Procedure and House Affairs Committee on Nov. 18th, 2014

[Soufiane Ben Moussa]

Essentially we can put a lot of parliamentary controls in the report to say there are some things that are wrong, and at that point, you can do it manually by calling, using the phone number. You can also automate that function to send messages to mobile phones or even to call automatically to confirm, and give another code. Then there are a lot of levels of authenticity that we can add. However, from our analysis, the majority of the systems are using only the e-mail system to confirm.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

Okay, so essentially it would require some individual follow-up whether by phone or e-mail or whatever to verify that those were all done by the person who was claiming had done them. That's it, essentially.

I think you mentioned in your opening remarks that you would have the ability to block any IP address outside Canada from being able to submit. Did I hear that right?

[André Gagnon]

Let's say you have a situation in which there are tons of signatures coming from London for whatever reason. I'm not sure we would be able to block those signatures, but we would be in a position to say that they were not valid and that we would not count them. I'm not sure where that process would take place.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

Essentially you'd be able to verify whether they were from within Canada or not and then determine whether there needed to be follow-up. That was what you were referring to.

[André Gagnon]

As you are aware, one of the check boxes that would need to be filled out would involve the individual indicating “I am a Canadian”. That would be one of them, along with the addresses and the phone number found in there. When you add all of those elements together, if there's a phone number that is a European phone number, well, we are getting the situation to be much clearer in terms of—

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

Just so I'm completely clear—

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you, Mr. Richards.

We'll go to Madam Latendresse, for four minutes, please.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Gagnon, thank you for your presentation.

I would like to echo what my colleague Mr. Christopherson said about the importance of hearing from the experts who know all about the nuts and bolts of translating these measures into reality.

I want to follow up on what Mr. Christopherson said.

In the past 10 years, since the last time you appeared before the committee on e-petitions, how many provinces and other countries have begun accepting electronic petitions? Do they make our job easier than it was in 2005?

[André Gagnon]

Thank you.

When we began looking into the issue in 2005, the members of the House modernization committee had visited Scotland. That was the major event relating to electronic petitions. Scotland was somewhat of a forerunner in the field.

Since then, a large number of legislative assemblies have put in place e-petition systems, some more advanced than others. While they cannot all be put in the same category, many of the assemblies, including the Northwest Territories' and Quebec's, showed bold thinking by bringing forward e-petition systems. In fact, I believe you are going to hear from representatives of those two provinces' legislatures today.

A number of countries, particularly in Europe, developed e-petition systems of varying degrees of sophistication. Some countries have a relatively simple system in place, while other assemblies, such as the European Parliament, have taken a much more comprehensive approach. So there are variations in terms of how quickly the different systems came about and how advanced each of them is, but a lot of work has been done in the area.

The report prepared by the analysts lists a lot of these countries, or legislative assemblies.

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

I entirely agree with what you said about every country having to tailor the system to its own reality and unique needs. Seeing all the countries that have managed to do that in their own legislative assemblies makes me hopeful that we will be able to establish a system that reflects our reality, here in Canada.

Would Mr. Stewart's system be fairly easy to adapt to our current rules and procedures?

[André Gagnon]

Other than the issues I raised, I would say it is for the committee to decide whether the challenges posed by the system could be overcome.

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

If you consider where the technology was 10 years ago, when you appeared before the committee to discuss the various challenges and options around e-petitioning, do you think it would be easier to implement such a system today, in 2014, technologically speaking?

[André Gagnon]

Thank you for the question.

It will give me an opportunity to bring up another initiative, the committee effort to go paperless. Your committee has undertaken such an exercise, as has the Standing Committee on Finance, which has solicited tremendous cooperation from Canadians in that regard.

In fact, more so than technology, initiatives like that are probably more helpful in terms of getting us ready. With technological advancements come technological challenges, especially around the issue of security. That means the House's system needs to be strong and its network, well-protected.

Security is an important consideration these days, especially when introducing a system like this. Committee efforts aimed at going paperless and promoting online cooperation, as the finance committee has done, make us better equipped in terms of implementing the system. So it has less to do with better technology and more to do with administrative and committee preparedness.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you.

We're well past time there. I think we're going to call it quits there and thank you for coming today. We apologize for a bit of an abbreviated session. We may ask you back or ask more opinions in the future on this one as we move forward, because we recognize that what we say yes to, you have to do. As Mr. Christopherson was putting it, sometimes it's really easy from these chairs to say what's going to happen, but we'll consider you the purveyors of this, if we end up having to do it.

Thank you.

We'll suspend for just two minutes while we being in another group of witnesses and carry on with our meeting.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

We will come back to order, please. We are still in public and with new witnesses.

We'll do all three opening statements and then we'll ask questions.

Mr. Wudrick, you may go first.

[Aaron Wudrick, Federal Director, Canadian Taxpayers Federation]

Mr. Chair, it's a pleasure to be here today and to speak to Motion M-428. I thank the committee for the invitation.

This motion is, I think we can all agree, one that clearly cuts across the political spectrum, and we're happy to speak to it.

My name is Aaron Wudrick. I am the new federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. We are a federally incorporated non-profit citizens' group with more than 84,000 supporters across Canada. Our advocacy is centred around three key principles; those are lower taxes, less waste, and accountable government. It's on this third principle, accountable government, that I appear here today.

The principle that citizens should have a voice in government in between elections is critical to our democratic tradition. One of the ways this has long been recognized is through the use of petitions as a means to measure popular support for an initiative, whether it be demands for government action or recognition or to voice opposition to particular legislation. It is a healthy and a useful tool to inform politicians about what is important to Canadians and to let Canadians stimulate debate on those issues.

We believe that politicians should welcome petitions and what they stand for, both as a guide and as a check on their instincts, and I'm sure that many members of Parliament, whether in government or opposition, have at least once or twice been caught off guard by the reaction from their constituents on some piece of controversial legislation that they either support or oppose. These petitions, when given formal standing by Parliament, are a way for Canadians to express themselves in a manner that is more powerful than simply speaking to their member of Parliament.

With respect to Motion M-428 specifically, we think it should be uncontroversial that we bring the mechanisms for gathering petition signatures into the 21st century. In most other ways, government has evolved and has adapted modern technologies that allow members of Parliament to do their jobs better. These include such simple things, which we take for granted now, as e-mail and social media, which allow MPs to communicate with their constituents. Also, the ability for witnesses to appear at these committees by video is of course a relatively recent phenomenon.

Moreover, as I caught from some of the previous witnesses, many other countries have embraced e-petitions, and we see no compelling reason that Parliament should not do the same.

If anything, we believe that Motion M-428 does not go quite far enough. In particular, we are concerned about the provision that requires a petition to be sponsored by five members of Parliament before it can be considered by Parliament. While on the one hand we certainly understand that it's reasonable that Parliament would want to avoid parliamentary business being hijacked by a flood of e-petitions, this provision gives rise to the possibility of a petition on an issue with potentially hundreds of thousands of signatures that would not be considered by Parliament simply because it did not have those five sponsors.

What we would suggest is something in this vein: that a petition beyond a certain threshold, perhaps a very high threshold, trigger a take-note debate with or without the requisite number of MP sponsors.

That being said, we do not wish to make the perfect the enemy of the good. This motion simply brings a well-established principle into the modern era. We believe that by supporting this motion, Parliament would be demonstrating its commitment to greater accountability and would be giving voice to thousands of Canadians who feel that the political system does not speak to their concerns.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you very much.

Monsieur Arsenault, perhaps you would like to go next.

[François Arsenault, Director, Parliamentary Proceedings Directorate, National Assembly of Quebec]

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.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Mercer, go ahead, and then we'll go to questions.

[Tim Mercer, Clerk of the Legislative Assembly, Legislative Assembly of the Northwest Territories]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My name is Tim Mercer. I'm the Clerk of the Legislative Assembly of the Northwest Territories.

The ability of residents to petition their government through their elected legislature has existed in the Northwest Territories for many years. The first recorded instances predate the relocation from Ottawa to Yellowknife in September 1967 of what was then known as the territorial council.

The debates of the council from March 6 to 10, 1967, indicate that six petitions were presented. One of these supported the application of a Hay River man for Canadian citizenship. Another called for increased medical services in the community of Gjoa Haven, which was then part of the Northwest Territories. The remaining four called for the off-premises sale of beer in Hay River, Fort Smith, Inuvik, and Yellowknife.

In addition to shedding light on what was on the minds of residents back in those days, these examples also illustrate the focus of written petitions on largely local matters. They worked reasonably well for issues centred on specific geographic regions or communities. Like Canada, however, the Northwest Territories is a vast and sparsely populated land. Its communities are separated from one another by long distances and the absence of convenient transportation infrastructure.

The old system of written petitions simply wasn't conducive to mobilizing public sentiment on issues that spilled across local boundaries or cut across the territory as a whole. Electronic petitions were introduced in the NWT Legislative Assembly on a pilot basis in the spring of 2010. It was not unanimously supported.

Some of the concerns expressed at the time related to the perceived inability to authenticate electronic signatures, the protection of personal information and privacy, cost, workload, and the provision of a visible and easily accessible platform for the airing of frivolous and vexatious grievances. While these were all valid concerns, the pilot project did demonstrate that each of these could be mitigated to the satisfaction of the initial detractors.

Prior to an electronic petition going live on the assembly's website, it is first vetted by the Clerk's office to ensure that it meets the criteria established in the rules of the Legislative Assembly. These criteria, similar to what my colleague from Quebec just mentioned, include ensuring that the subject matter of the petition is within the competent jurisdiction of the Government of the Northwest Territories or the Legislative Assembly, that it does not include libellous or defamatory statements, that it uses appropriate language, and that it does not address matters that are presently before the courts or similar quasi-judicial tribunals.

Because similar vetting does not occur for traditional written petitions, electronic petitions are less likely to be ruled out of order at the time of tabling. When a proposed electronic petition is rejected, the subject matter of the petition and the reason for the rejection are posted on the Assembly's website, even though it is not subsequently open to signature. In most cases the Clerk's office is able to work with the lead petitioner to resolve any outstanding issues prior to its being made publicly available or rejected outright. Decisions of the Clerk's office to reject a petition are subject to appeal to the Speaker.

The concern over the authenticity of signatures is addressed by requiring petitioners to enter their full names, civic addresses, and e-mail addresses at the time of going onto the system. Prior to a signature being added to the online petition, an e-mail is sent to the individual ,who must acknowledge its receipt. Only one signature per e-mail address is permitted, and a limit is placed on the number of signatures that may originate from a single IP address. We don't limit it to one signature per IP address, in the event that there are families, like mine, who have one computer and several e-mail addresses and all the family members may wish to sign. Petitioners are also required to solve a simple arithmetic problem to prevent mass computer-generated signatures.

Members who were concerned about the authenticity of signatures were reminded that these protections, while by no means insurmountable by someone determined to distort the final results, far exceed the scrutiny applied to traditional written signatures, many of which are illegible.

Although the lead and subsequent petitioners are required to provide their civic and e-mail addresses when accessing the system, only the person's name and community of residence is ultimately published on the website. The system makes it clear that personal information is only used for the purposes of verifying the authenticity of the petitioner and providing updates on the disposition of the petition, if expressly requested.

Following an evaluation of the e-petition pilot project in 2012, the Assembly resolved to permanently implement the initiative within its Standing Orders. In the two years since implementation, 14 e-petitions have been established and tabled in the Assembly. Many of these have been tabled in combination with traditional written petitions. There have been three rejected and each of the rejections took place because the respective prayers called for the redress of matters outside the competent authority of the Government of the Northwest Territories or the Legislative Assembly.

The technology used for the site was purchased off the shelf from a firm located in the United Kingdom for a price of $8,000. Minimal customization was required to meet the Assembly's requirements. The site is hosted and maintained by the firm in the U.K. for just over $800 a year, although it is accessed seamlessly from the Assembly's website with an identical look and feel to the remainder of the site.

There has been a marginal increase in the workload within the Clerk's office as a result of the implementation of the petitions. However, the overall result has been an increase in the quality and clarity of petitions that are tabled in our legislature. More importantly, the initiative has led to the significant improvement in citizen engagement and access to the NWT's political institutions, particularly on the part of residents who are normally far removed from the proceedings of the House, and on issues that cut across geographic and regional boundaries

Mr. Chair, I thank you for the opportunity to share the experiences of the NWT Legislative Assembly with electronic petitions. I'd be pleased to respond to any questions that you have.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you very much. Let's do that.

Mr. Lukiwski, you're going to be up for a seven-minute round to begin with. Please let us know who you're asking your questions to as you are asking them.

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

Gentlemen, thank you for being here.

I think if you had been following discussions of this committee, and hopefully you have, you would understand that there is a general acceptance by all members on the committee that we should move forward with e-petitions. It's not a matter of if, but a matter of how to.

In that light, I'm going to address my comments, with all due respect Mr. Wudrick, to Monsieur Arsenault and Mr. Mercer, as they're representing jurisdictions that have actively had e-petitions in their own legislative assemblies for the last number of years.

I will ask both of you a question, and I'll start with Monsieur Arsenault.

Is there any advice you could give our committee as we move down the road to hopefully get to a protocol that allows e-petitions? Is there any advice you could give us, perhaps bumps in the road that you encountered that we should try to avoid, or any particular areas of implementation that we should concentrate on to make sure this implementation process is as seamless as possible?

[François Arsenault]

The approach you're taking right now is great. I have been following the committee's discussions and have noticed just how carefully you are studying the issue.

Practically speaking, when we made the decision in Quebec City to launch an e-petition system, it took staff about six months to put it in place. Obviously, it had a lot to do with technology. Initially, we really had to make sure that the technology we used dovetailed with existing parliamentary technology.

One thing made the job easier for us in Quebec. Although it could have done the opposite, it ended up making things easier for us. At the same time as we were launching the e-petition system, we were completely overhauling our Web site and information architecture. We were able to incorporate the e-petition option into a much broader project. It was a bit easier to introduce because we had modified the system slightly. When citizens click on the option, it has to work. That is the most important element; people notice right away when something doesn't work.

The second most important consideration was ensuring that the people at the assembly who would be reviewing the petitions were properly trained and ready to handle any problem that might arise. When we launched the system, we worried that we would be flooded with electronic petitions, but that did not happen. We never had a flood, but the number of e-petitions did increase gradually as citizens became aware of the option.

The two most important considerations are technology and staff preparedness. I am not talking about the procedural component, but it goes without saying that everything has to work properly in that regard as well.

However you decide to proceed, I am certain you will have very knowledgeable people to guide you throughout the process.

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

Merci.

Mr. Mercer.

[Tim Mercer]

Mr. Chairman, I think in addition to what my colleague just said, I would advise to expect the unexpected and not to be thrown off the game plan. Things will happen.

It's important to keep risks in perspective. We're not talking here about legally binding petitions or plebiscites, or even votes conducted under the Canada Elections Act. We're talking about very general expressions of political interest and will on the part of citizens. I think you will experience small hiccups along the way, but it's about keeping them in perspective. You're probably going to catch things through your electronic petitioning system that always existed, but largely went unnoticed in the former system.