Procedure and House Affairs committee  Good morning. Thank you for this honour. I'm speaking to you today from Treaty 1 territory, which is the land of the Anishinabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples and the homeland of the Métis nation. I want to begin by acknowledging that I'm a settler who's been allowed t

Procedure and House Affairs committee  May I make three very quick points, please?

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you. I just want to point out that this is a matter of justice. It will cost the country to ensure that every measure is in place so that there is the right to free and democratic elections, but it cannot be compromised. This pandemic has created conditions that are ripe f

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Well, in terms of municipal and provincial movements toward—

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Do you want the number of permanent residents who currently reside in Canada who do not have the ability to vote?

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I do not have data related to new Canadians who are already citizens and are voting. I was referring to new Canadians who have permanent resident status and legally do not have the right to vote.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I'm sure we could find those numbers. This was information brought to me by several ethnocultural communities. They specifically noted that the delay in obtaining citizenship, and the many years as permanent residents, removed them from the democratic process.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I believe that Elections Canada needs to prepare multilingual resources that explain how to use the mail-in ballot in order for voters to know exactly what they need to do and by when they need to mail the ballot itself. The instructions need to be very clear and provided to ethn

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think it was mentioned by another speaker previously, but I believe that a non-partisan platform that summarizes the various positions of the different parties, which could be under the care of Elections Canada or another body with authority to oversee it and ensure it is corre

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think a great deal can be done through the ethnocultural community. I think there is a tremendously strong web of communities across the country who are interconnected, who are very invested in everyone having participation in the democratic process and who can be utilized in o

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I agree with you that there is a profound desire to participate. Among some newcomer communities, immigrant and refugee communities, there certainly is high participation. I don't want to discount that. I think we would need to look very carefully at disaggregated data, specific

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you. I want to specifically point out the wonderful work that was done by “Got Citizenship? Go Vote!” a number of years ago in Winnipeg, which was organized by the Ethnocultural Council of Manitoba. Voting instructions and encouragement to participate were recorded in Yo

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think that as much as possible we need to start as early as possible. I also want to point out that a lot of these platforms were made available online. I don't want to lose sight of the fact that what the pandemic has revealed to us is an enormous digital divide between commun

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I would agree with my learned friend Professor Blais that the longest period possible would be the best service to all Canadians.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Very briefly, I arrived in Canada in October 1989 as a privately sponsored refugee. My family and I left Soviet-occupied Poland in about mid-1988 because of the civil unrest. We spent just over 14 months in a refugee camp in Germany before being resettled here. In the seven and