Procedure and House Affairs committee  I'll certainly agree with the comment that Dr. Boda made. From our perspective as election administrators, in a minority government it's our mandate to be ready. We were ready, in a non-pandemic environment, in February 2020, and we pivoted. We immediately embarked on learning about the pandemic, learning how it would impact voting processes and what adaptations we needed to make to our processes to have a safe election.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  We also planned our election to spread the vote out over all opportunities, including voting by mail, advance voting and voting on election day. Our legislation calls for six days of advance voting, including a Saturday and Sunday, from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. each day. Using my powers to adapt the legislation, I added an additional day so that we had seven days, running from the Thursday through the Wednesday preceding voting day, when advance voting was available.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  In British Columbia, by law there are two different models for the length of the campaign period. In a fixed-date election, the voting day is the 28th day after the election is called. For an “on demand” election, it varies between an additional four to 10 days that are added to that period.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  No, I have no concerns with relation to voter fraud. A vote by mail is a proven process in B.C. It's been used successfully in provincial elections and referenda for many years. As we indicated, there have been four vote-by-mail events in British Columbia since 2002, with the most recent in 2018.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I am. It's not an automated system. It's not a system that sends someone a PIN and they then use their touch-tone phone to vote. It's operator-assisted. The voter is registered previously. The voter has to call in. They have to authenticate themselves based on information that only they know and we know about their voter record.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you for that question. We did. As I mentioned in my opening comments, having administrative flexibility as an election body was critical to enabling us to effectively respond to changing circumstances and new outbreaks. We had three models for voting or for serving isolated communities.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Our communication strategy was directed right at community leaders. In the case of the first nations community, it was with band administrators and the chief, and they were able to use their internal networks to make that available. Also, in the case of an acute-care hospital or hospitals that would go into a lockdown because of outbreaks, we had preplanned communication tools that could be distributed at the patient level to enable them to use operator-assisted telephone voting.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think it was Dr. Boda who had that statement in his opening comments, but I'd be very happy to just speak at a very high level about our processes. As I mentioned before, it was a snap election in British Columbia. We did not have the usual opportunity to do outreach and education with the various stakeholder groups during the lead-up.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I'll certainly have a word with the part of my team that was responsible for that aspect, and if there are operational documents that we're able to table, I will look to do that.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  We also had a youth at the booth program that we piloted first in 2017 and reused for this election. It focused on using high school students and university students as election workers. We didn't do any specific outreach of the kind Dr. Boda mentioned. In fact, our experience was that once the election was called, there were many expressions of interest coming in via our website to our central human resources department and into district offices, once they were open, from people who wanted to work as election workers or as office staff during the pandemic, so we did not have challenges in terms of numbers.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Our experience was that it was very consistent, and we're certainly within the 30% to 35% range in requests for packages to be issued.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I guess there are two points I want to make. One is in response to your first comment about how well prepared we were, based on our previous experience. I would say that without the previous work that we had done, it would have been extremely challenging to provide a similar level of service in terms of being able to fulfill the requests that we received.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  This will build from my comments during my opening statement, because I did see that as a particular challenge in providing safe and accessible opportunities to at-risk voters and unique communities. Many of our first nations communities, as an example, were isolating and continue to isolate, so trying to make contact with them to establish the best way to provide voting and to have a range of accessible options that could meet their needs was essential to be able to provide voting.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes, once the election is complete, we will do an extensive series of post-mortems with our own district staff, the political parties and the candidates. We will survey them to understand what their experiences were. I'm not aware of any specific or unique challenges that were raised.