Procedure and House Affairs Committee on Oct. 27th, 2020

[Kimberly Poffenroth]

That's a difficult question to answer, because the circumstance we experienced in New Brunswick was so different from what we had planned for. I think what needs to be kept in mind is that you need to have large polling locations regardless of the size of the province or the city. You need to have large polling locations to allow as much physical distancing as possible. You need to encourage people to vote and to take advantage of all of the opportunities for voting so that you do not have those large lineups. It's the same, once again, regardless of the size of the area, and it's probably more important in those densely populated areas. It may be a matter of having smaller polls with fewer people reporting, so you end up with more polling locations.

Those are the sorts of things that I think are equally applicable and probably even more important in large areas.

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

That's awesome.

Just one of the considerations that I've heard about is that in P.E.I. they don't use schools. I know that when we have been speaking about it here, we have been looking at schools and having an election on a weekend when the schools wouldn't be open. The schools aren't open in the first place.

Even in my own community, not all of our municipal facilities are open, so if we are looking for those large spaces, a lot of times those are public spaces. What are your recommendations? If public spaces are not available to us, what would you be looking at?

Also, since I know my time is running out, I want to talk about the workers. I'm looking at the fact that Elections Canada mentioned having, in the country, one person per polling site, who would work as both the poll clerk and the DRO. I know, however, that in P.E.I. you've actually increased that so that you have more election workers there. What is that right fit so that we can make sure that we have the most democratic election possible, looking at those voting locations so that they are easy for people to get to and also at the safety of our poll clerks and DROs and making sure that we have space for them as well?

I'm just going to throw that off to you guys.

[Kimberly Poffenroth]

The first thing I would recommend to facilitate that social distancing is the New Brunswick model for voting, in which we don't require two election workers to process a single voter. It would take far too much of the time allotted to explain it, but we only need one election worker to process a voter. We don't have the DRO/poll clerk model. That way you can actually process more people more quickly and can have social distancing between workers. We don't use schools in New Brunswick either, and I certainly don't expect that, even if we did use them, they would let us in during a pandemic to hold an election.

I would say that some of our most successful locations in our larger cities in New Brunswick were arenas and exhibition grounds. Those are typically really large buildings that allow a lot of room for the electors and for the workers. We had at least two extra workers for every poll in New Brunswick as well.

[Tim Garrity]

We had the extra workers simply for the sanitizing, making sure that people were maintaining that social distance, distributing masks and things like that. It's really that we wanted to ensure the electors here.... We met with the chief public health officer to say that between every elector voting, the surface area where they voted behind the voting screen would be cleaned. We guaranteed that.

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

Thank you.

Finally, I have one more question specifically on the recruiting of poll workers. Could you talk about that sometime in your next answers?

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

That's all the time you have.

Thank you, Ms. Vecchio, for that.

Next we have Ms. Petitpas Taylor.

[Ginette Petitpas Taylor, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Was Mr. Gerretsen wanting to take that spot? I'm a bit confused about the speaking spots.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

I'd take it if you offered it.

[Ginette Petitpas Taylor, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Mr. Gerretsen, I will go at the end. How's that?

You can proceed.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Thank you, Ms. Petitpas Taylor.

In my first question, I want to link back to a couple of things I heard.

Ms. Poffenroth, when you were describing to Mr. Tochor that you had no plan in an emergency and you went back to the red category, that's not to say that you don't have plans on how to deal with emergencies altogether, right? Most emergencies are unforeseen. You don't have the luxury of even being able to predict that you might go back to red; they just pop up.

You certainly have measures to deal with emergencies writ large, right?

[Kimberly Poffenroth]

Yes, absolutely. For example, there was a fire that took out the Internet connection of several polling locations on polling day. We had a location where the power was turned off because the building owner hadn't paid the power bill. We had procedures in place for that. One of our locations is on an island that is only accessible by land from the United States, so we had plans in place in the event they lost power, lost water, those sorts of things.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Okay, so you do have those plans. That's great. Thanks. I just wanted to clarify that.

Either of the witnesses can comment on this. In the discussion you were having about best practices, it appeared clear to me, based on your answers—but I think with some of the discussion that followed, it's not clear to all members—that you hadn't necessarily created the plans for being safe when campaigning. You were taking your health adviser's information and passing it along to candidates, right? Or were they actually your plans and best practices on safe campaigning and stuff like that?

Ms. Poffenroth, do you want to start?

[Kimberly Poffenroth]

I was facilitating the communication of that documentation from the chief medical officer of health to the parties.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Mr. Garrity, was it the same on your end?

[Tim Garrity]

We just put our parties' official agents in contact with the public health officer because we knew the contacts.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

You were aware that there were some best practices out there and you were just linking people with the right places. Okay, great.

[Tim Garrity]

Correct.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

I'm going to the mail-in ballots now.

Mr. Garrity, you said you had 235 mail-in ballots, of roughly 4,200 electors. Is that correct?

[Tim Garrity]

Yes, that is correct.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

You're at about 5% there.

[Tim Garrity]

Yes.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Ms. Poffenroth, you said there were 13,000 mail-in ballots—although you did specify that that lumped in some special ballots—out of approximately how many electors?

[Kimberly Poffenroth]

Approximately 380,000. It was just under 380,000.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Okay, we can get the percentage from that 380,000.

My last question for both of you would is a very straightforward one relating to mail-in ballots. Do you have any concerns that a mail-in ballot contributes to electoral fraud in any way?

[Kimberly Poffenroth]

No.