Mr. Speaker, I will begin my remarks by addressing the issue of vouching. It is a subject opposition members have raised, and I would like to point them to some key facts.
Canadians can use 39 different forms of identification to prove who they are and where they live. If they fail to bring any of those, the law allows someone to vouch for them. Due to massive irregularities in the use of vouching, the fair elections act would end the practice. To highlight these irregularities, I pointed to a compliance review commissioned by Elections Canada as evidence of the problem. It included audits from four ridings in which irregularities in vouching averaged 25% of cases. Some have questioned this fact and its importance. The fact comes from page 15 of the Elections Canada compliance review I mentioned. The author was Harry Neufeld, the former Chief Electoral Officer for the Province of British Columbia.
Some correctly point out that the national rate of irregularities is actually 42%. The difference arises from the fact that the 25% number is an average of just four ridings, and the 42% number is a nationwide figure. At worst, I have understated the problem. Either way, both numbers are correct and both are shockingly high.
Are they important? Some argue that they are just minor paperwork glitches that have no importance with respect to the integrity of the vote. Yet that is not what the author of the report found. Mr. Neufeld defined irregularities as “serious errors”. Those are his words. They are not small details but are serious errors.
This is how he officially defined it:
An “irregularity” is a failure by an election officer to administer safeguards demonstrating that a voter is entitled to receive a ballot.
Some have correctly pointed out that this failure does not automatically mean that the voter is not eligible to vote. By that logic, we would not require any form of identification rules whatsoever. Instead, we would put the onus on the elections official to prove that a person is not eligible. Someone could walk in and assert his or her identity or address, and unless officials could prove beyond a doubt otherwise, the person would cast a ballot. In that instance, there would be literally thousands of fraudulent votes, and there would be no way to stop it, because one cannot prove a negative, nor should we expect elections officials to try.
ID requirements exists for a reason. Failure to properly identify voters, as so often happens with vouching, allows people to vote when they are not eligible or to vote more than once.
It should not be a guessing game, yet that is what vouching has become in nearly half of the cases where it is used. The facts contained in Elections Canada's own compliance report state:
Serious errors, of a type the courts consider “irregularities” that can contribute to an election being overturned, were found to occur in 12 percent of all Election...cases involving voter registration, and 42 percent of cases involving...vouching.
The latter point is particularly devastating. Judges do not overturn election results for nothing, yet the report states that vouching irregularities, which occurred 50,735 times in the last election, are serious enough for a judge to consider doing so. That number of 50,735 irregularities related to vouching comes from page 69 of the aforementioned report.
That is not all. While vouching is theoretically intended to extend the right to vote, it may ultimately rob people of that very same right. When courts invalidate votes because of serious irregularities, there is a chance that legitimate ballots can be invalidated along with them. In other words, a contaminated process can deprive even honest votes from being counted at all.
Why not simply administer vouching more competently instead of ending it altogether, as some ask? The answer to the question of quality assurance seems to be addressed as well in the Neufeld report. Let me quote:
During two of these elections, quality assurance programs involving Onsite Conformity Advisors...were applied. However, vouching irregularities still averaged 21 percent during the OCA monitored elections. This indicates that overly complex procedures cannot be remedied simply by improved quality assurance.
To translate, in the four ridings audited, there were irregularities in 25% of the cases where vouching was used. One in four vouched votes had an irregularity. The compliance review then asked if the number of irregularities would be reduced if there was extra supervision to enforce compliance. Sadly, it only reduced them from 25% to 21%. Therefore, even with extra efforts to impose better compliance, one in five cases where vouching was used involved an irregularity.
It is also important to note the key principle here. Yes, we must allow every eligible voter to cast a ballot. That is why the fair elections act proposes another day of advance voting and would require Elections Canada to advertise ID requirements so that people would know what to bring.
Let us consider another way someone's vote can be taken away, and that is through the fraudulent vote of someone else. If an honest voter casts a ballot for candidate A, and a fraudulent voter casts a ballot for candidate B, the fraudulent vote mathematically cancels out the weight of the honest vote. As such, fraudulent voting is a form of disenfranchisement and is one Canadians expect us to combat.
These are serious problems. Our identity laws must be serious as well.
Let me turn my attention to the issue of fundraising. The opposition has raised concerns about the decision to exclude in the fair elections act the cost of fundraising calls and letters to previous donors from the overall spending limit. This criticism, to start with, is at best hypocritical. Both the Liberals and the NDP exempted fundraising calls from spending limits in their own leadership races. They had no problem with the principle of exempting these costs in their own internal party practices. Why do they not believe that those same principles should apply in a general election?
I should also note that fundraising expenses are already partly exempted from the spending limit under subsection 407(2) of the existing Canada Elections Act, so it is not a foreign or exotic concept that there would be some exemptions. The reason is that there is a difference between campaigning, which is to seek out votes, and raising money for campaigning.
People do not put mileage on their cars while they are standing there putting gas in. They put mileage on their cars when the wheels start turning. That is the fundamental difference between the two, and that is the reason both the NDP and the Liberals have made the decision that fundraising costs should not be included under spending caps within their own leadership races. We are rendering consistent with their practices the law of the land.
The number of donors to a party is very small, so calls directed to them could not substantially help get out the vote, not to mention that donors are the most motivated to vote and the least in need of a reminder call. A suggestion that people could use a fundraising call as an indirect effort to finance their entire “get out the vote” operations is completely impractical and devoid of basic knowledge of how campaigns actually work and the demonstrable, documented facts about how many donors are actually out there in the universe.
Furthermore, the fair elections act includes a provision that deals with the purpose of the call. The purpose must be fundraising. It cannot be something else. If the purpose were actually to get out the vote, the call would not be exempted from the spending cap. Concerns about a call being used for something other than its intended purpose are therefore not valid.
The fair elections act also includes compliance measures that would make it hard to skirt these rules. Under the voter contact registry, which the fair elections act would create, unsolicited phone calls to individuals to raise funds for a registered party or candidate would be captured as voter contact calling services. That means that they would have to be specifically reported on a candidate's expense return. Furthermore, the script would have to be kept for an entire year. Therefore, if anyone were to allege that a purported fundraising call was actually designed to do voter turnout, then the investigator could look at the script to ascertain what the purpose of the call actually was.
These would all be new compliance requirements that did not exist prior to the fair elections act.
Furthermore, it would require an external compliance audit that each party would be subjected to. Parties would have to hire an external auditor who would look at all the expenses and claims of the party to ascertain if they had been properly reported, and if they had not been, the commissioner, as the watchdog of elections law, would be able to undertake a law enforcement investigation.
All election period spending by registered parties is eligible for a 50% rebate from taxpayers. If fundraising calls are not exempt from election spending, taxpayers will be stuck paying half the cost of fundraising calls and letters. We judge that inappropriate. Parties across the way might believe that taxpayers should be forced to pay for half their fundraising costs. We in the Conservative Party disagree.
According to proposed sections 348.16 and 348.19 of the Canada Elections Act that we propose in clause 77, political parties would be required to keep a copy of scripts and recordings used to make unsolicited voter contact calls for up to one year. As I stated earlier, this could become an investigative tool for the commissioner or the watchdog of elections.
The fair elections act would require tough new requirements for audits of party expenses. There would also be firm limits on what parties could spend during a campaign. They should not have to use up those limits to raise the money in the first place.
I return to the issue of the purpose test. Under proposed subsection 376(3), there is something called a purpose test for the exclusion of what would constitute an election expense. Calls would have to be made for the purpose of soliciting monetary contributions from past supporters. The more a party relied on these calls to obtain other forms of support from past supporters, the higher the risk that they would be investigated and potentially prosecuted for having failed to submit a complete election expense return. As required by proposed subsection 376(3), the calls would have to be made for the purpose of soliciting monetary contributions in order for their costs to be excluded from the mandatory reporting as an election expense. This would thoroughly deal with the false allegations of the opposition on the subject of fundraising costs.
Allow me to move to the subject of section 18 of the existing act. Our change in the fair elections act to section 18 would require Elections Canada to focus its advertising budget on the basics of voting: where, when, and what ID to bring; and what special tools are available to help disabled Canadians cast their ballots. We know that there have been serious deficiencies in Elections Canada's communication of this basic information in the past, because its own data shows as much. According to Elections Canada's own surveys, 50% of youth were not even aware that they could vote before election day. They were not aware that they could vote in an advance ballot, by mail, or by going to a local Elections Canada office.
Thus a student who is occupied with studies or work on election day might not know they could have voted earlier and, as a result of that logistical obstacle, they miss the chance to cast their ballot altogether. Some 73% of aboriginal youth are unaware of this information.
I think it is an appalling failure that Elections Canada has not informed youth of these voting opportunities, especially considering that the agency says it has dedicated an inordinate amount of its budget to informing Canadians. If that is really the purpose, then it is not currently being fulfilled. The fair elections act would ensure that it would be, by focusing the advertising budget of Elections Canada on the basics of voting, the information that people require to cast their ballots.
The act would not prevent the CEO from speaking publicly. He is not only allowed to speak publicly under the law but is required to do so under sections 534, 535, and others, and that would not change in the fair elections act.
I should add that all of the data that Elections Canada provides on the reasons people decided not to vote in the last election point in the direction that the fair elections act is headed. Let me quote from an Elections Canada report on the May 2, 2011 election: “In 2011, 60% of non-voters cited everyday life issues as the reason for not voting.” While voter turnout increased in 2011 when compared to 2008, there is more work to be done to increase participation in Canada's democracy.
What were these everyday life issues? The report indicates that 17% of people were travelling, 13% had a busy work or school schedule, 10% were just too busy, and 7% lacked information. Those are some examples of the composition of the overall 60% who said that everyday life issues prevented their voting.
Let us break this down. First, we have a solution for travellers. One, they could vote by mail and two, they could vote in advance. However, as I stated earlier, half of young people are not even aware of that. Why does Elections Canada not inform them? The fair elections act would make sure it does.
If a person is too busy, again they can vote in the advance ballot like two million other Canadians did, and the fair elections act would give them an extra day on which to cast their early ballot.
People lack information, which is the case for 7% of non-voters. That is exactly why the fair elections act would require the agency to give people the basic information on voting, where, when and what ID to bring.
The fair elections act looks at the data that Elections Canada provided on the reasons people are not voting and provides direct, tangible solutions that would help people cast their ballot. That is exactly what the law should do; it should respond to data, and respond it would.
I should also point out that the current promotional campaigns of Elections Canada have failed. When they started, the turnout was 75%. Now, roughly five elections later, it is 61%, and the drop has been most precipitous among the people whom the Elections Canada campaigns claim to help.
Are we to suggest that Elections Canada's ads have actually turned people off voting? Of course not. We are suggesting, though, that it has failed to give people the basic information they require to vote. That is not my personal conclusion; that is the result of looking at the data Elections Canada has put on its own website, and we are responding to that data.
I look forward to debating that bill as we move forward. We have had an excellent debate so far, and I look forward to hearing the suggestions of members of the opposition, the government side, and members of civil society as the bill enters rigorous study at committee.