Evidence of meeting #32 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 recommendations.
A video is available from Parliament.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
Actually, we're just going to 12:45 p.m., because we have committee business.
Liberal
Arnold Chan Liberal Scarborough—Agincourt, ON
At 12:45 p.m. we're doing committee business. Scott, how do you want to do this? Do you want just keep going?
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
I'll go along with whatever the majority wants.
Liberal
Arnold Chan Liberal Scarborough—Agincourt, ON
If our witnesses are fine with continuing straight through to 12:45, then we shall do so. Let's carry on, then.
I wanted to simply chime in along with all of my other colleagues and say, Mr. Mayrand, and to your colleagues from Elections Canada, thank you for all of your work and for your service these past nine years as the Chief Electoral Officer. I think that this report and the other two reports you tabled are a testament to your service to our country, and I want to thank you as well.
As I went through this report, I was particularly heartened by the recommendations and suggestions. I think the report reflects the point you made that at the heart of it, it is about fairness for electors and for Canadian citizens. I personally have very little that I couldn't endorse in terms of moving forward.
I do have one very specific pet project related to electoral district associations, and it was referred to in your report. I just wanted to probe you briefly on that particular point.
I support the previous decision to bring EDAs under greater scrutiny under the Elections Act. I do have some problems with the way it's currently administered or the way in which sanctions are applied, and I just want your thoughts on that. I agree that there needs to be greater transparency, and the current system, I think, does achieve that, but my concern is that sometimes what actually goes on within EDAs and the sanctions that are potentially applied to them may not in fact match.
Let me give you a situation that happens within political parties, and I'm sure my colleagues can see that the situation could arise. Sometimes the transition between candidates or between riding associations is not an easy one, to put it diplomatically. Sometimes the requirement to actually file the EDA's returns is not within the control of the new riding association, yet the sanctions that are applied right now could include deregistration of the riding association—essentially penalizing the individuals currently in control of the riding association—or the loss of the ability to issue tax receipts. These sanctions apply to the riding association, as opposed to the individuals who were actually in control and who would have had information about the activities of, let's say, a previous riding association.
Do you think there is still a gap in terms of how that reporting takes place and how sanctions would be applied?
Chief Electoral Officer, Elections Canada
That matter would deserve a much longer discussion than we can have in this forum.
There are still offences, under the act, for those individuals involved. As I mentioned, these are criminal offences, so this is not the most suitable forum. This committee could look at the legislation to see whether there's a need to reinforce the statutory responsibility of the officers in charge of the EDAs at the time.
The act considers that unless you deregister the EDA, the same entity continues, from the perspective of the legislation and from the perspective of transparency of the financial transactions. It's the same entity, and the act does not distinguish whether there is a new board or new management at the EDA.
The best way, in those cases, may be—and I say this with great caution—to deregister the association, but you still need to file a final report of that association and register anew.
It is a problem in the system. The fact that it relies very significantly on volunteers, I think, is a big factor in all of this. We could look at ways of making it a little bit more effective and fair.
Liberal
Arnold Chan Liberal Scarborough—Agincourt, ON
I think the suggestions and other provisions dealing with giving you greater powers so that this could be done not just through criminal enforcement but through sanctions, including fines or something like that, might at least provide you greater flexibility and at the same time give Canadians confidence regarding the transparency of reporting.
I'm struggling with a particular situation of not being able to get my hands on certain decisions of a previous electoral district association. My association is under a compulsory requirement to file for transactions over which I had no control and about which I have no details, yet I bear the consequence of the way the act is currently set up.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
Thank you, Mr. Chan.
Go ahead, Mr. Christopherson, for three minutes.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Thank you, Chair.
I have just two things. I wanted to mention, on providing a subsidy to the official agents who complete Elections Canada training and file the returns, that this is a growing job. I'm so glad that you're starting to concentrate on that.
Tyler Crosby, behind me here, my staffer, was my campaign manager. For all intents and purposes, nobody worked harder than he did, hopefully with the exception of me. Nobody worked harder than he did. I have to tell you, for the chief financial officer after the campaign it is flat out, and no one sees it. It's a thankless job, and if you make a mistake, the seat is on the line. It's huge.
Richard MacKinnon is my guy now. We can't give him a subsidy, but I can give him a shout-out and tell him thanks. Every one of us has someone like that who gives a big part of their life, and quite frankly they have to be really competent, high-functioning people who get it. It's not child's play, so I'm really glad to see you moving on that one.
The last thing I wanted to mention was that notwithstanding the fact that we're seeing more and more evidence that referendums are not necessarily the magic elixir for every question in front of a democratic nation, we should at least have a referendum that works if we need it, but right now we are not in any kind of condition, really, to conduct a modern referendum.
A lot of work was done—and Mr. Reid, of course, was here then—during the minority governments. We spent a lot of time doing good work on referendums and on prorogation, for instance.
I just want to mention to colleagues that if we do start to look the Referendum Act, rather than reinvent the wheel, there's an awful lot of that good basic foundational work from constitutional experts and other people like Mr. Mayrand. It's there and available.
If anybody thinks right now that we can just pull a referendum off the shelf and have a state-of-the-art fair referendum process that works, that person is mistaken. I will just leave that with the committee.
Maybe we can hear your thoughts on how much work is needed for it to to be state of the art and to have something that would reflect the kind of referendum process we would like to have.
Chief Electoral Officer, Elections Canada
It certainly needs an update, just to reflect all the changes over the last decade and a bit more, since 1992, that have occurred in the electoral process itself and in the electoral legislation. The two are closely interdependent.
The other question for this committee to consider—and it's not for Elections Canada—is whether in this modern age there are alternatives to how we run a referendum. I understand that in B.C. they run plebiscites by mail. I understand that in P.E.I. next month they will be running a plebiscite online and by phone. There's nothing about those modern alternatives that's available under our federal statutes, which causes a significant cost to a federal referendum.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
Okay, we've finished two rounds. I'm just going to open it up to any committee members who have any further questions.
Go ahead, Mr. Chan.
Liberal
Arnold Chan Liberal Scarborough—Agincourt, ON
I wanted to follow up on another matter. It's with respect to costs.
A lot of the proposals that you've put in here.... I'll give one example. It's extending the voting hours at advance polls, moving it earlier, from, let's say, noon to nine o'clock. One thing is that doesn't give me a sense—and I guess this would be tabled through your estimates—of what the potential incremental costs would be for each of the particular proposals that you have within all these changes.
As I said, I think most of these changes are really good, but I think it's also fair and transparent to Canadians to have a sense of what those incremental costs might be, just so that we have a sense of their potential impact.
That was one question. There's a second question I want to table quickly, and this wasn't covered in your report. Given that you've been administering this act now for nearly a decade—and of course the changes took place before you became Chief Electoral Officer—I wanted to get your thoughts on the consequences of the elimination of the voter enumeration system and the establishment of the permanent voters lists.
I think your report indirectly deals with some of the challenges, such as new voter registration, particularly for those who are turning 18, and of course new Canadians, particularly those who may not be filing income taxes or those without fixed addresses.
I wanted to get your thoughts in terms of the efficacy of the current system and the participation rates of those under the new permanent voters list as opposed to.... Because on occasion you get complaints from voters that there used to be voter enumeration in every election. I recognize it was a very expensive system, but by the same token, there was confidence that the people who lived in your electoral district were picked up in that enumeration process and could exercise their franchise and there was a lot less uncertainty as to whether you were on the voters list.
Chief Electoral Officer, Elections Canada
There is certainly a range views on that issue. I can speak of our experience.
First of all, we need to not forget that we still do enumeration during an election campaign. We do it in a targeted fashion, in neighbourhoods with high mobility and all these things. We do targeted revision on reserves, for example. There is still a form of enumeration taking place for exactly the reasons you mentioned—people are highly mobile or hard to reach—so we do enumeration there.
One of the reasons—and think my colleagues across the country at the provincial level would agree—is that it's increasingly difficult to reach out to people through enumeration. We often knock at doors, but nobody answers. People are busy. They have different schedules. It's a challenge to recruit workers to do that kind of work. Even StatsCan is moving away from those surveys. The other thing—and it's unfortunate—is that in many cases, we can't find staff, for security reasons, who would go into certain neighbourhoods, yet they're probably the neighbourhoods that would most benefit.
As an alternative, we have the permanent register. What we did last time around also was launch our online registration service. That allows any Canadian at any time, at their convenience, to add themselves to the register or change their address, for example, if they've just moved recently.
Of course, looking at it from a cost perspective, the national register as a permanent list is much cheaper than enumeration. Yes, we lose contact with electors. Perhaps one way to offset that is to beef up the civic education program that exists.
I just want to take up one point. You inquired about the cost, which is absolutely legitimate. Of course, many of those recommendations don't bring any additional costs. Some of them bring extra costs, of course; an example is opening advance polls for longer periods of time. We estimate it's probably $500,000 an hour to have those polls open. With what we're proposing, we're talking about $6 million per election.
Civic education, registering youth at 16 or 17, would also have a cost. It's very preliminary, but we estimate that it's between $5 million and $10 million. We estimate that the first round would be more expensive. When the system stabilized, it would be a regular program, and the costs would come down. These would be the larger cost increases caused by those recommendations.
Of course, I can't speak for modernization. Now technology at the poll will be something else, but until we have devised a system, it would be premature to talk about it.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Thank you.
I have a couple of questions related to recommendations 21 through 24, which is maximum length for an election period, allowing appointment of returning officers from outside the riding, and so forth.
My question is, why do we limit preparation of hiring to the writ period? Could we not have that all set up in the weeks and months leading up to an election, now that we know when the elections are going to take place?
Chief Electoral Officer, Elections Canada
If we have certainty about the election period, that would make it easier. There are some staff. Returning officers' key staff are trained before the writ is issued, of course. The 285,000, however, we can hardly train much in advance because they need to know when they will be available and if they are available, but the earlier the better. That's why we put in those recommendations to not wait until the night before advance polls open to train people, which happens too often.
The other advantage of what we're proposing is that we would be able to specialize the task for poll officials so that their curriculum of learning would be somewhat narrower than what they have now. Hopefully, that will help them perform their functions.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
In the same spirit, knowing the elections are going to take place on a specific date, aside from legislation that introduces changes, what is stopping us from sending out our overseas ballots months ahead of time and having that whole process stretched out to make it much easier for overseas voters to participate?
October 4th, 2016 / 12:25 p.m.
Chief Electoral Officer, Elections Canada
They can register. They have to register, and normally in the year of an election we will contact citizens overseas and issue pamphlets inviting them to register. That's the first thing they have to do. When the election is called, we issue the ballot kits. We do a bit of work prior to the writ, but again, not enough of them are registered.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
But your recommendation is that they can pull the forms off now electronically, so they don't have to wait to get them in the mail. That's a recommendation.
Chief Electoral Officer, Elections Canada
Yes. In fact, the changes we're recommending are that they could download the ballot electronically and send it back to us with their own envelopes. Rather than having to wait to receive a kit from Elections Canada, they could save that time. They could register online, download their ballot, and send it back according to the procedure that has been described on the site.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Mr. Mayrand, you talked about the use of one polling station to vote at any table, and in the recommendation you mentioned the need to perhaps put the poll numbers on the back of the votes. Would that be at print time, or when the RO signs the back of the vote, would he then also write the poll number? How do you see that?
Chief Electoral Officer, Elections Canada
We would have to look into that in more detail. This thing is suggested as a way to ensure that we continue to have poll-by-poll results.
One of the downsides of allowing people to move around, in terms of voting, is that you may not get as granular a result as candidates and parties like to have. An option to proceed ahead and preserve the poll-by-poll result would be to ensure that the ballots indicate the poll with the ballot.
Another way also is to use scanners. If the committee agrees, we would be ready to do a technical briefing on these aspects of modernization. We've done one with political parties recently. It went quite well, and I think it would inform your discussion as you start looking at the recommendations.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
You were talking also about the ability to do pilot projects. If you wanted to do a pilot project, what is the process that you'd have to go through, in brief?