Mr. Speaker, the complaints that the member for Vancouver East has been raising tend to revolve around the issue of homeless people and their ability to participate and the danger that they will be left off the voters list and will not be able to cast their ballots. They are valid things to be concerned about. I think it is not valid to say, as she is saying, that these things have not been taken into account in the bill, in the work the committee did on the bill, in the questions we asked the Chief Electoral Officer, in the responses he gave us, and in the way we incorporated his responses in the amendments to the bill.
I will point this out again and ask her why she thinks this does not work. The law is now amended. I invite the member to look at subclause 16(1) of the bill, which states that an elector or any other elector living at the residence of that particular person, for example, at a homeless shelter, can vouch for the person and get him or her on the voters roll. Not only that, but they can be vouched for at the poll. They cannot vouch for many people, but it does not mean that many people cannot vouch for other people on that list.
The member says that people have to go to the homeless shelter during the day. That is a good point, but we have a number of ways of dealing with it. They could be enumerated when they are back at the shelter by adjusting the enumerator's hours. Enumerators frequently work in the evening for this reason anyway, so it would be easy to accomplish this goal. It could be dealt with by other means. There is a wide variety of ways this could be dealt with.
What I cannot understand is why she thinks that with this provision--and this provision was put in specifically after the Chief Electoral Officer was asked how to deal with this kind of problem--this seriously fails to achieve the goals that she is outlining.