Good afternoon. My name is Sharon DeSousa and I am the President of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, or PSAC. I am joined by our General Counsel, Sasha Hart, and our Assistant Director, Communications, Political Action and Campaigns, Michele Girash.

The PSAC represents over 245,000 workers from every province and every territory across the country.

Thank you very much for allowing us to speak to you on this particular project.

We welcome this effort to remove barriers and make it easy for people to vote. We support adding additional voting days and making it easier to cast mail-in ballots. Helping Elections Canada engage voters and increase turnout, especially among young voters, is another great step forward.

While we welcome this bill and its goals, we do have some concerns about it as drafted and, in particular, its important impact on the democratic operations of trade unions, particularly public sector unions like PSAC. We have three main concerns.

First, the bill fails to make changes to the act to make sure our ability to engage our members or advocate on their behalf doesn't risk being obstructed. It's important that committee members understand the unique position of public service unions like PSAC. As a federal bargaining agent, many of our members are employees of the federal government. The governing party is their employer, and other parties running in an election are their potential future employers.

Talking to our members about workplace issues is a primary responsibility of every union and simply can't be separated from talking to them about election issues. We have a legal duty to represent, advocate for and inform our members on issues that affect their working conditions. This is a necessary part of our work. Restricting our ability to talk freely about things like cuts to public services or remote work arrangements or to comment on positions that parties are taking places us in an untenable position.

We urge the committee to amend the definitions of “partisan activity” and “election survey” to make sure communications between a union and its members aren't unintentionally obstructed.

Second, the bill proposes new reporting requirements for third party contributions. As drafted, new reporting requirements could be interpreted to impose onerous new obligations on unions around things like the citizenship status of our members. This raises serious constitutional and privacy concerns for our members.

It creates a new obligation not only for us but also for our employers. Are Treasury Board, Crown corporations and agencies even collecting this information in such a way that they can send it to all unions? To fix this, the committee should amend the definition of “monetary contribution” to confirm that union dues are not considered contributions under the act.

Third, the bill risks making it harder for not-for-profit organizations to work together. As drafted, the bill prohibits third parties from using contributions from anyone other than Canadian individuals, even if all organizations involved are registered and all are reporting contributions under the act. This can be easily fixed by amending the bill to allow contributions between registered third parties.

Thank you again for inviting us. I hope all parties agree to the simple changes to fix these problems and to remove the risk that this bill unfairly restricts our union's ability to advocate for and communicate with our members.

We are happy to answer any questions.

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