Procedure and House Affairs Committee on May 8th, 2018

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

I totally agree with Blake. I do not see any reason to have logos on the petitions. Logos or companies having their logos on petitions is the last thing I need to have, especially when you're putting the petitions on the Internet. No, it's not what we're here for. I think it's appropriate not to have logos and such on petitions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Is that the sense of the committee?

Okay, we won't allow logos.

Second, or b), is a requirement to have any address format that clearly establishes the city, town or village where the signatories reside.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

As opposed to what?

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

André can confirm this, but I think sometimes people might not use the exact format that the government has.

Do you want to comment on that one, André?

[André Gagnon]

The idea here is essentially to ensure that whenever there is a signatory, a person who signs a paper petition, the amount of information that's needed to identify the individual is enlarged a bit to make sure that that petition can be counted amongst the 25 names. It's that simple.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

It's if someone does something slightly different from the official format but the information is still there. In the past, I think they've been rejected.

Mr. Richards.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

Basically what we're getting at here, is let's say someone is filling this thing out and right now you must have your town, your province, your postal code listed. Let's say they put “John Smith, 123 Jones Street, Toronto”, and then they put their postal code and they forgot to put Ontario. Now you can say, that's pretty obvious where this person is and you're able to verify it, rather than say, “Well, it doesn't have Ontario, so we can't go with it.”

Is that basically what we're talking about here?

[André Gagnon]

We're trying to remove technicalities. That's what we're trying to remove.

Maybe Jeremy, you have something to add.

[Jeremy LeBlanc, Deputy Principal Clerk, Journals Branch]

The way the requirements are written, there are certain address combinations that are allowed and others that aren't. So if you filled it out and, as you say, indicated Toronto but not the province, we know Toronto is in Ontario, but if it doesn't have the province, that's not one of the allowed combinations. So that wouldn't be counted.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

It really just makes it easier for people who maybe forget to put in one little part of it in. You still have to be comfortable that you can verify it, but that's really what we're trying to do, just to make it easier for people.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Just for the minutes, that was Jeremy LeBlanc from the Clerk's office.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

That makes sense.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Are people okay with that?

Now we're on c), the use of varying paper sizes.

Do one of the clerks want to comment on that? What's practicable and what's not?

[André Gagnon]

I think Ms. Finley essentially brought that to our attention in a very direct way, in the sense of when you have individuals who are signing a petition that is exactly of the same type as the petition on an 8 x 11 piece of paper, but is in a different format. For different reasons—and I think Ms. Finley had good reasons for that—many people want to have more space to sign, bigger letters on the piece of paper. This is essentially to accommodate those types of situations.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

So is the wording in c) okay?

Mr. Graham.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

I was just going to suggest that you have a limit on the size of the paper so that you won't have a 400 foot scroll come in. Call it something like anything that could reasonably scanned. That would be the standard I'd recommend. If you can reasonably scan it, it's fine. I don't care if it's A4 or letter size. If you can scan it, it's fine.

Personally, I don't have a problem with postcards being accepted. I don't know what my colleagues think. We get a lot of postcards, why can't they be counted as petitions? If you get 25 postcards with the same message and same signature, what difference does it make if it's one or ten on a page. That's my thought on that.

[André Gagnon]

The postcards, most of the time, are written in different formats, so even the content, the text that would be there, could not be counted as a petition. That has been the case in the past.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

That disqualifies them for other reasons, but if it's in the correct format and it calls on the House to do something without a logo and it's one signature per page, I don't have a problem with that. That's all I'm saying.

[André Gagnon]

Okay.

[Charles Robert]

If it's without a logo, that might be a catch.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

That's up to them.

[André Gagnon]

That's up to the committee to decide.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Are there any other thoughts?

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Mr. Nater, you're shaking your head.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Yes, I'm shaking it both ways. I'm on the fence on that one. If there's a postcard with one name per page, all of a sudden it could be the wheelbarrow situation, where you're bringing in a stack, and it is becoming a bit of a stunt type of thing. We don't necessarily want to go down that route.

I think especially when it's presented as being in an accessible format, in a larger size with a larger font, which was Ms. Finley's argument.... I think the wording in here—“usual size” or something like that—allows for flexibility and perhaps some encouragement in terms of the larger size. Personally—and again there could be other input—I just wonder if the postcard format would get us into a stunt type of scenario.