Procedure and House Affairs Committee on Oct. 2nd, 2025

[Stéphane Perrault]

To be clear, I don't believe we ever did use pens in work stations. As far as I know, we've always used pencils.

The benefit of pencils, beyond the fact that they are economical, is that they don't dry up, and they don't smudge. If you start using ballpoint pens, for example, and you store them for four years and the leftovers stay on.... Some pencils have been in our box for several cycles. They always work. If you buy pens, you have to verify that they work. Even if they do work, sometimes they may smudge, and that could cause ballots to be rejected.

Our preference is for pencils, but we do not disallow the use of pens.

[Grant Jackson, Conservative, Brandon—Souris, MB]

Thank you for that.

Trying to deal with this misinformation issue, there may be an additional cost but, on the information side and dealing with credibility questions about ballots, perhaps it is worth the cost. When you talk about smudging, for example, I understand that it is an issue on the physical ballot itself. I would like to try—as parliamentarians, I think we all would—to combat some of those issues in a non-partisan fashion, if we can, so if there's anything we can do, please let us know.

In terms of the report, it was very comprehensive. I agree with my colleague's comments on that.

It states that more than 60% of voter information cards were either mailed late or not at all. With labour disruptions and the general context of mail delivery these days, I'm skeptical that it is likely to improve going forward. In terms of the voter information cards themselves, if 60% can't be delivered on time, have they outlived their usefulness? What does Elections Canada recommend? Would you consider other types of delivery providers? That 60% figure not getting delivered on time is very high, in my opinion.

Have you considered other options to get those cards out on time, or are they past their usefulness?

[Stéphane Perrault]

Thank you. That's a very rich question. I'll try to peel the different parts of the onion.

Just to be clear, 60% were mailed late. That's after day 24, which the act provides. They should be in the mail on day 24.

I believe it's something like 17%, a much lower figure, that arrived late. For me, “late” is after advance polls have begun. Of course, we want that to happen before advance polls, but it's critical that they be received before polling day. That's the first point.

The second point is that it's not primarily a mail delivery problem. In this election, the challenge that we faced was not an inability to find polling locations but to confirm them.

In many cases, what we see is that it takes a lot more time to negotiate leases. Whether it's school principals, school boards or commercial landlords with lawyers and boards that they report to, it's having to validate and approve the lease in a way that was not the case before. It's no longer a handshake or a phone call and a quick signature. It's a long process, and then the returning officer moves to plan B, and plan B is the same long process, and plan C is the same long process. The main challenge is securing polling locations in a timely way.

That's why I said that when it's on a fixed date on the calendar, it's not a problem, but when it's outside of a fixed date, it really creates an important pain point.

[Grant Jackson, Conservative, Brandon—Souris, MB]

Thank you.

I have a quick question about my constituency, because I know I'm running out of time in this round.

I heard a lot—and again, I am a new candidate—about a couple of locations: Hobbs Manor, which is a seniors' residence in Brandon, and La Rivière in Cypress River. These are two communities that have had polling stations in them for time immemorial. Nobody can remember an election when they didn't have a federal polling station. Neither of those places had one this time.

Has the population threshold to have a polling location changed as part of this election? Why would these long-standing communities that have always had a polling location not have one?

Particularly in the two rural towns, it's a severe impact, because there is no public transit available in these communities to get to the next community for residents to be able to vote, etc., so it was a significant barrier for all of those locations.

[Stéphane Perrault]

I do appreciate that.

We did not raise the threshold in any way for locations for assigning polls. We had more polls in this election than in previous elections. The ability to find one that is suitable in the right location is where the challenge is. It's not about Elections Canada wanting to reduce the number of polls. It's quite the contrary. For me, especially on polling day, which is the last chance to vote, proximity voting has always been top of mind and is critical. That's one thing that we strive to achieve.

On your initial question, we are looking at options. Voters can go online at any time and find their polling location, of course, once it's confirmed. They don't need to wait for their voter information card.

We would like to allow electors to download their voter information card in digital format. That would not replace the paper one, because for some electors, that's just not an option. I do believe that over time, the paper voter information card may go away, but that's not for the immediate future. I think we need to have multiple layers as we move forward.

[Grant Jackson, Conservative, Brandon—Souris, MB]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

Thank you so much.

Go ahead, Ms. O'Rourke.

[Dominique O'Rourke, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Thank you, Chair Bittle.

Having twice been a trainer for Elections Canada and once for Elections Ontario, I just want to thank everyone who works the elections. It's important for people to know that within a matter of days, the returning officers have to find the locations, start accepting ballots at their location and hire hundreds of people and train them.

Effectively, there are a number of manuals. I know that I've gone through them myself and memorized them and been a troubleshooter on election day. It is a monumental task to pull together an election out of thin air. I want to thank you for your leadership and thank our returning officers and all of the folks who were the poll workers.

Just out of curiosity, we know the advance poll this time was held on Easter weekend. Many of the faith communities that might hold polling stations did not do so this time. Was it situational that there was a challenge to secure enough voting locations, or is this an ongoing challenge?

Also, did the new boundaries impact that at all? I know that in my riding of Guelph—which is the home of the robocall, as you may recall—there was some confusion around the new boundaries, and people who had always crossed the street to go to vote could no longer do that. Were those factors at all?

[Stéphane Perrault]

Broadly speaking, I would think not.

Returning officers had to adjust to new boundaries, especially experienced returning officers who had established contacts in the past with certain locations. That was an adjustment. In Ontario in particular, because we used to share the boundaries with the province and we do share some of the returning officers, and because we had back-to-back elections, they had to move from one boundary to another and make adjustments, so there were challenges there. Speaking to the CEO of Ontario, he had a huge challenge confirming polling sites, and he didn't change his ridings.

I don't think these are unique circumstances. I think we have to accept that the difficulty stems from a range of legal and social factors. Today, if a school principal has a badminton tournament organized in a school, they will not cancel it without consulting the parents or going to the council. They're reluctant to do that. Commercial landlords have lawyers, and they often own many properties, and they have standard processes that are not designed for the turnaround times we need during an election. I think it's an evolution of the real estate market for polls.

[Dominique O'Rourke, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

I'd like to ask another quick question about ballots, which are extremely long and list the names of multiple candidates. Did you consider having a different official agent for each candidate? Could that be a solution?

[Stéphane Perrault]

That's something that has been mentioned several times by a number of people. I'm not opposed to the idea, but I don't know whether it's a real solution to the problems we experienced. However, I don't think it's a bad idea to consider having an official agent, who's teamed up with one candidate, work solely with that candidate.

In theory, the candidates compete against one other. It's a bit strange then for teams to use the same official agent within the same riding when candidates are supposed to be competitors.

In principle, I'm certainly open to that suggestion. However, if we want to resolve the problems we identified, we need to go beyond that, and I think we also need to look at the double signature issue.

[Dominique O'Rourke, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

We know foreign actors may attempt to meddle in democratic elections and undermine them. One of the ways that is increasingly happening is through deepfakes or artificial intelligence.

Can you tell us why these threats need to be taken seriously? Should AI content made by or on behalf of political entities be labelled? How do you think the Canada Elections Act can be used as a tool to fight malicious uses of artificial intelligence in our elections?

[Stéphane Perrault]

Thank you for the question.

I made recommendations on that specific topic before the election in the context of the Hogue commission. I do believe there are adjustments that are warranted in the Canada Elections Act. For example, the impersonation rules contemplate a situation where someone presents themselves as somebody else but not where they present somebody else in a different context or saying or doing things they haven't done. There are adjustments that are required to deal with that. I do believe labelling of all synthetic content would provide greater transparency. That's also a recommendation I had.

We did not experience, thankfully, significant amounts of disinformation using AI in this election. My understanding is that it may have been used more to promote content than to manipulate it. We did see, for example, a fake Le Journal de Montréal article saying that for those over 60, Elections Canada had moved the polling day to the Tuesday. That wasn't AI, but it was made to look like.... You don't need AI to do that. Thankfully, social media platforms were very quick to respond and pull that content down. I don't believe it had any impact whatsoever.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

We've completed two rounds of questions, so I'm going to suspend for a few minutes so we can do whatever we need to do.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

Welcome back, everyone.

We'll turn it over to Mr. Kram for five minutes, please.

[Michael Kram, Conservative, Regina—Wascana, SK]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for joining us today. I especially thank you for your very detailed report on the 45th general election.

I think election night is a very exciting and stressful time for candidates and Canadians alike. I'm sure everyone in this room was on the Elections Canada website on the evening of April 28. Unfortunately, when we needed it most, elections.ca crashed. According to page 18 of the report, it went down at 7 p.m. on election night, and it was not fully restored until just after 5 a.m. the next morning.

I strongly suspect that even the most hard-core political junkies were fast asleep by 5 a.m., and there was probably a very large reduction in volume and traffic on the website by that late hour.

I was wondering if the witnesses could share with the committee what exactly went wrong with the website and what steps are being taken to make sure that it doesn't happen again. I hope the technical solution is not to just to wait until five o'clock in the morning, when people stop using the website.

[Stéphane Perrault]

There are many elements to that question.

To be clear, technically speaking, the website was not the problem. The web service provider that's behind the website.... Our systems were functioning, but people could not access them.

There was a failure of a firewall that is set up by the private partner that provides the web services for us during the election. That firewall could not handle the spike we saw on election night—or throughout the election period, I should say. Throughout the election period, we saw double the visits to our website, and that was true as well on election night. They were more than double the number we had in the last two elections, when they were pretty stable. That caused the firewall to go into what we call “protection mode” and to stop the traffic from penetrating or to slow it down significantly, such that it was very difficult for most Canadians to get access.

There are a couple of things. One is that, at that point, we had to identify the source of the problem. We were very quickly informed, working with the Canadian centre for cybersecurity, that it was not a cyber-attack. This was almost instantaneous. We knew that this was not the case.

Our service provider, however, was not able to identify in real time the source of the problem. There are a few lessons learned from that event. Of course, from the service provider's point of view, they have augmented significantly the capacity of their firewalls. They've replaced the firewalls with much greater capacity, and doubled them.

We've also introduced protocols whereby we will be monitoring the pre-election tests more actively. Rather than letting the commercial partner do its testing, we will want to be more involved in seeing the tests that take place. The service provider is very committed to that.

We did have a couple of fail-safe solutions. One was that there's a separate channel that provides the results to the media consortium, so the results kept flowing through the media consortium to the media through a different channel. That's an important safety measure that we will, of course, maintain. Also, we have a replication of our website across the world on thousands of servers, except that there are two things about that replication. One is that it's a static website; we're looking into that. It provides information but not live information. In hindsight, we took too long to switch to that static website. We should have switched sooner.

We're drawing lessons from that event and making sure it does not happen again.

[Michael Kram, Conservative, Regina—Wascana, SK]

This segues well into my next question about the live results that were still being distributed to the media.

When I was declared the winner on election night, I did a screen print of the results, posted it to social media and said thank you to all the voters. When I checked the results the next morning, I was down 1,300 votes from the results posted on election night. Fortunately, my opponent was down by about the same number. In Terrebonne and in other ridings, we saw the results change from one day to the next.

I was wondering if you could explain how it's possible to lose 1,300 votes from election night to the morning of the next day and why there are these discrepancies in the results being reported to the mainstream media.

[Stéphane Perrault]

I'll have to look into that question more deeply in terms of losing votes, because that would be surprising.

What is not surprising is that election night results do vary between election night and validation. That's why there's a validation. In fact, if you look at the Canada Elections Act, you see that preliminary results do not exist in the law. That's something that we provide as a matter of tradition, and Canadians and candidates very much want it. However, it has to be clear that on election night, with poll workers calling in results that are being hand-entered into systems late at night, fatigue and human error come into play. That's why the validation process is so important. There's always some variation between election night results and the validation. That is not unusual.

We also sometimes see important swings in the vote, simply because, for example, a group of advance poll results may come in late at night from a part of the district that tends to favour one candidate. Then you can see a swing happening. Sometimes people are concerned about that, but it's not unusual.

We will look into your situation, certainly, and we can talk about that.

[Michael Kram, Conservative, Regina—Wascana, SK]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

Mr. Al Soud, you have five minutes.

[Fares Al Soud, Liberal, Mississauga Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Monsieur Perrault and Monsieur Roussel, for taking the time to be here with us today. I say with confidence that it means a lot to the members of this committee and to the millions who are watching this on CPAC right now, of course.

Ms. Normandin said it perfectly: There's always room for improvement. I'm convinced we all agree on that.

I have the honour of representing the Mississauga Centre community, and its citizens were extremely clear, in the last election, about their priorities. Every day, they continue to be extremely clear.

I'm also a member of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, so I'd like to take this opportunity to ask a few questions about misinformation and disinformation.

We speak to the importance of local and public media in ensuring Elections Canada can address misinformation rather quickly. Could you speak to that as well, please?

[Stéphane Perrault]

Yes. I think one of the successes of this election, from our perspective, was in preparing so many information products and making them available to the media so that they could use them. We really did see that. I don't have numbers here to share with the committee, but I was impressed in the early phases of the election at how the media would actively use the products that we made available to them. I had a sense that this was really working well.

Many Canadians listen to local radio or read ethnic newspapers, so yes, there's a growing trend towards social media, but I think it's critical that we maintain the channels through other, more traditional media to reach different communities.

[Fares Al Soud, Liberal, Mississauga Centre, ON]

Thanks for that.

I also understand that there are special protections in place during election periods against misleading publications and undue foreign influence in broadcasting from outside of Canada.

Could you explain what these are and whether you think these protections need to apply outside of specific election periods as well?

[Stéphane Perrault]

I'll have to refresh my memory here, Mr. Chair.

Of course, a range of provisions have been enacted regarding the undue influence of foreigners and the use of funds by a foreign entity to support a candidate or party or to oppose a candidate or party. Right now these provisions apply only during the election period. It's something that I mentioned earlier in my report from last fall. I did suggest that it be expanded to outside of the election period.