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.
Head of Office, Office of the Leader of the House of Commons of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
My understanding is that all postal codes are checked automatically against the database. That's my understanding.
Conservative
Blake Richards Conservative Wild Rose, AB
So it sounds as though there is probably some potential for abuse, if someone is self-verifying that they are a resident, and outside of checking postal codes there are not a lot of safeguards in place for that.
Head of Office, Office of the Leader of the House of Commons of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
With verification there are several steps that we take for people signing petitions. When they send an email, they get an email confirmation, so we can check that the email account is valid. It takes some action on their part. We also ask them to enter a couple of randomly generated words, using the recapture type of software that you would be used to using on websites to stop automatic signing of petitions through automated processes.
I think the level of verification and security are suitable for what the site is, which is an e-petition site. If someone is very determined to sign an e-petition, so be it, I think. Most of the checking, particularly on IP addresses and other things, is done by the technical staff who do account for patterns of signing that might be unusual, just to check that the system is working okay. The verification does certain things, but a determined person would be able to sign some petition from abroad.
Conservative
Blake Richards Conservative Wild Rose, AB
Sure. Understood.
You mentioned watching for unusual patterns with IP addresses, etc. Do you have some kind of barrier, that once there is a certain number submitted from a certain IP address or a certain email address, that determines that there should be a closer look at those particular signatures?
Head of Office, Office of the Leader of the House of Commons of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
One of the reasons we store the email addresses is to stop people signing the same petition more than once. That's one of the things the system does automatically. We don't stop an individual signing a number of petitions. There are no restrictions there.
As to the IP addresses, I'm told by my technical team that in some large organizations, if they share a Wi-Fi connection it would have the same IP address, so they don't limit by IP address but they do look out for unusual patterns. I don't think there's a threshold as such, but we don't restrict by IP address because of that problem with Wi-Fi connections.
Conservative
Blake Richards Conservative Wild Rose, AB
What further verifications would they then do when they notice those unusual patterns? Obviously, there is some further verification being done there. What would that consist of?
Head of Office, Office of the Leader of the House of Commons of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
I have to be honest with you. I don't think we've ever found anything to give us cause enough to investigate further. So I have to say I'm not quite sure what we would do if we did find something wrong with the system. I guess it would be a matter for the technical staff to report back to the policy officials and ministers, to report the behaviour to see if anything is needed to happen due to that, but we haven't had that scenario yet.
Conservative
Conservative
Dave MacKenzie Conservative Oxford, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Very briefly. Mr. Winter, I understood you to say that you do keep track of some of the addresses. Not to say there would be anything wrong with that, but do you have serial petitioners, that is, people who sign virtually any petition that gets posted?
November 25th, 2014 / 12:30 p.m.
Head of Office, Office of the Leader of the House of Commons of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
The official answer is yes, there are some who have signed a large number of petitions and certain individuals do like signing e-petitions. I think the sort of success in terms of the system might be though that since the system started, it's roughly about 3.5 million individuals per year. That's over 10 million individuals in a relatively small country who have signed e-petitions, so I think there are some serial signers. But I think it's also a system that's used by millions of people in the country, which I think is one of the good points.
Conservative
Dave MacKenzie Conservative Oxford, ON
I asked that question because one of the things I noticed was for some of the community bloggers it will be the same people over and over who respond. I'm not being critical of them, but I think that is their hobby and their pastime and I suspect that when you put something online, when people find it they will spend a fair bit of time attaching their names to a variety of things.
Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Joe Preston
Mr. Lamoureux, did you have that one more question you wanted to ask? I have a little time and I'll be really kind to you today.
Liberal
Kevin Lamoureux Liberal Winnipeg North, MB
I appreciate the kindness, Mr. Chair, but actually I've forgotten the question.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Joe Preston
All right, thank you. I love your honesty and that's what gets you elected.
We thank our witnesses. I understand that you are working together with your Procedure Committee on putting together a report. We all know how hard and diligently procedure committees work, so we'll let you wait for yours but we sure want to see it when it's finished, too.
We thank you all for being our guests today. Thank you for the great information you were able to share with us.
We'll suspend now for a couple of minutes while we go in camera.
Thank you.
[Proceedings continue in camera]