Procedure and House Affairs committee  Let's say you have a situation in which there are tons of signatures coming from London for whatever reason. I'm not sure we would be able to block those signatures, but we would be in a position to say that they were not valid and that we would not count them. I'm not sure where that process would take place.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  As you are aware, one of the check boxes that would need to be filled out would involve the individual indicating “I am a Canadian”. That would be one of them, along with the addresses and the phone number found in there. When you add all of those elements together, if there's a phone number that is a European phone number, well, we are getting the situation to be much clearer in terms of—

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you. When we began looking into the issue in 2005, the members of the House modernization committee had visited Scotland. That was the major event relating to electronic petitions. Scotland was somewhat of a forerunner in the field. Since then, a large number of legislative assemblies have put in place e-petition systems, some more advanced than others.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I understand. Sorry, I didn't get that part. To put it very simply, no, you could not say that you have 150,000 signatures on this website and you just want to put it on this one so that we can get a debate. You could probably say that you've heard there are a lot of citizens who are interested in that issue; there is a citizen in your constituency who is interested in the issue and has approached you and said, “I want to put a petition on the public parliamentary website of the House of Commons.”

Procedure and House Affairs committee  This year is an important year; let's put it this way. Last year was a prorogation year. There were close to 2,000 petitions, and before that, close to 2,650. There have been a lot of petitions over the last few years, but this year there's a good number.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  That I could not comment on. I'm not sure about what the trend is here. What you could see in terms of the situation as well is that you could see the number of petitions declining. Why would that be? For instance, we get a lot petitions in the House. We have a member who presents five petitions one day, and another member who presents five petitions the day after.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The answer is yes to that. We need to start with the idea that at first the Clerk of Petitions would get the list of those who have signed the petition. From that perspective we would be able to see very rapidly who has signed the petition, and if there are funny names or whatever, as we've seen with petitions signed “Mickey Mouse”, or whatever, in the past.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Can anything be done without the changes? When you see how the numerous changes, as we've talked about.... For instance, for a take-note debate, nothing is in the Standing Orders regarding take-note debates on petitions. How many hours would you want to have that debate take place?

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes, there are other alternatives, and I think you'll hear about one from the National Assembly of Quebec after we're done. Most of them go around the question of committee appearance of individuals who want to put forward the ideas they have regarding specific situations. You have a number of petitions that have been signed by a number of individuals, and after a certain threshold they can appear before a committee to make their point.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I'm not exactly sure what you are.... Maybe I didn't understand well. I think the proposal refers to 10 members of Parliament who would be needed after a petition has reached, let's say, over 100,000 signatures. Those 10 members would be needed to make sure that there is a take-note debate in the House.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Maybe I could ask Soufiane to give you the details regarding the technical aspect of it.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  If this committee works very rapidly, there are other steps that would follow before we could take action. The first one would be to table a report in the House. I'm not sure how the committee would like to work, whether it would be a report that would have changes to the Standing Orders already built into it or not.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  From the approval of funding, because we would need funding to proceed with that.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The totality of the budget of the House is $400 million.