Evidence of meeting #144 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 signatures.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Deputy Clerk, Procedure
That's as far as I know. Thank you for the vote of confidence. That starts the meeting very well.
Hamilton Centre, NDP
You're well on your way to 45 years in your own right—not bad.
Deputy Clerk, Procedure
Yes. Thank you.
Our objective today, as Mr. Bagnell indicated, is to go through the different follow-ups to the 75th report, which was adopted last fall.
Today we will be discussing five very specific points, and we will conclude with a presentation of the Web drafts, which will be accessible at the start of the next Parliament.
The first item has to do with the number of days that petitions remain open on the website. Mr. Bagnell has referred to some items that have already been put in place. This one has already been put in place. It started on January 28, I think.
The fact that petitioners may ask that the petition stay open for 30, 60, 90 or 120 days makes things even more flexible for the different petitioners.
The first petition submitted by a member of Parliament was that of Mr. Blake Richards, who was a member of this committee at the time. That petition was authorized on January 28 and
essentially was closed for signatures yesterday, and it met the 500-signature threshold.
The second item had to do with sponsors. Members of this committee had indicated that having sponsors associated with a member of Parliament and associated with a petition could, in some instances, be understood differently by different people. This change has been made as well, so members are now authorizing the publication of a petition on the website.
The third item has to do with the format of paper petitions.
For those of you who remember, the origin of this recommendation by the committee was a point of order raised by Ms. Finley in the House. The objective of the recommendation is to have various types of petitions accepted, certified and tabled in the House. Obviously, this will increase the number of petitions submitted by members, and their representation of citizens’ interests. This process has begun.
The fourth point we wish to draw to your attention is dissolution. When the committee, during the 41st Parliament, adopted the changes to allow electronic petitions, it asked that anything on the electronic petitions website at the time of the dissolution be considered to have lapsed. There are cases where ongoing petitions amass a large number of signatures.
Once dissolution arrives, the website is closed, and all of that is essentially moved. If you compare that to paper petitions, for instance, you see that paper petitions continue throughout the year, but clearly if we have a paper petition that has been certified by Journals Branch and provided to a member of Parliament and the member of Parliament doesn't table it in the House before dissolution, that member of Parliament or another member of Parliament can have it recertified for the next Parliament. Essentially, the signatures that were on that petition are not lost.
The committee could consider the idea of having, let's say, any e-petitions that had met the 500-signature threshold at the time of dissolution certified afterwards. This would not be possible now, but they could be certified afterwards for the next Parliament. That could be a possibility, or any e-petitions that were certified but never tabled before dissolution could also be recertified for the other Parliament. This is a possibility that the committee could consider.
For instance, if today you had someone put a petition on the website asking that the petition be open for 120 days, essentially that would mean this petition would never be tabled in the House, because 120 days would bring us past the June 21 deadline. Let's say we only sit until that time and don't sit any later. That petition could not be tabled in the House, even though that petition could have met the 500-signature threshold. This is something that we wanted to bring to your attention.
The matter of the paper petitions that have been placed online is the topic of a large part of the 75th report we are presenting today, to provide information on what has been done.
We have worked very closely with the Privy Council Office to establish a way that all those paper petitions could be dealt with as efficiently as possible, and that's what we want to present to you today. This collaboration has worked very well, and we're very happy to say that this system will be in place at the beginning of the 43rd Parliament.
In a very practical way, this is how we propose it would work. As usual, any member of Parliament having a paper petition would send it to the Journals Branch to have it certified. The clerk of petitions in the Journals Branch would get the text of that petition translated right away. Rarely are petitions bilingual, so that text would be immediately translated and verification would take place to see if it's certified. Once it was certified, the clerk of petitions would download a certificate on the MP portal for petitions. That means the individual, the member, could immediately table the certificate in the House, exactly the same way we do for e-petitions.
Once the certificate is tabled in the House regarding a paper petition, the text of that paper petition would appear on the website, exactly as we do for e-petitions, and PCO would be informed so that a response could be worked on immediately, respecting again the 45 days afterwards that the government would have to respond to it, to table a response in the House, and that response to the paper petition would appear on the website as well. The response would be put with it at that time.
That would meet the request put forward by the committee, but in a much more efficient manner than having the paper petition circulating from the office of the member to the office of the clerk of petitions, back to the office of the member, then tabled in the House and then sent to the PCO, which was the case previously. Now what would happen is that only the certificate would be sent to the PCO, and only the certificate would be sent to members. Journals Branch would keep the paper copy of the petition until it's tabled in the House, as with e-petitions. On a regular basis, those petitions would be destroyed so that the private personal information found on those petitions would remain unaccessible to all.
That covers most of it.
To illustrate all of that, Jeremy is going to do a short presentation with mock-ups, and we'll be more than happy to answer all of your questions.
Jeremy LeBlanc Principal Clerk, Chamber Business and Parliamentary Publications
Thank you, André.
You have paper copies of those mock-ups in front of you, and they're on the screens as well. I want to take you briefly through what the new site will look like at the launch of the 43rd Parliament.
The look and feel of the petitions website is very much like what we have currently for electronic petitions. The difference is that we've rebaptized it so that it's just called “petitions” rather than “e-petitions”, since we'll be having both paper and electronic petitions. You'll see very obvious buttons that stand out, quick-access buttons that allow you to get to the more popular sections of the website, notably the one in purple that brings you to all e-petitions that are open for signature, since we expect that's what the vast majority of people will be coming to the website to do, to sign an e-petition. That will take them there relatively quickly.
Next, there is a section that allows you to do a search in any of the petitions. There is more information on this site than on the actual petitions site. Also, the information is presented in a more user-friendly way so as to better respect access standards for websites, for instance for visually impaired persons.
We added a button to the right to identify the Parliament concerned. We will archive the petitions of the 42nd Parliament, which is the current one. You will thus have access to them, as well as to those of the 43rd Parliament. At this time, since the site only contains petitions from the current Parliament, there is no information near the button on the right, but it will be possible eventually to do a search in the petitions of a given Parliament.
There are also icons that will allow you to quickly find paper or electronic petitions. In the list, the small icon that looks like a computer screen indicates an electronic petition, and the icon that looks like a sheet of paper is for paper petitions.
Next, if you go to the detailed page for each petition, again it has a layout very similar to what we have currently. There are some small changes to improve a bit of the look and feel of it and make it more accessible. Most notably, we've added a few other elements as well. We've added what language the petition was originally submitted in. As André mentioned, it's very rare for us to receive petitions in both official languages. Usually they're in one or the other language. We'll indicate what the source language is, giving people an idea of whether the text is a translation or the original language.
We've also integrated the text of the government response to the petition directly on that page. Currently there's a PDF version of the response that you can click on, and it opens a new version. This is not great from an accessibility perspective. The text of responses is usually relatively short, a few paragraphs, so it's possible to integrate that text directly in the page of the petition. As we mentioned in the fall, the last time we appeared before the committee, we have an agreement with the Privy Council Office whereby the responses to petitions are going to be transmitted to us electronically, so we'll be doing away with the reams of paper that represents.
As soon as a response is presented in the House by the parliamentary secretary, the Privy Council Office can transmit that text to us electronically. We can quickly upload it to the website, and there's an alert that is sent to the office of the member who presented that petition to let the member know that the government response is available. Rather than having to wait for a paper response to be sent to your office by messenger, which takes a day or two, you'll get an email alert that the response has been uploaded to the website and is available. That's something you can very easily share with people who may have been involved in organizing that paper petition through your own contacts. That's an improvement. The information will be available much more rapidly than is currently the case.
There's also an interesting feature at the bottom of the page. I'm sure you realize that there are often situations of the same paper petition being presented by multiple members or by the same member multiple times. We'll keep a running total of identical petitions at the bottom of the page.
In this example, it concerns health services. This is all fictitious data, but we've created examples of other members who may have presented that same petition, the date when they presented it, and a running total of the number of signatures collected. There were 148 signatures in this example, but also others that had been collected, for a grand total of 568, as you can see at the bottom of the page. It's a way of keeping track of the number of identical petitions that are presented, and also of the total number of signatures collected for them.
The next slide shows what the petitions website will look like on a mobile device. Since it was designed for the current site, it easily adapts to mobile devices, so that people will be able to consult it from various locations.
The next slide shows the government response section, which has now been integrated into the research section. This makes it possible to do a search in all petitions to which the government provided a reply. Here as well, we improved the display, and we provide more information on the status of the petition.
I also want to draw your attention to the small green button that is at the top of the page, right next to the menu. It is the “MP” button.
or “Member of Parliament” in English. That is the button that will allow members to access the MP portal, where they can find information about both paper and electronic petitions.
As André was mentioning, the process we envisage is that when we receive a paper petition in the Journals Branch and it's certified, we will send an electronic certificate that will become available in the member's portal. Rather than the entire petition being returned to your office through internal mail, which takes a day or two, it's uploaded electronically. You'll get an alert automatically to let you know there's a certified petition that's available. You just have to go to this MP portal. You or your delegated staff can then print the certificate and present that petition in the House. It will have the text of the petition and the number of signatories in the same way we do for electronic petitions, on a single sheet of paper.
Once the petition is presented in the House, that certificate will disappear from this section of the portal, so it's not possible to re-present the same petition over and over again.
Once it's presented, the certificate disappears and will instead be added to another new section, for the information of members, which gives you all the petitions that you have presented and information about them, including the latest update and where they are in the process. Has a response been received, and on what date? What date was the petition presented? You have that information there. You can also click on any of those petitions to get more detailed information about them.
That concludes what we want to show you. We're happy to answer any questions you might have for us.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
If it's okay, we'll just do this by open questions and answers.
Go ahead, Mr. Graham.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
I have a number of questions to get through.
You're probably aware, André and Jeremy, of the study that's been at the BILI committee for the last five years about getting sessional papers onto the Internet. Can this process be used to get all sessional papers to the general public, and is there any intention of doing that?
Deputy Clerk, Procedure
You have to understand the different categories of sessional papers.
You have those special and easy reports, let's say, from the Energy Council of Canada or whatever, which are tabled by the minister. There are responses to petitions, responses to questions on the Order Paper. There are responses to different categories of reports, committee reports, pursuant to Standing Order 109. Those different items are all considered sessional papers, and there are also orders for returns that are massive. This is clearly a start to the process of considering whether we could eventually envisage all of the information tabled by the government in the House of Commons, all documents tabled by the government, to be made accessible in an electronic format.
What we're doing here today is the first stage. As you can imagine, the documents tabled in the House—I think it's around 3,000 every year—amount to a lot of documents. As well, as we understand it—and people from Treasury Board and the Privy Council would be in a better position to answer that—sometimes, for instance, the format is not the same from one department to another, or perhaps there are tables in the documents that make it more difficult for people who have accessibility issues.
Those issues are not small. They're really not small. To get to that point could be a good long-term objective, but clearly what we've done today is just the first step. This committee, I think, has looked at that. The Library of Parliament has looked at part of that, asking for some sessional papers to be scanned, which is a completely different issue and certainly less accessible for people from the outside.
This is a first step, to answer your question.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
In the same vein, if PCO returns a response to a petition that includes a spreadsheet, for example, and they happen to send you the Excel, would the Excel go up, or do you have to print that into a PDF to table it? How would you do that?
Deputy Clerk, Procedure
The idea is that the information we would get—and I'm talking here about responses to petitions—from PCO would not be modified in any way, either for format or content, from the House of Commons. That's what we're working on: to have something agreed upon in terms of the software and the look and feel of what would be presented.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
While a petition is open, can anything happen to it? Can someone withdraw it? Can it be corrected if it has a mistake in it, or is it set in stone, and for those 120 or 60 days it is completely untouchable?
Deputy Clerk, Procedure
Jeremy can correct me, but I think that's why the committee has decided to adopt the changes and permit the 30, 60, 90, 120 days. The idea is you're locked into those, and it's to have that initial choice.
Principal Clerk, Chamber Business and Parliamentary Publications
I think the idea is that once it's published, it's very difficult to withdraw or change the text. If you were changing the text, then the people who signed it previously may not have signed the same thing. The change may seem insignificant, but for some people it might be a big deal, so we don't change the text and we generally don't withdraw petitions once they're published.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Even an Oxford comma might be enough to mess up the whole meaning of the thing, so yes, I get that.
When you log in as an MP to the financial portal and a number of other places, it accepts the identification of your browser and carries on. Is this going to have the same system, or are we going to have to have a separate log-in for it?
Principal Clerk, Chamber Business and Parliamentary Publications
It's the same system. It will recognize you based on the account that you've logged in with.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Okay, that's helpful.
If someone prints off an electronic petition and gathers signatures on paper, can those be used for anything, or does it have to be certified as a paper petition?
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
The two are completely separate processes? Is there no way of amalgamating the two processes?
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Okay. This will be my last question for the moment. I might have more later.
When a petition is certified, does anyone check that the addresses are valid?
Liberal
Deputy Clerk, Procedure
This issue was considered at length during the last Parliament. Essentially we looked at how to attest to the quality of the signature, or the legitimacy of the signature, and at that time the committee adopted certain elements to determine which types of signatures are not acceptable, such as, for instance, all signatures that end with gc.ca, meaning people signing from their offices in government. A couple of filters like that exist to attest to the legitimacy of the signatures.
Principal Clerk, Chamber Business and Parliamentary Publications
I would add that for e-petitions, when someone attempts to sign, they enter an email address. There's an email that's sent by the system to that address to validate that the address actually exists, and the person has to click on the link sent to that address before their signature will be counted. For an e-petition, there's a validation that the address exists.
For paper petitions, we don't go and see that Jeremy LeBlanc lives at whatever address was given. We don't verify to that degree. We just verify that the address format is accepted, the signature seems legitimate and doesn't look like it's in the same handwriting as all the other signatures on the page, and those sorts of things.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
If you find them all in the same handwriting, would you come back to say that you think they're all from the same person? You can't prove that either.