Evidence of meeting #113 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 elections.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
I think I had already done three campaigns by the time I was 16, so I can relate to that.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Well, I watched CPAC as soon as it came on the air when I was a teenager, so there you go.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
If we reduce the voting age, if we were to go down that road, should the age of candidates also be reduced?
Member of Council, National Office, Green Party of Canada
I think it's actually in the Constitution, if I'm not incorrect, that anyone who is eligible to vote is eligible to run.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
So we'd be fine with lowering the candidate age to 16 as well at that point or—
Member of Council, National Office, Green Party of Canada
I can't see disconnecting them as being just.
Member of Council, National Office, Green Party of Canada
What is the right age is a difficult question to ask. I imagine some of us would say sarcastically that we know full-grown adults who perhaps shouldn't vote because they have not gone through the effort to get informed on the electoral process. You can't write a test to pass whether or not someone should be eligible to vote. We have to pick an age, and if we pick an age where someone's old enough to enlist in the reserves, in the military, and drive a vehicle that could kill somebody, I think they've shown enough maturity that they should be able to vote.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
One would hope in any case.
We also talked about curbing the influence of money in elections, which I agree with, quite frankly. It's a little frustrating to me, and I've said this in PMB debate before, that somebody who gives $100 and doesn't have any income pays $100, and somebody who gives $100 and has a lot of income gets $25. It's another problem to solve in a PMB somewhere I suspect.
When I talk to colleagues about our putting fundraising limits, I always get these questions. What about volunteers? How do we limit volunteers? How do you quantify that?
How do we quantify it?
Member of Council, National Office, Green Party of Canada
Personally, I think quantifying volunteering is not in the interests of democracy, let alone putting a limit on how much personal time someone wants to put into an election. If you really have to break it down, there are theories of economics that say the only currency that matters is time, because that's the one thing we all have an equal amount of. If a political party has more volunteers, then ostensibly it's because they are able to motivate more people to their cause. That is the true test of someone who has the support of the people who are electing them.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Have you ever—and this is for all three witnesses—witnessed voter fraud to do with VICs, voter information cards?
President, Commoners' Publishing
I was a DRO and saw people coming in with voter identification cards, and on subsequent requests for further identification it was clear they were a different person. In some cases they were eligible to vote; in other cases it was a problem, shall we say.
President, Commoners' Publishing
It was quite rare. I think the greater problem was more confusion, that people were voting at the wrong place or there were problems in getting them to vote. This was a pretty minor problem, but it has happened. I've seen it.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Is it a big enough problem that 160,000 people should lose the right to vote to protect it?
President, Commoners' Publishing
That's deeply ironic because the other point I was making with Elections Canada was that they had failed to look into the largest loss of the right to vote, which was 170,000 Canadian men during the unemployment relief camps, and they were not putting that in their history.
I think you should err on the side of participation. Yes, I would like to include that, but the problem I have is the deferential inclusion of some groups and the exclusion, the ignoring, of others. If you're concerned about the 160,000, you should also be concerned about the 170,000 who lost the right to vote, in my opinion.
President, Commoners' Publishing
This was between 1930 and 1936. Because they were put into unemployment relief camps they lost their right to vote. Essentially, they were under military command so they lost their right to medical care. If you look at Canada's social services you can see all these things—unemployment relief, worker's compensation, wages for work—and they were looking for the right to vote.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
I only have a few seconds left. Who else didn't have the right to vote in 1936?
Liberal
