Procedure and House Affairs Committee on Oct. 20th, 2020

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

Yes, coming from the great province of Saskatchewan, which is less than seven days away from its general election, I think probably the most useful witnesses would be chief electoral officers of New Brunswick, obviously, which just went through an election during a pandemic; Saskatchewan, currently; and B.C. To Todd's point, I think that at the very least we need to hear from these people for sure, and as we know with elections, the work in those offices doesn't just end on election day. There's a ton of work afterwards.

We'll need to have a little bit of flexibility to make sure that we get Saskatchewan's Michael Boda, hopefully, to attend and take part as a witness. I think that would be very helpful for this report.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Absolutely. Maybe if the committee is willing, we can work around their schedule at some point and perhaps try to schedule a meeting outside of our permanent time. I'd be open to that if all the members are, so we get all of those important witnesses in.

I believe Ms. Vecchio has something to say at the end.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Just carrying on with what Corey said, I also think it would be a great opportunity, post-election, because we're going to be having the Chief Electoral Officer this Thursday. On Monday, we're going to be having those two elections going on, and I think that after getting reports following those election days, we should really be asking what some of the hurdles were that they didn't even see coming.

On Thursday, he's going to share with us everything he has prepared for, but then we need to see the actual results and the hurdles that arose and the different things that he put into place. I would really like the opportunity to call him back as well as a witness so we could discuss post-election.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Absolutely. I will make a note of that. We'll let him know that we want him to come back to report on those by-elections after the fact.

I think we have agreement at this point that by Friday noon we'll submit our preliminary witness suggestions, and then obviously there's an opportunity after that point to submit other suggestions. Then committee members can decide if they want a cut-off date for any new suggestions, because I think Mr. Doherty had mentioned that he does want some kind of end in sight, or some kind of scope to this. We know that we could go on forever, really. It's such an interesting topic.

Good work, everyone. Thank you for all of your great input that got us to this point. I look forward to seeing you on Thursday and getting started with this study. Have a good rest of your day.

The committee is adjourned.