Procedure and House Affairs Committee on Dec. 9th, 2014

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would like to thank the witnesses for their participation and for speaking to us about these issues. We are pleased to know that Canada will probably also be able to use online petitions soon.

My question concerns your report. There are a lot of problems with the system you are currently using, and they are related to the fact that you worked from an existing system.

If you had the opportunity to start again and choose the rules that suit you with regard to online petitions, are there things you would change? Are there things you would have preferred to develop?

[Charles Walker]

Look, I'll be perfectly honest with you. I have never been an enormous fan of e-petitioning. I think there is a danger that it could dumb down political engagement, but one must set aside one's own opinions as chairman of a committee.

This is a serious bit of work we've done. To be honest, I can put my name to and stand behind the report we have produced. Of course, it isn't perfect, but I think it's pretty good.

Now, the government was determined to have a joint petitioning system with the House of Commons. As someone who in my own private political life favours, perhaps, the separation of powers, I could understand and have great sympathy for a petition system that is wholly owned by the House of Commons, but I'm afraid we're not at that stage. We draw our executive from the legislature.

So I think it's a good report and I think the proposals we came up with are strong proposals, but absolutely key to this working is a House of Commons petitions committee chaired by a member of Parliament with its members drawn from Parliament. I think with that in place we get a much better deal out of this than actually the government does, and I think our constituents get a better deal.

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

That's very interesting.

As I understand it, there is a big difference between the system we are implementing and the one in the United Kingdom. The one we are creating would be a simple online petitions system controlled by the House of Commons. Based on what you said, the system that we are implementing would probably be more effective and work better than the United Kingdom's, where the petitions system is linked to both the government and the House of Commons.

Do I have that right?

[Charles Walker]

The concern I have about a joint petitioning system is that it doesn't make the distinction between the executive and the legislature. Now, more power to your elbow—and that's an English turn of phrase that I'm not sure will translate—so good for you in Canada for taking a different approach. I would have great sympathy for the approach you're taking.

Again, in the imperfect world that we must all inhabit, the proposals we have put forward are given credibility by the fact that although it is a joint system, the committee in charge of basically the whole process will be drawn from the House of Commons. I think we have the better end of the deal.

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

I also have a question about your threshold of five signatures for a petition to be authorized.

We have instead chosen a system where an MP should sponsor a petition. So at least one MP would have to be willing to sponsor it, but there would be no five-signature threshold.

Could you please explain the difference between the two?

Also, why did you choose that threshold?

[Charles Walker]

The threshold now is the lead signature plus five, so we've gone to six. We reckon that by having six, that will reduce the petition load from, on average now, about 15,000 to around 7,500. About 7,500, give or take, of the petitions currently get less than six signatures.

As far as your other question is concerned, we did debate whether a member of Parliament should add their name. We took the view that this may not be desirable in the sense that there would be many petitions possibly from my constituency put forward by my constituents, the lead signature would be a constituent of mine, but actually I would fundamentally disagree with the content of the petition and be unwilling to add my own name to it.

Again, we're a representative democracy, aren't we? We're not delegates, so I do think the system is better for what we've put forward.

Now, my clerk is putting forward the report to me with a sentence underlined, which I shall let him explain to you because I'm struggling slightly at the minute to get my head around what he's showing me.

[Huw Yardley]

I thought I would draw your attention to paragraph 41 of the committee's report. It noted:

The essence of the system which has already been set up, [the government's system] and on which our proposed system is therefore based, is one of direct access to the institution to which the petition is directed....

The system, which the public is already familiar with, is able to petition directly, without the intervention of a member of Parliament. The committee, as the chair said, did discuss this issue, but decided that it would be wrong to retreat from that direct access to the institution, which is already in place.

[Charles Walker]

To be fair, there was a diversity of views, and the minority on our committee, but a significant minority, felt that by not having a lead member of Parliament, it undermined the involvement of Parliament and members of Parliament. So it was a finely balanced judgement.

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

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Mr. Lamoureux, you have seven minutes.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I do have a few specific questions.

One is in regard to opinions or thoughts, even as you're reflecting on what you currently have through the government petition system. What do you believe is the bare minimum of information required in order to legitimize a signature or a name on a petition?

[Charles Walker]

That's a very good question. All communications, as you well know, are open to abuse. I don't know if you have postcard lobbying campaigns in Canada, but we get them here and you get people signing postcards and you send them a letter and they write back saying, “Mr. Walker, I have no idea why you wrote to me about experiments on mice. I've never contacted you on that subject before.” So you're right, there is always the possibility of abuse.

We have been assured by our IT people that there will be safeguards and checks in place. I'm completely IT illiterate and would not be able to describe to you what those will be, but I'm happy for them to put a note together for your committee more specifically in answer to your questions. We're hoping in the main that engagement will be honest and up front, but we do not live in a perfect world.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

What I'm thinking is, for example, if someone affixes a name, like I say I'm Kevin Lamoureux and now you have my email address because it's an e-petition. Does that suffice to count as a signature or would you suggest that a postal code or something else should be added to it?

[Charles Walker]

We won't be requiring a postal code from people signing it. I believe the petitioner will be contacted and have his details checked.

Sorry, we're having our own little conference here. I'm going to let Huw answer that.

[Huw Yardley]

My understanding of the system is that a petitioner will be asked for their name, post code, and email address. They will need to supply that information. They then receive by email a message, including a link, which they need to click on to confirm their signature and—

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

I'm glad you're moving over from a system where the government...and making it more apolitical by bringing it into the parliamentary website by the sounds of it. I think that's a good thing.

To what degree do you provide information that is collected to others, whether it's the local member of Parliament or it's the minister that's most impacted by it? Do you provide anything to them in regard to a name and an email address or is that kept in confidence?

[Charles Walker]

Again, that would be kept in confidence. We had long discussions about this. What we have recommended is that if I were to sign a petition....

Let's say one of my constituents was to sign a petition. They will be given the option of alerting their local member of Parliament that they've added their name to said petition and this would be done through a link where they would first put their post code in. A lot of people actually don't know who their member of Parliament is, to be honest, I'm ashamed to say, and that could be my fault and not theirs in the constituency of Broxbourne.

The post code will say your MP is Charles Walker, click here, and we will alert him that you have signed the petition in case you also want to communicate with him or get him to communicate with you directly. But it will have to be a decision taken by the person signing the petition whether they want their information forwarded to their member of Parliament. We do not see that information going more widely than the member of Parliament.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Well, I'm glad to hear it's an opt-in as opposed to the other way around, which is good from my perspective anyway.

In terms of the maintaining of the records, what do you anticipate? Say, after a year, is all that information wiped clear out of whatever computer system you have? Do you have any sort of security measures in place to protect the integrity of the data bank and ultimately the disposal of the data itself?

[Charles Walker]

That is an extraordinarily interesting question and that suggests I haven't got a very good answer to it. You're probably well ahead of us on this. The case of paper petitions...for example, I did a paper petition a few years ago and got 16,000 signatures. We put that in the bag behind the Speaker's chair and that paper petition is kept indefinitely in some vault for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Obviously, computer systems are governed by data protection, but I think you've asked a very good question and I'm embarrassed to say we haven't thought that far ahead. My assumption was and is that these signatures would be retained in the same way that paper petitions are kept, so as a source of potential historical interest.

But Huw may want to come in on this.

[Huw Yardley]

My understanding is that under the legal framework in the U.K., the personal data, such as names of people who have signed petitions, can be kept only as long as is necessary, and then has to be destroyed. So any petition will remain open for six months, and then the text of the petition and the number of signatories will be recorded in the House's official papers. But I think soon after that, the names of the signatories would likely be destroyed, because they are no longer necessary, so there is no legal basis to keep them.

[Charles Walker]

That actually puts the electronic petition system out of step with the paper petition system, which I think is something we might have to have a look at.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

I have a last quick question. If you put a petition online today, how long will it stay online before it's taken off or closed?

[Huw Yardley]

Under the current situation it stays open for a year. In fact, the government has said that its existing system is going to stop at the election, so it goes on only until the dissolution of Parliament. But under the system proposed by the committee, it will be open for six months.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you.

Mr. Reid, please, you have four minutes.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

I just wanted to follow up on the six-month number. Does that effectively mean that any action that is likely to come out of a petition, such as bringing an issue forward for debate in the House of Commons, is held up by six months? That is, do you have to wait until the six-month period is expended, even if it goes over the number, or at some point, when you've hit the trigger number of 100,000, does something magic happen?