Evidence of meeting #58 for Procedure and House Affairs in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was petition.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Liberal
Kevin Lamoureux Liberal Winnipeg North, MB
I thought it would be seven minutes and a few seconds there, Mr. Chair.
Liberal
Kevin Lamoureux Liberal Winnipeg North, MB
No, I'm kidding.
I appreciate the presentations by both presenters. I do have a few questions.
First off, dealing with this whole issue of duplication and similar petitions, let's say you have a number of written petitions. Can a written petition rule out an e-petition? Has there been any exploration of that, or has that been given any consideration?
Director and Head of Research, Hansard Society
In the U.K., no. The paper petitions are dealt with as they've always been dealt with. They're presented on the floor of the chamber. They're listed on the order paper. The government can respond to them in the form of an observation, if they want. But they're not integrated with e-petitions, and they don't stop any petition on a similar subject going forward. There's no real integration of them at all.
Liberal
Kevin Lamoureux Liberal Winnipeg North, MB
Are there any restrictions in terms of petitions of repetition in the House in England? Can you have eight MPs presenting the same petition? Does that sort of duplication occur?
Director and Head of Research, Hansard Society
I think you could, conceivably, but there are very few paper petitions presented through that route.
I can check this with the clerks of the House, but to the best of my knowledge that doesn't tend to be a problem.
Liberal
Kevin Lamoureux Liberal Winnipeg North, MB
Have you found a diminishing demand for the paper or written petitions because now you're doing the e-petitions, or has it even been noticeable at all?
Director and Head of Research, Hansard Society
I don't think there's been any noticeable impact. What you will find is that there are a number of online petition systems in the U.K. that the public will use. The 38 Degrees website has an e-petition system as well.
What we're tending to find is that members of Parliament individually may get fewer written petitions presented to them at the constituency level, because a lot of their constituents are using online forums. But members of Parliament might not have intended to present, or perhaps in the past actually presented, those petitions in Parliament anyway, as very little happens with them. Effectively they end up in the bag behind the Speaker's chair—quite literally—so they're not regarded as a particularly effective process.
Liberal
Kevin Lamoureux Liberal Winnipeg North, MB
Now then, are there certain things that trigger the House to take action? For example, if you get the 100,000 signatures, is there a day of allocated debate assigned to a petition?
Director and Head of Research, Hansard Society
It's usually 90 minutes. Basically what happens is, at the 100,000-signature point, the leader of the House of Commons writes to the chair of the backbench business committee informing her that the petition has reached a threshold. The backbench business committee then has to decide if and when it will schedule a debate on that issue. Now its time is allocated to it by the government, and it's a set number of hours each year and it has to decide—
Liberal
Kevin Lamoureux Liberal Winnipeg North, MB
I'm just concerned about time, that's all. What happens if you get like 50,000 signatures on a petition?
Director and Head of Research, Hansard Society
Once you reach the 10,000 signature threshold, you will have a written statement on the website. After that, unless you reach 100,000, you get nothing.
Liberal
Kevin Lamoureux Liberal Winnipeg North, MB
So, what happens if you get....? Oh nothing. So, if you get 300 signatures, absolutely nothing happens. It's not introduced to the floor, commented on, or anything of that nature.
How many petitions would be on...? If we go on to the website, the official government parliamentary website, how many petitions could we anticipate seeing?
Director and Head of Research, Hansard Society
The last time I looked at this in any great detail was in the summer. At that point they had 5,800 petitions that were open, so again, with the issue of context, of duplication, it is very difficult for the public, for members to find things. It needs a really good search functionality, which that site is not great for. Overall, there have been over 60,000 petitions that have been registered on the site, but at any one time you can have 5,000 or more that are open.
Liberal
Kevin Lamoureux Liberal Winnipeg North, MB
Yeah, I'm thinking of how, as a citizen, I go onto the website, and it could be quite overwhelming to see 5,000 petitions. I think you have to have fairly good search engines to try to define your area and so forth.
What percentage would actually get over 10,000 signatures?
Liberal
Kevin Lamoureux Liberal Winnipeg North, MB
Less than 1%, okay.
Now in terms of members submitting a petition to the House directly, is there a minimum number of signatures required for that?
Director and Head of Research, Hansard Society
For the public to submit a petition?
Liberal
Kevin Lamoureux Liberal Winnipeg North, MB
No, as a member of Parliament they can submit petitions, I assume, to the House directly, a written petition.
November 25th, 2014 / 11:35 a.m.
Director and Head of Research, Hansard Society
For a written petition, there's no minimum number of signatures. The member can just bring forward whatever petition they've been presented with, if they wish.
Liberal
Kevin Lamoureux Liberal Winnipeg North, MB
Right. Now for us, we have that minimum threshold of 25 signatures. We get 25 signatures, we come to the House, we present it, and we get to speak for a minute of two on it. Do you have something equivalent to that there?
Director and Head of Research, Hansard Society
Yes, the member will present it on the floor of the House. It will be handed over to the Speaker who literally puts it in the bag on the back of the chair. It's listed on the order paper, and the member can speak for a few moments on it, but that's it.
Liberal
Kevin Lamoureux Liberal Winnipeg North, MB
Okay, thank you, Ms. Fox.
Ms. Hilderman, with regard to participation in terms of the public, do you have any thoughts in terms of how practical it is to have 5,000 petitions online? How do you see this thing unfolding? Would you provide some comment on that?
Acting Director and Research Manager, Samara
I think what I want to emphasize is that as a committee you're asking all the right questions in terms of how you actually make this functional and an experience that's worth a citizen's time to go on and sign.
I'm not an expert on digital interface but I think there are experts out there. Think about websites like Change.org and Avaaz.org that host thousands of petitions, and they've managed to do it in a way that allows citizens to try to find those petitions that they want to sign.
I think a really important design feature is that it needs to be shareable, like whatever petition is very shareable on social media. I know the U.K. platform does do this where it's very easy to tweet or Facebook the link to the petitions so that you're driving traffic from your followers or your friends to a petition. What we know from how petitions work and the curve on participation is that with petitions generally most of the activity happens in the first 10 hours of a petition's lifetime, so if you don't have thousands of signatures happening in those first 10 hours, you're probably not going to have a petition that reaches 10,000 or 100,000 threshold.
