Great, thank you, and thank you, all three, for such powerful and articulate presentations.

I particularly want to recognize Leadnow with respect to this particular bill. Right from the beginning you helped raise the alarm with Canadians and you said something very important, Mr. Shedletzky, near the beginning of your presentation. You said there are many problems in Bill C-23 and a focus on voter ID risks diverting our attention from those other elements. I'll come back to that because I'd like you to, after I've made a couple of other comments, just to summarize what you think really needs attention beyond the voter ID stuff.

On the encouragement of voting, it's also worth noting that this bill makes it much harder to do experiments with online voting. It's singled out for not just full House of Commons approval and thus, blocking, but Senate blocking of any such pilot projects, which I would have thought from the student perspective is not something all that welcome because I hope students would want us to be ready when the technology and public confidence level is there for online voting to be used at least in a supplementary way.

The last thing is that I very much hope that at some point we will have a fair elections bill that's about fair voting, that's about making every vote count, and that it would include proportional representation within our electoral system, which we know more or less can increase the vote by 2% to 5% as well.

That said, Apathy is Boring, this is an amazing document, this card, but the irony is that if we were to look at this in terms of post Bill C-23, it's not even clear Elections Canada would be able to partner with this at all, because the new language of proposed section 18 talks about an exclusive list of things that Elections Canada can do, and, “The Chief Electoral Officer may provide the public...with information on the following topics only”.

Those topics include this side, but they would never include this side:

The future is ours: 50% of the Aboriginal population is under...27. It's up to us to own it.

Elections Canada would be banned from helping with this side. They might even be banned from helping with this side because the language in the existing act of, “The Chief Electoral Officer may implement public education information programs”, is removed, and the provision that says “The Chief Electoral Officer may, using any media or other means” is removed. So it's not at all clear that the current provision will even allow partnerships with bodies such as yourselves. I think that should be a real concern given how you are advancing the ball down the field with this kind of stuff.

Back to Mr. Shedletzky. I'm wondering if you could just tell us what you think we should be paying attention to. You have about a minute.

Craig Scott

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