Thank you for inviting me to once again address what I have characterized as the most astonishing urban legend in Canadian public policy in the 35 years that I've studied public policy.
This urban legend claims that large, significant, or substantial numbers of Canadians lack any ID whatsoever, thereby disenfranchising them from voting. As a former banker deeply familiar with identification systems, I know that the principle of banking goes back to ancient times of “know thy customer” and is grounded in the idea that you can't collect money from someone if you don't know who it is you lent the money to. Therefore, identity and identification have been at the very core of financial systems for thousands of years, and it's only the rest of society, as we've moved into the digital economy, that is realizing what bankers have always understood.
First, I found that no critic had undertaken a systematic empirical review of all major identification systems in Canada using the government reports of the government departments that issue the ID in Canada: Passport Canada, Transport Canada, and so forth. I presented the empirical evidence of these systems both to your committee and the Senate committee in April 2014, and that became the basis of my op-ed published in The Globe and Mail on May 4, 2014, “Canadians who can't vote because they lack any ID? Don't believe it.”
I testified to you and in the op-ed...and I'm just going to summarize this very quickly.
Canadians possess over 200 million pieces of identification or identification documents including birth certificates, as the vital statistics acts of every province compel the registration of every birth in every province. StatsCan reports 29 million people in Canada were born in Canada, with 6.7 million people foreign born.
In Canada there are 29 million birth certificates. There are 22 million drivers' licences—not the 15 million stated by Mr. Mayrand—per the annual Transport Canada report to Parliament. There are 29 million cars and trucks registered in Canada per the Transport Canada report to Parliament, each with an ownership certificate disclosing name and address. It's the same for insurance certificates, and there are nearly 35 million health care cards, as every province requires a health card to access a doctor, a clinic, or a hospital.
According to StatsCan, 69% of Canadians, or 9.2 million, own their own home. Under provincial law, real estate ownership must be in writing with name and address disclosed. Likewise for rentals, 31% of Canadians rent, and under landlord and tenant acts, the name and address must be disclosed in writing in the tenancy.
Per the FCAC established by Parliament, 96% of Canadians have a bank account, and the Bank Act passed by Parliament requires two pieces of primary government-issued ID to open a bank account.
StatsCan 2013 reports that 17.5 million Canadians filed taxable returns with, of course, name and address, while another 8.9 million Canadians filed non-taxable returns to get the GST rebate and so forth, a total of 26.3 million filers. Per StatsCan, in 2014 two million Canadians boarded planes requiring ID three times: once at check-in, once at security, and once at the gate. Per Passport Canada, 70% of Canadians, or 23 million, have a passport. Per the Canadian Bankers Association, there are 71 million credit cards outstanding in Canada.
I'll wrap up very quickly. As the French philosopher Michel Foucault taught us in 1978 in his astonishing article on governmentality, government departments and agencies have been studying, measuring, analyzing, and collecting data on us over very long periods of time in every area of life in western countries from health care to hospitals, to educational institutions, to penal institutions, to security, to borders, to agriculture, to drug use, to seniors' housing, and on and on.
In other words, and I said this before and I'll say it again to you, it is legally and factually impossible today in Canada to be digitally invisible with zero identity of any kind in any database anywhere. The Frank court decision has added an estimated 1.5 million eligible voters abroad.
I support Bill C-50 as Parliament must act to establish a level playing field with respect to voting in federal elections so that voters abroad vote under the same rules as domestic voters. In summary, in a modern, complex society, identity and identification are absolutely essential. The nostalgia for 19th-century voting systems in a far smaller and simpler time simply does not work.
Finally, to the trust issue, to quote the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, if we all really are angels and never do anything wrong, they why do we lock our doors at night? Restated, why do we need ID to board a plane if none of us are terrorists?
Thank you.