Evidence of meeting #102 for Procedure and House Affairs in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was petitions.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
I'm not sure I've noticed. Sometimes I have a hard time figuring out who is presenting the petition. Is there a person who is responsible, someone whom you tell that the answer has been tabled in the House?
Deputy Clerk, Procedure
Clearly, the process that has been followed for e-petitions has been much easier to establish because, from the beginning, you have a sense of who, through the email addresses, has signed the petition. We have provided from the beginning an indication to those individuals, first, when the initial petition is tabled, and second, when the response to that petition is tabled by the government.
That type of information is gathered for e-petitions, but it's not the same for paper petitions.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
What you're proposing is that once the government responds to a paper petition or an e-petition, it goes on the electronic database, but the presenter or the person who organized the petition wouldn't even know that.
Deputy Clerk, Procedure
That's always the difficulty with paper petitions. You need the person to have either signed or started the petition; you need to follow the process in the House. By doing what is proposed here, which is essentially to put the content of a petition on the website, have it translated into both official languages, and then when that petition is being responded to by the government, have that text of the government's response, you would take it a step further in at least sharing information following the tabling of that petition in the House.
As you can imagine, trying to sort out the addresses, email addresses or postal codes of different individuals who have signed the paper petition, would take too much of an effort for the results at the end of the day. With paper petitions, it is hard to get back to the petitioners directly in the same way we are doing it for e-petitions.
At least this proposal is going a step further to share the information following the tabling of government's response, but also following the tabling of the petition in the first place.
Conservative
John Nater Conservative Perth—Wellington, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I just want to step back a little bit. I think it was Mr. Simms, in a previous Parliament, who moved a motion regarding sessional papers being published online. I understand that the library committee met recently on this and that there have been some challenges.
Would those challenges be similar to what we face with this? Would you be able to elaborate a little bit on what those might be?
Clerk of the House of Commons
I'm not really very good at this: I'm challenged by a fountain pen.
Converting a paper petition into an electronic format would be a challenging process, especially because there are so many paper petitions that are presented. You saw the stats in the paper. Normally, it's 1,500 per session. This is a large volume to deal with.
The proposal that we are suggesting is that the responses be available uniquely in electronic format. That would make a lot of the information more accessible.
The problem there is that the response of the government to a petition belongs to the Privy Council Office, not to us, so the burden falls on them to make, if they are willing, the responses to paper petitions electronically available.
Conservative
John Nater Conservative Perth—Wellington, ON
I just want to clarify, as well, that our privilege as a Parliament to publish papers would allow us to publish a scanned copy or other types of formats that may not always be in perfect condition. We have the privilege of doing so.
Deputy Clerk, Procedure
I think what is behind your question is this: how do we make available information that is tabled in the House, either paper responses to paper petitions, other responses, or government responses to committee reports, or agencies that table a report in the House through a minister? The objective is to make this accessible and available to the largest number of people. The question then becomes, “How accessible do you make it?”
Scanned copies have been, I would say, an interim measure throughout the years, but clearly have not offered all of the benefit that is expected from documents tabled in the House. For instance, those documents need to be easily accessible to people who have difficulty accessing, reading, or hearing audio documents.
Scanned copies are clearly far away from meeting those exigencies. That's why in the discussions that we have already started with the Privy Council Office with regard to petitions—which clearly form a smaller portion of all documents tabled in the House—we have already set ourselves very high standards regarding the accessibility of the documents, because that's part of the new reality that we are working with. I think it's a commitment that the House of Commons has decided to meet.
Conservative
John Nater Conservative Perth—Wellington, ON
I have a different topic now.
We had our colleague Diane Finley's example earlier—I guess it was in the fall—of paper size. I think it was that ledger size paper wasn't legal.
Conservative
Liberal
Raj Saini Liberal Kitchener Centre, ON
Mr. Gagnon, can you help me with the procedure here? Somebody gives you a paper petition, and there are 25 signatures on it. The 25 signatures each have an address and pertinent information for each person who signed that petition. Does somebody physically go through and check the addresses: who they are, and if they are legitimate or not?
Deputy Clerk, Procedure
Let's say Mr. Saini signs a petition. No, not Mr. Saini because he cannot sign a petition. Well, he can sign a petition, but we won't count his name.
Let's say that people sign a petition. We won't check each of the names listed to see if that person really lives on that street or in that city mentioned. That will not be done.
What we do is a thorough check to see if all of the information that is gathered on the piece of paper seems to make sense. We don't do that for all of them. Let's say there are 2,000 signatures on the paper petition. We go through the first 25. For the petition to be certified, except for the content and all of those things, in terms of numbers it's 25. We make sure that at least 25 signed, and a bit more, are—
Liberal
Raj Saini Liberal Kitchener Centre, ON
What do you do with the e-petitions, then, that have 500 signatures?
