Procedure and House Affairs committee  My answer, Madam, is always the following: we must strive to use the least amount possible of personal information. I am neither for nor against. I would remind you that the more we use personal information, the more we feed it into large databases, the more we want to share it, the more we increase the Canadian State's ability to monitor its citizens.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  —and as I understand, for what riding? Then when you get to the polls, how do you legitimately show, in the least intrusive way possible, but in a way that doesn't make a mockery of our elections, that you are the person who's on the list? I think that trying to put all those together perhaps increases the potential of privacy invasion, so—

Procedure and House Affairs committee  My understanding is that there are fairly broad powers under the Privacy Act to run data lists against each other, as long as they meet the test of consistent use, which the Supreme Court has set out. I don't know the details--and we might have to get back to you on this--as to how the Canada Elections Act would fit under that scheme, because it's not subject to the Privacy Act.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think there are potentially very great problems. Again, we have to come back to, what are the real misapplications that you have found with the current wording of the Canada Elections Act? Is electoral fraud such a problem that we have to make drastic changes? Assigning each elector in Canada--and that's a good part of our population--a single number is one step towards assigning every single citizen a number.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  As I remember, the Income Tax Act is one of the pieces of Canadian legislation with the most privacy protection, because it is very sensitive. When we give our information to the income tax authorities, we want to make sure it's used for strictly income tax purposes. So it's in that spirit that we worked with the director general of elections and the income tax people to say that if the information was to be shared, Canadians should be informed and they should consent to it.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think there's a problem if you move towards asking on one card for a series of information that doesn't already exist in pre-existing Canadian identity documents.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes, that's why I'm trying to think, what documents do we have? In some provinces, the health insurance card has our photo, name, date of birth, but I don't think our address. Our passport would have our photo and address, but—

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I don't know if you can move and still use your Canadian passport.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes, that's right, just our place of birth. So I'm not sure that there's one card at the present time—

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It seems to me there are two issues, but of course you know far more about electoral issues than I do. One issue is, who is legitimately on the voter's list—

Procedure and House Affairs committee  That would be very kind, yes. Ms. Marnie McCall is from our legal department. Ms. Aline Gélinas is my special assistant.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I can't inform you as to whether the people at the tables--the volunteers--do have access to the date of birth. If they do, that would probably be covered, I would think, by an oath of office that they would have to take to keep that information confidential. To the best of my knowledge, this hasn't been an issue.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Well, a basic rule of data protection is that you should use personal information sparingly and in proportion to the problem it's meant to address. If you find that you have a real problem of voter fraud--that is, misused identity, identity fraud at the polls--this could suggest that one of the ways is to use increased amounts of personal information.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, and we'd be happy to appear and discuss. We have two annual reports under both laws. We'd be very happy to go over those annual reports with you and answer your questions on those.