Thank you very much to the committee for the opportunity to testify before Parliament today.

I am joining you from Ithaca, New York. I am now a member of the faculty at Cornell University, and I'm pleased to be joining you nonetheless.

I'll open by saying that considering laws around elections is an exceptional act by members of Parliament because, unlike other pieces of legislation, considering the Canada Elections Act directly affects your prospects of re-election. There is inherent in this work a conflict of interest, so it must be undertaken with care and with transparency.

I thank the committee for having these hearings and for doing this work of carefully considering the legislation in front of all Canadians. Thankfully, most changes to election law are likely to have small effects to which parties will respond strategically, hopefully cancelling out any differential effects or any effects that advantage one party or another, but big effects or small, it's important that this be carefully considered, so kudos to the committee for its careful consideration of this legislation.

For background, I've been a close observer and researcher of election laws for nearly 20 years. Indeed, the first time I had the honour of appearing before this committee was in 2007, when the committee was considering changes to advance voting days. I've since continued research on electoral systems and elections, have appeared before Parliament on other occasions and have been an expert witness in several cases related to election law.

I wish to make three brief observations about the legislation under consideration. Then I look forward to members' comments.

The first is that all of the measures that are proposed are likely to increase voter turnout, but the effects of this will be small. Increasing voting days and increasing ease of voting by mail can increase voter turnout, but members should not expect large effects. There is an implied trade-off here between the capacity of Elections Canada to deliver on all these changes and the value of increased voter turnout. Elections Canada is a highly competent organization, but there are limits to what can be done in our locally volunteer-administered elections. I would hope that the members would keep in mind that all of these changes impose strains on the capacity of Elections Canada to deliver on elections.

Second, these changes will undoubtedly increase what I believe is a worrying trend. Elections are increasingly isolated, atomized, individualized exercises, where voting is held up as a matter of convenience rather than a matter of duty, something that is done by individuals when it's easy for them rather than being done all at once as a collective action. It leads to elections in which voters are encouraged to implicitly or explicitly arrive at a decision sooner than later, rather than being open to all the information that an election can provide. At some point, this strikes me as an undesirable thing and not something that we should be encouraging.

Third, more careful regulation of third parties is a good thing. I think there are two emerging considerations for parliamentarians to consider in this. The legislative framework in Canada has for a long time done two things. The first is that it has limited who could speak during elections, largely limiting speech to political parties with a little bit of a carve-out for third parties. Second, it has regulated speech by using spending limits with the idea that it is money that propagates speech so, if you limit money, you can limit the advantage of some parties over others in speaking.

This is problematic in the emerging world because the cost of creating and distributing ads or distributing content is racing towards zero. That's the first reason why it's difficult, and the second is that we generally regulate humans, and it is possible that people, through writing algorithms, will in the future create non-human entities that may soon be intervening in elections by creating content that's used to persuade voters.

I ask members to consider that as they consider this legislation.

I have nothing more to say than that, but I look forward very much to the testimony of other witnesses and to the questions of members of Parliament.

Thank you.