Evidence of meeting #118 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 information.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Scott Simms Liberal Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL
But this is not part of criminal prosecution.
Chief Electoral Officer, Elections Canada
This is something that Elections Canada would not administer. It would be the commissioner who would administer that. He would exercise the discretion in that regard.
The important point is not so much the amount. The vast majority of non-compliance under this act is regulatory and of a fairly minor nature. They need to be sanctioned in some way, but they do not warrant the criminal process. There's an imbalance between the nature of the conduct, mostly by campaigns and volunteers, and the nature of the penalty in the criminal context. So that's a major improvement to the bill.
Liberal
Scott Simms Liberal Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL
I agree that it's not the amount, but there's a lot of judgment being imposed here as to how much it should be, and so on and so forth. Don't you find this to be overly prescriptive?
Chief Electoral Officer, Elections Canada
No. We can revisit that in the future, but I believe that's the right approach to begin with. If I'm not mistaken, if the penalty is over $1,500, there is a power for an appeal to be made to the Chief Electoral Officer to review.
Liberal
Scott Simms Liberal Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL
Okay.
I have about 20 seconds left. I'm going to throw up a general question. If you can answer it very quickly, I'd be highly impressed.
The future electors, the registry, how are you doing with that?
Chief Electoral Officer, Elections Canada
Actually building the registry is not that complicated. A registry of people is a registry. Mr. Roussel will correct me if I go wildly off on this, but fundamentally this is not a challenge from the point of view of the creation of a registry. The challenge will be to bring people on board. The level of effort that we will deploy before the election will be limited because of the time we have. We will be focusing mostly on 17-year-olds who will be turning 18, and over time we'll build that, but the actual creation of the registry is not a sophisticated undertaking.
Liberal
Conservative
John Nater Conservative Perth—Wellington, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Again, thank you to Mr. Perrault and our guests for joining us today. It's always nice to hear from our CEO and get comments from Elections Canada.
If I have time at the end, I'm going to leave my last minute or so to Ms. May, if that's acceptable to the committee.
I just wanted to touch on a couple of things you mentioned during your comments, and then I also had a question about your perspective on the Ontario changes, if you want to give some thought to that. We hoped to have the CEO of Ontario here. It may not happen before we complete our work with this bill, but we would like some perspective from you on that as well. I'll get to that as we go on.
You mentioned 20 or so IT systems that Elections Canada will have to update and change to implement this bill. You'll certainly appreciate the testing that must be undertaken whenever you do anything with IT systems. I know in government we've seen far too many examples of IT systems gone awry throughout my short tenure here. I'm curious whether those 20 IT systems are prioritized: those that must be updated in order to fully implement this bill versus those that may be left until after the 43rd election, or is it a case that all 20 must be updated at the same time? Is there some prioritization there?
Chief Electoral Officer, Elections Canada
Absolutely. That's the analysis that was conducted over the course of the summer. I'll give you an example. Some components of systems we will not touch in the short term, but we will in the longer term. For example, the system for the third party reports is being changed considerably. We can publish a PDF version of a third party report online. It will be searchable, but you would search within the report and you'd have to search another report if you wanted to do cross-references for contributions, for example. Down the road, we absolutely want to have a more useful tool, a more powerful tool, whereby people can search databases and not just within returns. So we've had to make that compromise to make sure the other changes are done in time.
I have other examples, but yes, that's the kind of analysis we've done to make sure we can deliver this bill, even if a better version of some of the systems is coming after the election.
Conservative
John Nater Conservative Perth—Wellington, ON
Thank you very much.
Now, as you know, this bill has a somewhat unusual coming into force provision: six months or a written indication from the CEO. I think Parliament Hill has a rumour mill that is in full swing 365 days a year. There's always the implication that there may be a spring election or a snap election at some point. If an election is called in the spring, and this bill passes by December, say, is there a date throughout the spring where you would not go ahead with the coming into force provision within that six-month window? Is there a drop-dead date? I guess that is what I'm asking.
Chief Electoral Officer, Elections Canada
Well, let me backtrack a little. I want to reassure Canadians and MPs here that we are always ready to deliver the last election. Whenever we work on improvements, whether it's within the boundaries of the law as it exists or other legislation, we always have an election that's sort of ready. That's the election we use for by-elections. That's the set of services and tools we use for by-elections between general elections until we improve systems and make tweaks, in some cases, and they're tested and rolled out. So we cascade the improvements.
In terms of this bill, as I said, our target for readiness to deliver the election is April. It's not September; it's April. Before that, we have an election in the works, which is the last election, and we're working on improvements for this election. But to meet the April target, we need to do some testing, starting in January. That was my point. There's a certain amount of runway that you want to be prudent about when you make those kinds of changes.
Conservative
John Nater Conservative Perth—Wellington, ON
Over the summer, you gave an interview on Power and Politics, and you mentioned the importance of multi-party consensus on a bill such as this. Is that still your view?
Chief Electoral Officer, Elections Canada
It's always been my view that electoral legislation benefits from cross-party support. That's why I was reluctant in the spring to say, “What is the drop-dead date?” I am quite frankly stretching it. I was hoping for an April or spring piece of legislation. I'm doing my best to accommodate the work of Parliament to work together and improve this legislation.
Conservative
John Nater Conservative Perth—Wellington, ON
I'd like to move on to questions about Ontario elections. As you know, there was an election in June. They undertook a fairly extensive update of their elections law, including rules specifically related to third parties.
I'm curious to have your thoughts on that legislation in terms of how it was rolled out, how it may have been implemented during the election campaign, and then any lessons learned you may be able to apply to this. That's my last question. After that Ms. May will have the last word.
Chief Electoral Officer, Elections Canada
I thought you were going to go into the technology aspect of the Ontario election.
Conservative
John Nater Conservative Perth—Wellington, ON
We can go into that in the future. We have questions about that too.
Chief Electoral Officer, Elections Canada
On the third party, there was some catching-up to do. The third parties had had a very significant impact in Ontario provincial elections in the past, due to the high number of unions in particular. They had to do some catching-up.
The assessment of those rules is something that takes a bit of time. I have not had the chance to speak to Mr. Essensa on how satisfied he is with how the rollout went. I'll reserve comment on that, because I would want to speak to him first. I have not heard any major concerns.
I believe the proposals in this bill are important—that they expand considerably. What we've seen in the past is that third parties in Canada no longer just advertise. It appears they do various kinds of campaigning. It's important to expand the regime to make sure it covers this and tries to provide a level playing field that includes more than advertising.
Green
Elizabeth May Green Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC
Thank you very much. Thanks, John.
I haven't addressed you since your official designation as our Chief Electoral Officer. I want to congratulate you personally. I think you're a wonderful choice.
I'm very worried about timelines. I would have liked to see C-33 move ahead when it was at first reading in December 2016. Now we have C-76. I generally support this legislation. It's in the House. We're going to go to clause-by-clause soon, and then it goes to the Senate and royal assent.
I know you're doing a lot of due diligence preparedness as though this was going to become the law, but I'd like you to give us a sense of when royal assent is necessary so that you can actually be ready for an election in the fall, assuming we stick to our fixed election date under the legislation and don't have a snap election. What's the drop-dead date for royal assent?
Chief Electoral Officer, Elections Canada
Answering that question is not as straightforward as it seems. As I said, my concern is having a fixed IT environment in December, so that we can complete the system changes. Not everything in this legislation affects our IT systems, though. I'm reluctant to say that the Senate should not contemplate any changes past December, but we have to be careful as to what those changes are and whether they would impact our systems.
Sometimes the changes may impact the need to do some public awareness. I'm thinking about third parties. It's a major change to how they operate. Some of the new rules contemplate that they will have to report back on earnings and contributions moving backwards.
It's very difficult to turn around on a dime and try to educate the world about the pre-writ spending limits for third parties when they're not really part of this conversation. They're not in the House and they are not necessarily aware that these changes are coming. It's not just the IT systems. It's a nuanced answer that I'm giving here.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Thank you, Chair.
Welcome.
You painted a scenario in the spring, in which delays would restrict what you could implement. In other words, there is some sort of a shopping list that comes out of a bill like C-76, and the longer it takes to be passed, presumably the less you can actually implement for the next election. Is that a fair thing to say?
Chief Electoral Officer, Elections Canada
A fair amount of discretion is given to the Chief Electoral Officer in this legislation. I've said that I will not be able to leverage some of that discretion to improve services in the next election. I could give you an example.
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Chief Electoral Officer, Elections Canada
Bill C-33 was much narrower in scope. It did not provide a whole lot of discretion to the Chief Electoral Officer, so what I'm looking at are largely mandatory aspects, and I have no issue with those. There was some discretion but not a whole lot. For example, they were talking about the possibility of doing mobile advance polls for remote communities.
