronic petition with the same subject can be initiated during the time the first petition is posted.
Once the petition is available online, all citizens who wish to sign it must fill out a short form with their first and last name, city, province, postal code and email address. Once this information has been submitted, citizens will receive a confirmation email at the email address they provided. The citizen must then click on the URL link in the email to confirm their electronic signature. If they fail to click the link, their signature will not be recorded.
Thanks to a signature management software program called Gestion des signataires, the signatures are sorted according to various criteria. Assembly employees must verify signatures that the software program has flagged. It asks for verification in the following cases: if there are duplicates; if a name seems suspicious, as in the Mickey Mouse case mentioned earlier; if the citizen provided only their initials; or if the signature was confirmed using a National Assembly email address.
Once the period for collecting signatures for an electronic petition is over, the sponsoring member has 3 days to table the abstract of the petition in the Chamber. The relevant committee has 15 days following the tabling of the petition to decide whether to examine the petition or not. If the relevant committee chooses not to examine the petition, if, after the 15-day time limit, the committee has not agreed to examine the petition, or if the committee has prepared and submitted a report on the petition, the government has 30 days to respond to the petition in writing.
This is a summary of how the e-petition process works. Now, what about citizen participation using this process? Our statistics do not go back very far, since e-petitions have been in use for only five fiscal years. This means that the data must be interpreted with care.
From the tables in the appendix of the brief, you can see that 200 petitions are tabled annually in the National Assembly, on average. Approximately 70 of these are online petitions. Over the years, there has been a slight increase in the proportion of e-petitions tabled when compared with paper petitions. However, the total number of petitions tabled has remained relatively constant, with some small variations.
In contrast, if you look at the number of people who sign these petitions, you can see that all the petitions taken together over the course of a year have about 500,000 signatures in total. Electronic petitions account for approximately 300,000 of these signatures.
In short, the number of electronic signatures has increased through the availability of this new method of citizen participation when compared with the number of signatures on paper. It is also worth noting that the total number of signatures for all types of petitions has not increased by very much.
Thank you for your attention. I am available to answer any questions you may have.