Procedure and House Affairs Committee on Oct. 2nd, 2018

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Why did you find it necessary to put a limit in place? Once you did so, why did you choose the limit of $1 million?

[Greg Essensa]

I've been an electoral administrator for over 30 years. From watching elections being conducted federally, provincially and even municipally, it is clear that campaigns start much earlier than the 28-day or 35-day writ period.

Messaging and people's perspectives on political parties, leaders, etc., can often be informed in that pre-writ period. We were seeing an unequal balance between some political actors who had extensive funds and could fund many of these campaigns.

From my perspective, it effectively violated the core principle of our democracy, which is a fair and level playing field. We needed to ensure that those who had more funds than others could not just dominate the airwaves and, in effect, have a direct impact on the electoral result at the end of the writ period.

In Ontario, there was considerable debate amongst us. I travelled with the committee across the province. I heard from a number of stakeholders who supported some form of a pre-writ advertising limit.

I can't honestly say where $1 million came from. There was a lot of debate about different figures. Ultimately, that's what the government landed on and it made its way into the final versions of Bill 2.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

You also mentioned in your previous testimony that we should consider having a mechanism to regulate and figure out whether any of the money in our third party spending is coming from foreign actors. How have you gone about doing that? You referenced it a little bit.

I'm thinking more in terms of large, international organizations that have presence in Canada, have a branch in Canada or operate out of here, but also collect donations to do international work. How do they segregate the money that they spend and where is the money coming from, when it comes to the Ontario election?

[Greg Essensa]

I will be recommending to Ontario's legislators that we provide greater transparency into where the money comes from third parties and that there be a requirement for third parties to differentiate where funds are actually coming from in their financial reporting requirements and materials that they need to provide to us at Elections Ontario.

I would suggest this is something your committee may wish to consider while you're deliberating Bill C-76, to provide those mechanisms for the commissioner of Canada elections to, in fact, investigate where some of those funds are, requiring third parties to provide information on a fulsome basis as to the derivative of exactly where that money has come from and whose money is being used during the campaigns. I think there are—

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Help me clarify. You were unable to do that in this last election.

[Greg Essensa]

We did not have the authority to do that.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Okay.

[Greg Essensa]

It is something that I will be commenting on post-election, next March.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

How would you envision greater transparency? Would it be a separate election fund? Then they'd have to be able to trace all money that's deposited into the election campaign fund for that organization and let you know who the donors were. How would you do that?

[Greg Essensa]

I think it's very clear it's no different from what political parties are required to do now. You have to provide us with a list of who is providing you money that you utilized during your campaign.

We publicize those lists. Federally, here in Ontario, we have a 10-day direct posting, so if someone gives you $100 towards your campaign, we post it within 10 days of that. There are financial reporting requirements. I think that similar types of requirements could be put in place for third parties that would clearly indicate where the money was coming from, so that if XYZ corporation was supporting a third party and they're based in Alberta, and they gave $5,000 towards that third party, then you would clearly understand that's where the money came from, from that corporation. They provided the money and there was transparency to that.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Where does it end? That corporation may have money in their account that comes from foreign actors as well.

[Greg Essensa]

Very well, and you will have multinational corporations that have that. But I do believe there does need to be greater transparency in this process. I hear from Ontarians. Certainly up until we made the changes in Bill 2, and certainly when I travelled the province, I heard extensively from Ontarians who said that having third parties just spend in an unregulated way was something they were quite concerned about. They wanted to have greater transparency on where the money was coming from and who was spending this money.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

This piece of legislation doesn't deal with fundraising, but I've been dying to ask what the government's intentions were behind changing its fundraising rules to not allow candidates or nomination contestants to be present when conducting any kind of fundraising activities.

[Greg Essensa]

I think the previous government members, back in 2015 or 2016, found themselves on the wrong side of public opinion when it came to some of the fundraising tactics that they might've been using here in Ontario. They quickly moved to introduce Bill 2. They wanted to do it in a very transparent process. They asked me to sit as an adviser to the committee. They made the committee travel the province to hear. But, I think primarily, they wanted to get away from the public perception that ministers and politicians were influencing directly with contributors.

The bill did go to the extent of eliminating MPPs, ministers and leaders from attending fundraising events. It was quite a departure from the previous regimes that we had in place. I think early on, the party struggled a little bit with how to fundraise in that regard, but I think as we got closer to the event in 2018, all three parties sort of found their feet on how they could manage within those restrictions.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Thank you, Ms. Sahota.

We'll go to Mr. Nater again for five minutes.

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

Thank you, Chair.

Again, thank you, Mr. Essensa, for joining us.

I'm going to jump around a couple of different topics in my short five minutes, and hopefully I can get to the topics I wanted to touch on.

I wanted to touch on the pre-writ spending. In that pre-writ period, is there also a limitation on government spending, or government advertising?

[Greg Essensa]

There is a limitation that is overseen by the Auditor General of Ontario, but there are limitations. There's a separate statute that is not my home statute which does regulate that, and the Auditor General does review those ads.

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

Okay. Thank you, sir.

You mentioned e-poll books, and that you'd piloted that in by-elections and then implemented that in the general election back in June. I'm going to tie this with another question that goes with that.

On e-poll books, I'd appreciate any lessons learned from that piloting and implementation process, specifically on the technical side of things, but also on the connectivity side. There are regions of the province that don't have perfect connectivity coverage, 3G coverage.

This leads me to tying that with another question about the vote tabulators. Certainly from a viewer's perspective, the results came fast and furious. I was walking into a victory party about 12 minutes after the polls had closed and my local candidate had already been declared elected. It's a quick process with the vote tabulators.

I'm curious about lessons learned from that, again tying this with e-poll books. Were there any connectivity issues and challenges that came about because of rural and remote areas?

With regard to tying those two questions together, what are your thoughts?

[Greg Essensa]

We did our pilots in both Whitby—Oshawa, and Scarborough—Rouge River. When I wrote to the legislators, we were very transparent. We believed going into the election that we would only put technology in where we knew it would work.

We had our returning officers do a review of all the voting locations with a technical device to determine what type of connectivity we would get there. We put the technology in just slightly more than 50% of the voting locations in Ontario, but it represented that 90% of the electorate were going to those locations, meaning that 90% of electors voted using the technology.

As far as the technology itself is concerned, it far surpassed our expectations. On election day, we hovered between 99.4% and 99.6% connectivity with the 3,900 locations in which we had technology. It worked really, really well.

From the electorate's perspective, we recently received all of our research data. In Ontario, there is a requirement in the act to do a large survey. We ask about 10,000 Ontarians various questions, and some of the numbers coming back are staggeringly high. About 95% of general electors in Ontario were very supportive and found the technology easy to use, efficient and secure.

When it comes to the vote tabulators, they were the easiest part. It is a paper ballot. When I went into this process of trying to modernize the election, I was very cognizant that we wanted to maintain a paper ballot. I've conducted elections right across this country and in speaking to Canadians, most Canadians believe they want a tangible piece of evidence of how they voted. Maintaining a paper ballot was core to us.

With respect to the tabulators themselves, the technology is relatively simple. It's been around for 30 years. It's the same technology when you go to your grocery store and the clerk takes your cereal box and runs it over the scanner. It's not cutting-edge technology; it's tried and true technology.

On election day, we had over 4,000 tabulators in the field, and we literally had nickels and dimes, meaning we had some issues with 10 to 20 of them throughout the course of the day. No elector was ever disenfranchised. We had processes in place to ensure that they could still vote by using an auxiliary box.

From our perspective, the technology was a big benefit to us in this election.

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

Very briefly, as I only have about a minute left, with regard to the audit function post-election, was an audit done to ensure that the number of votes cast through a tabulator corresponded with the number of paper ballots and the exact votes that were cast? Was an audit done to ensure that aligned?

[Greg Essensa]

We are currently doing that.

We effectively go through all 124 ridings here in Ontario and we do a complete audit. We look at every aspect. We look at the official returns; we recalculate them. We recount hand ballots, and we recount tabulator ballots by hand.

We're in the process of doing that complete audit right now. Our official results will be published at the end of November or early December, but we have found so far that everything has worked exactly as we intended and expected it to.

[The Chair, Liberal, Larry Bagnell]

Thank you very much.

Now we'll go to Madam Lapointe.

[Linda Lapointe, Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, Lib.]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Welcome, and thank you for being with us today, Mr. Essensa.

For the 2014 election, you changed your rules regarding the number of polling hours. Did I understand you correctly?

[Greg Essensa]

We had the same hours. What we did change substantively were advance voting days. In the previous regime we had 10 days of advance voting and the ability to rotate advance poll locations. If you were in central Ontario, it provided the returning officer the ability to have an advance poll for three days here, two days there, etc., and rotate throughout the riding.

The new rules that were in place for 2018 dramatically reduced that. We now had five consecutive days of voting. It also reduced the hours at advance polls by an hour. We no longer went from 9:00 a.m. until 9:00 p.m.. We went from 9:00 a.m. until 8:00 p.m..