Finance and Government Services — Issue No. 60 — Tuesday, March 24, 2015 (HTML)

Present: Wm. Scott Hamilton, MLA (Chair); Carole James, MLA (Deputy Chair); Dan Ashton, MLA; Eric Foster, MLA; Simon Gibson, MLA; George Heyman, MLA; Gary Holman, MLA; Mike Morris, MLA; Jane Jae Kyung Shin, MLA

2. The following witnesses appeared before the Committee and answered questions regarding Elections BC’s Budget Proposal: 2015 Metro Vancouver Transportation and Transit Plebiscite:

3. Resolved, that the Committee meet in-camera to consider the request from Elections BC (Simon Gibson, MLA)

The following electronic version is for informational purposes only.
The printed version remains the official version.

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES


CONTENTS
Page
Elections B.C.: Budget Proposal for 2015 Metro Vancouver Transportation and Transit Plebiscite	1365
N. Western
J. Lawrance
Y. Koehn

S. Hamilton (Chair): Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for attending at this most inconvenient hour. I do apologize for that. We have very few opportunities, I’m finding, to conduct meetings like this during the Legislature being in session, so unfortunately, lunch-hour is it. Once again, I apologize, but I do thank you for being able to attend.

If I could turn the floor over to you to briefly introduce yourselves, and then I’ll go around the room. Then I’ll ask what you would like to present to the committee before we go to the floor to questions. Would that be all right?

N. Western: Okay. My name is Nola Western. I’m the deputy chief electoral officer for funding and disclosure.

Dr. Keith Archer couldn’t attend today’s meeting. He’s been out of the country for the last three weeks on a long-awaited holiday, but he’ll be back Thursday.

With me today at the table is Jill Lawrance, our director of corporate planning. Jill is the event leader for this plebiscite, so we’ll be able to answer any questions that you have around the plebiscite.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much, and welcome to the both of you. If you wouldn’t mind, I’ll go to the committee. I’ll start with Simon over here, and maybe we can go around and introduce ourselves to our presenters today.

S. Hamilton (Chair): I’m Scott Hamilton. I’m the Chair and the MLA for Delta North.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Wonderful, thank you. If we could stay on a first-name basis, then, Nola, I’ll go to you, turn the floor over to you and allow you to present whatever material you have that you would like us to absorb.

Elections B.C.: Budget Proposal for
2015 Metro Vancouver Transportation
and Transit Plebiscite

N. Western: Also with us in the gallery today is Sherry Hyde, our comptroller; Yvonne Koehn, the director of information technology; and Tim Strocel, the director of voter registration and boundaries.

Thank you for giving us this opportunity to address you on the 2015 Metro Vancouver transportation and transit plebiscite. I’ll begin with a very few opening remarks, and Jill will then provide an overall summary of the plebiscite process. She’ll highlight key operational aspects of the event. Once Jill has done that, I’ll walk you through the budget numbers, after which we’ll be pleased to answer any questions and to hear your comments.

As mentioned to this committee during our annual meeting in December, the event funding that’s required by Elections B.C. to administer its mandate varies from year to year, depending on the on-demand electoral events that are called and according to where we are in the four-year election cycle. Event funding for Elections B.C. is different than the office’s annual operating and capital funding.

Whenever possible, we advise this committee of known event funding requirements for each fiscal year at the annual December meeting. When we’re required to administer on-demand or unknown events, our practice is to advise the committee of those requirements by letter once the event becomes known and then follow up with a meeting, if so desired by the committee. This meeting is as a result of that protocol.

Our event funding requirements are developed using a detailed bottom-up process. We start by identifying and scheduling all of the deliverables necessary to successfully administer the event — for example, a contact centre with 28 operators, an initial mailing to 1.56 million voters, nine plebiscite service offices, a voting package tracking system and so on.

We then produce cost estimates for each of the identified deliverables and add these estimates up to arrive at the total budget. Actual estimates from suppliers are used whenever possible, and historic costs from similar events, like the recent 2011 HST referendum, are also used.

Our total event budget for the vote-by-mail plebiscite is estimated at $6.213 million, broken down as $4.293 million in fiscal 2014-15 and $1.92 million in fiscal ‘15-16.
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The specific detail for the budget is shown on page 2 of the background document that you have before you, and I’ll provide more detail in this area later in our presentation.

Right now Jill will explain the plebiscite process and how the event will be administered by Elections B.C.

The budget that we have prepared will cover all aspects of plebiscite administration. I’m going to review key operational aspects of the event, as Nola mentioned, to give you a sense of the scope of work that the budget pertains to. Starting on page 3 of the background document that we’ve provided, you’ll find a detailed overview of the material that I’ll cover more briefly today.

Plebiscite operations began with the mailing of voting packages to 1.56 million registered voters in Metro Vancouver. The mailing started on Monday, March 16, and will conclude at the end of this week on Friday, March 27. Each voting package consists of a number of elements: a ballot; a secrecy envelope; a certification envelope that’s customized to the voter, with the voter’s name and address written on it; a return envelope; and an outer envelope that the package goes out in.

Some eligible voters will not receive a package through the initial mailing. These voters may not have been registered, or their address may have been out of date on our voters list. These voters may contact Elections B.C. between March 16 and midnight on May 15 to register or update their information and request a voting package.

Voters who spoil their ballot or lose their ballot can also request a replacement voting package. Whenever a voter is issued a replacement package, the original package is cancelled in Elections B.C.’s tracking system. If the cancelled package is returned, it will remain unopened. So we keep track of all that with our tracking system.

Voters who will be away from their usual residence during the plebiscite voting period can request that their voting package be mailed to an alternate mailing address.

Accessibility to the vote is very important. There are three channels available to contact Elections B.C. to register and request a package. Our contact centre operators are available through a toll-free number throughout the voting period, from Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., and on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Our on-line registration and request system is available throughout the request period, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

To provide even more enhanced accessibility, beginning on April 13, Elections B.C. will open nine plebiscite service offices across Metro Vancouver. Offices are in accessible locations and are intended to provide reasonable access for all Metro Vancouver voters.

These offices are not voting places in the traditional sense. They’re focused primarily on providing voters with information on how to participate in the plebiscite, as well as providing a local drop point for completed ballot packages. These offices will also offer registration and voting package issuing services.

In terms of voter communications, our public awareness campaign began in February with two weeks of radio and on-line advertising to encourage voters in Metro Vancouver to register or update their voter registration. This was done to improve the effectiveness of our initial mailing by making sure that we had as current a voters list as possible.

A key element of the communications plan was implemented, starting on March 9, with the distribution of an information pamphlet, or householder, to every residential address in Metro Vancouver. If you’re a Metro Vancouver resident, hopefully you have had one of these delivered to your residence at this point.

The 1.05 million pamphlets delivered over a two-week period provided general information on eligibility to participate in the plebiscite, how to register and vote, and key event dates. It also contains a page of neutral information about the plebiscite, including information on the Mayors Council plan on transportation and transit and the proposed 0.5 percent congestion improvement tax.

To serve the culturally diverse communities of Metro Vancouver, the information contained in the householder as well as the voting package has been translated into 17 languages. Those translations are available on our website.

For visually impaired voters, Braille ballot translations and ballot templates designed to allow voters to vote independently are also available from Elections B.C. on request.

Elections B.C. is implementing an integrated public awareness program, including print, radio, on-line, social media and out-of-home transit advertising, with messaging time to provide voters with the information they need at different stages of the voting period. Messaging began, as I mentioned, with focusing on promoting registration. It is now shifting to requesting voting packages and will shift again, later in the voting period, to returning ballots.

On the receiving end we have a comprehensive process of receiving, screening and preparation for counting that we’re doing at a secure Elections B.C. facility. The objective of these processes is to ensure the integrity of the vote by consistently and accurately applying the regulation rules around the acceptance of envelopes for counting. To be considered for counting, completed ballot packages must be received by Elections B.C., including plebiscite service offices, before the close of voting at 8 p.m. local time on May 29, 2015.

At our processing facility certification envelopes are removed manually from their return envelopes. The certification envelopes then undergo an initial screening, which is a visual inspection conducted by staff to determine whether they are completed as required by the regulation. The regulation requires that all certifica-
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tion envelopes have the voter’s birthdate written on them as well as the voter’s signature. Complete envelopes will proceed to the next stage of processing.

In a vote-by-mail context, there will be certification envelopes that are missing those required elements that I just mentioned — the signature and the birthdate. In the 2011 referendum there were over 20,000 such envelopes. In the plebiscite these envelopes will not simply be set aside. Instead, the voter will be notified by mail that they can make an appointment at a plebiscite service office to complete their certification envelope. This is a new process that we are piloting, and it is recognized internationally as a best standard. Corrected envelopes will be reinserted into the processing stream, so we hope to keep down the number of envelopes that don’t make it through to counting due to voter error.

Certification envelopes that pass that visual inspection will proceed to the next stage of verification, where they will be validated against information on the plebiscite voters list. Those that pass this screening will be accepted, tallied and securely stored until the close of voting, at which time they will be prepared for counting. Those certification envelopes that do not pass this final screening will be set aside and not considered for counting. A complete record of certification envelopes set aside and not considered for counting will be provided in the Chief Electoral Officer’s final report on the event.

After the close of voting, all certification envelopes that meet the requirements of the regulation will be opened. Secrecy envelopes containing the ballot will then be separated from the certification envelopes that show the voter’s identity in order to protect the secrecy of the vote. Ballots will then be removed manually from secrecy envelopes, sealed in boxes and transported securely to our counting facility.

Counting will be conducted using proven document scanning and tabulation technology. Plebiscite officials will break the seals and open the ballot boxes, process the ballots through scanners and then adjudicate any results that cannot be automatically tallied. Counted ballots will then be stored securely in sealed ballot boxes. Elections B.C. will conduct periodic manual validation of tabulated results to ensure that the counting technology is performing as specified and as confirmed through testing.

Starting April 1, we’re going to provide information weekly on a summary of the ballot package returns by municipality, so people can track the progress of participation in the event.

Following completion of counting and validation of results, Dr. Keith Archer will announce the results through a letter to the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly. Results will be provided on a Metro Vancouver–wide basis as well as for each of the 23 participating jurisdictions. As required by the regulation, the Chief Electoral Officer will also announce the results publicly through the Elections B.C. website.

Elections B.C. will produce a detailed report on the administration and cost of the event. Typically, this report is submitted to the Legislature, through the Speaker, within six months of the conclusion of the event.

I’ll now turn it over to Nola for some additional information on funding requirements.

N. Western: As you can appreciate from Jill’s comments, administering a vote-by-mail plebiscite for almost 1.6 million voters requires a significant amount of planning, expertise and manual labour.

In your package, on page 2, you’ll find the estimated cost for the plebiscite for both fiscal years, ‘14-15 and ‘15-16. It’s important to note that although we’ve necessarily estimated costs by fiscal year, the actual expenditures may not align by fiscal year quite so precisely.

We’ve had to make some assumptions about voter behaviour that may or may not play out. For instance, return mail costs for ballots are largely budgeted for in fiscal ‘14-15, in the hopes that people will vote as soon as they get their ballots and send them back to us, but if a large number of voters delay returning their ballots, more of those costs will be incurred the next fiscal year.

Salaries and benefits are for temporary staff. Permanent staff costs, other than overtime, are not allocated to events. They are included in our ongoing operating budget. We expect to hire almost 150 individuals for this event, but they will not all work full-time throughout the plebiscite period. They include 28 contact centre staff, nine plebiscite service office managers and 51 staff for those offices, about 63 people for receiving and processing the ballots, and two people at headquarters to support the additional payroll and human resources workload involved.

More than 90 percent of these staff will be paid $15.81 an hour. The highest salary level is $20 an hour for a PSO manager, or plebiscite service office manager.

As one might expect for a mail-in vote, postal services and postage is the single largest expense. This covers the postage for the 1.05 million householders mailed to every residential address in Metro Vancouver and to institutions such as long-term-care facilities, universities and colleges, public libraries, social service agencies, hospitals, municipalities and the plebiscite service offices. The cost also includes mail preparation processing and outgoing and return postage for over 1.56 million voting packages.

It should be noted that postage costs have increased by 40 percent since the 2011 HST referendum. So the cost per voter is considerably higher for this event than for past vote-by-mail events.

Building occupancy is rent for the nine plebiscite service offices, or PSOs. Those offices are located in strategic locations throughout the plebiscite area, and they were chosen for their location and accessibility, rather than their size. The average size of the office is 2,100 square
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feet, but they’re speciality short-term leases, and they’re not really based on square footage.

For instance, we have one space that’s over 4,000 square feet. In that case we had selected a smaller unit, but the landlord then found a long-term tenant so instead provided us with a much larger space in the same mall for the same price.

General office expenses cover the printing of 1.6 million voting packages and ballots and the 1.05 million householders. Also included is some furniture rental for the plebiscite service offices and a small amount of office supplies, although we will use a lot of the office supplies that we already have in our warehouse left over from the last general election.

Travel includes expenses for the plebiscite service office managers to come to Victoria for in-depth training; travel by plebiscite officials throughout Metro Vancouver to assist voters in long-term-care facilities and hospitals; and, of course, some visits to the plebiscite service offices by our senior staff, to oversee those offices and ensure that voters are receiving consistent high-quality service.

Professional services include the cost of translating the householder into the 17 most widely spoken languages in Metro Vancouver. In addition, we’ve prepared translation keys for the voting package in those 17 languages. Also included in professional services is the electrical and data wiring that was necessary for the ballot receiving and processing centre and for the call centre.

As you know, advertising is always expensive. Our advertising plan includes radio, print and Internet advertising aimed at informing voters how to complete and return their ballot and how to request a voting package if they did not receive one in the mail.

And finally, information systems. In addition to the phone lines for the call centre and the plebiscite service offices, this amount covers the modifications to our vote-by-mail applications; the tracking system that Jill talked about; increased information technology contractor support during the plebiscite period; and the cost for scanned ballot preparation, testing and scanning the returned ballots.

The most recent vote-by-mail event conducted by Elections B.C. was the 2011 HST referendum, and for your convenience, we’ve included the actual costs of that event in your package. It’s on page 7.

Although there are about half as many registered voters in Metro Vancouver as for the 2011 referendum, you can see that the cost of this plebiscite will be more than 50 percent of the referendum costs, and there are a number of reasons for that. The passage of time and the resulting inflation is key, of course. According to the Bank of Canada, the inflation rate since 2011 has been 5.52 percent, although some costs have increased at a much higher rate than that. Postage costs, for instance, are 40 percent higher per piece than in 2011, and this is especially significant in a vote-by-mail event, given that postal services alone account for more than 40 percent of the budget.

Also, of course, many of the costs incurred for such an event are fixed, and they do not vary depending on the number of voters involved. We need the same information technology, the same related IT support and call centre setup whether there are 3 million voters or 1.6 million voters.

Advertising has certainly increased between the two events, not only because prices have increased, but also because we found it necessary to actually increase the amount of advertising that we are going to do. One of the lessons learned from the referendum was that the public needed more information about what the event is about, how to register to vote, how to request a voting package and how to actually vote.

Of course, at 11 weeks, the voting period for this plebiscite is longer than the eight weeks for the 2011 referendum, which had originally been six weeks and then was extended because of a postal strike. So the advertising is correspondingly longer, and the contact centre operations, IT support and plebiscite service offices operations are all correspondingly longer.

We’ve also improved our service offerings for voters. We’ve added the on-line channel for requesting a package so that voters no longer need to do it by telephone. As you heard from Jill, we’ll be following up with those voters who don’t complete the certification envelope completely and correctly, so that they’ll have a chance to correct their information and make sure their vote is counted.

We have nine plebiscite service offices in Metro Vancouver, compared to five collection centres during the referendum in 2011, and those offices will each provide a wider variety of services than the collection centres did. The collection centres were just that — a place to drop off the ballot. No other services were available, so the training and the staffing model for those offices was quite different than for the plebiscite service offices where people will be able to register to vote, and they will be able to receive a voting package at that office.

To summarize, Elections B.C. will require a budget of $6.213 million to administer this plebiscite. I now turn the floor over to you, Mr. Chair, and will be pleased to answer any questions that the committee members may have.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you, Nola and Jill both, for a very detailed, thorough presentation. I appreciate that. We do have questions from the floor.

D. Ashton: Ladies, thank you very much, and I greatly appreciate the information that you brought forward. I just scratch my head at some of these costs.

Information systems, you know — could you explain it to me? First of all, I caught the postage, but a 66 percent
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increase in four years is a substantial increase in overall costs in a more concentrated area.

I caught that you had mentioned that you were bringing people to Victoria. Are we not going to Vancouver for training? Why are we bringing people over here to train? We have to, I would think — and I hope that you are looking — at every opportunity to be a cost saving for those taxpayers that are paying for this.

Please don’t take my octave change in my voice as being…. It’s a desperate octave change, because I scratch my head at these ongoing costs just to get a vote in and to get a vote registered. Is there not a way we can do this better?

D. Ashton: Yup. I fully understand that. So you can sense our frustration in the room with….

N. Western: Absolutely. I can understand that you want to keep the costs to a minimum, and so do we, especially as taxpayers as well.

IT service costs are always significant. We have a new IT vendor, so we have a new contract at a higher rate than what we were experiencing four years ago, which is to be expected.

D. Ashton: But do we not have the same programs? Do we not own these systems ourselves? Are the systems that we did four years ago or three and a half years ago not somewhat applicable to what we’re doing right now?

N. Western: Somewhat applicable they are. But we did have to make modifications, and perhaps Jill can talk more about that.

J. Lawrance: That’s right. We did start with the base, obviously, that we had developed for the 2011 referendum. We added some functionality, because now plebiscite service offices are going to be able to issue packages and do voter registration in the field. That was feedback we got from the last event — that it was important to have those services available in the community as well. So we’ve added that functionality. We also added the opportunity for people to request a package through our on-line application. There were some additional costs there as well.

D. Ashton: But does government not have any other programs that could be like shared services, instead of having to do all of this additional IT work? Do we not have other programs in government that could be utilized for this? Does it have to be sole-sourced just into Elections B.C. for tracking this? I don’t know. I’m just asking the questions to see: have we looked at everything to try and bring these costs down?

S. Hamilton (Chair): Could I get you to take a position as a witness, please, and if I could have you please state your name and your relationship to the organization.

Y. Koehn: We always take a look at what’s already in place to the best that we can, but what we end up finding is because of the requirements of the regulation and the requirements to make sure that we’re tracking the ballots appropriately, it ends up being very specific.

In this particular case, we’re very concerned about making sure that it’s one ballot per voter, one return per voter, so that we are ensuring an appropriate end result. The ability to go outside of what we’ve already got in place in our environment is pretty limited.

We had a very good base to start from. Expanding it to add the additional functionality that we were asked to include this time is where some of those expenses have gone to play.

I do want to mention also that when budgets are put together, it’s in anticipation of the big picture. As we go forward, we always try to minimize those expenditures and use what’s already off the shelf. Those are things that we are looking at, so that we can keep our actual expenditures under what that budgeted amount is.

N. Western: Can I just address your comment about training and the travel? We’re training the nine plebiscite service office managers in Victoria because that was less expensive than more than nine of our staff going there to train them. Those nine managers will then go back to Vancouver and train their staff. We’re not bringing 51 people here for training, just nine of them.

D. Ashton: Okay. There are going to be lots of questions around the table. I would just ask that we look at absolutely everything, not only in this instance but every instance that we have, within the standing officers — for the bottom line.

G. Heyman: We’ve got a budget that’s 50 percent higher on a per-capita basis. Partly that’s explained by a 40 percent increase in postage, which is 40 percent of the overall budget, and some change in advertising — the difference between the two referenda being somewhat akin to about 8 percent of the budget.

But that doesn’t quite account for the rest of the 50 percent increase in the overall budget. I’m wondering…. My first question: can you point to any other causes for the 50 percent increase in the estimated cost per registered voter, besides IT, which you’ve already discussed?

My second question is…. This plebiscite is a result of an initiative and legislation introduced by the Minister of Transportation. We had some discussion about this amongst ourselves, and I understand that eventually, whatever happens with this, the money will come from general revenue. But can you explain why this wasn’t a submission to the Ministry of Transportation or the Minister of Transportation for the implementation of his own legislation?

N. Western: Well, I can’t explain the second part, other than that this is a plebiscite held under the Election Act, and because it’s held under the Election Act, that act says that costs incurred to administer it are paid for out of the consolidated revenue fund. They are incurred by Elections B.C. So it’s part of our costs, not the minister’s.

Why has it gone up 50 percent? Well, a lot of it is inflation, increased service at the plebiscite service offices, as Jill talked about. Those collection centres had one, sometimes two, people on staff, if they had to have two for security purposes, and all they did was accept ballots and make sure that they got put in the box. There were no phone lines. There was no IT. There was really no training involved.

These nine plebiscite service offices are going to provide a much wider range of services to voters. There are computers. There are registration centres.

J. Lawrance: Yes, and another aspect that Nola touched on, which is quite significant, is that it’s a much longer voting period. The voting period is 11 weeks for the plebiscite versus eight weeks for the HST referendum.

So we’re providing services through our contact centre, our additional IT support, to support those systems that are in place on off-hours, outside of business hours. That’s also over an extended period of time. We’re just basically keeping the engine running for an additional three weeks, and that adds to costs.

N. Western: As we go through this plebiscite, we will always look to see if we can realize savings as we go through. This $6.2 million is a budget. The actuals for the referendum — those are actual numbers.

Naturally, we all hope that it really doesn’t come in at $6.2 million, but that’s our best estimate at this point.

E. Foster: Dan touched on a few of the points that I was going to bring up, but one of them, he didn’t. I’ve taken the liberty of going back through budgets for Elections B.C. over the last number of years and looked at the submissions to Finance for the extraordinary additional costs and so on.

To your last comment about some of this being an educated guesstimate, which is understandable…. You must be pretty good at it, because I’ve never seen a surplus in all of that time. My question to you is: if you’ve overestimated this, if people do get their ballots in on time and you don’t have to make all the extra phone calls, what happens to the money?

If we recommend to Treasury, and they put $6.213 million into your account, and you don’t draw it all down, does it go back to consolidated revenue?

N. Western: Yes, it does. It just doesn’t come out of the consolidated revenue fund.

We don’t spend it on other things. It’s going to be spent on the plebiscite or on nothing.

S. Gibson: How many languages does the city of Vancouver translate their ballots into? I look at 17. I come from…. My riding is Abbotsford, which is the second-most multicultural community in B.C., and we’ve never felt the pressure to translate into 17 languages. To me, personally, it seems like overkill. That’s just my personal comment.

My question is: you must have picked that figure based on balloting around Metro? That’s my first question.

N. Western: I am actually not sure on that, but we could find out and get back to you.

It’s based on the number of languages that we translate general election materials into. Of course, voting in a provincial election is a constitutional right for Canadian citizens, so it’s very important that we translate it into the languages that are spoken in the area.

S. Gibson: I guess the other question I have — and it was alluded to earlier — is about the postage. I worked with an organization…. I can just present it kind of physically. We would mail…. We wanted them back, as well, from our customers, our members.

It would be a card like this, okay? The people would tear off the edge. It was mailed to them and had their address on it. It got mailed to them. Inside was the return mailer. You folded that over. It was pre-sealed. You put out the information that we were looking for, our company. That’s a part of the first mailer, and that gets mailed back.

That, to me, seems like it’s superior, as opposed to having millions of envelopes. This model that we used — there were no envelopes. The mailer arrived correctly. It was sealed. It was confidential. They ripped out the outside, filled out the information on the material that was inside, which was a card, sealed it and mailed it — one piece of paper that was separated. That, to me, seems incredibly superior to millions and millions of envelopes that have to be opened.

J. Lawrance: Sure. The design of the package is actually part of the regulation. The regulation specifies exactly what envelopes need to be in the package and the exact package contents. Each piece of it has a purpose. If you think about voting in person, you can see the parallels between the components of the voting package that’s mailed out and what happens when you vote in person.

When you vote in person, you start by checking in with the officials, where they confirm your registration and confirm your identity. That’s basically the equivalent of the certification envelope that has your name printed on it, your signature and your birth date. Then once that’s cleared, you’re issued a ballot and you put that in a box.

There’s no connection anymore between your vote and your identity. That’s achieved in vote by mail by having your ballot put into the separate envelope. During the process, when the ballots are returned, after we have confirmed that your identity checks out with our voters list, then that secrecy envelope is separated. It’s physically separated from the certification envelope that identifies you to ensure that your vote is kept secret.

S. Gibson: A supplementary. I don’t want to belabour this, but that’s not inconsistent with what I’m saying. I don’t want to drag this out. It’s the same thing. The outside is the envelope. You get that. You open that up. The inside is the mailer. It’s a part of the same piece of paper. You pull that off. You seal it. You’ve got one thing.

I just think that would save hundreds of thousands of dollars with endless envelopes. But that’s just my opinion. Again, I’m not being critical. One thing we all want in this room is we want an election that’s not criticized in any way. I get that. But this seems highly complex — unnecessarily so, in my view.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you, Simon, and you’re lucky I didn’t call you on a prop.

J. Shin: While it’s pretty common in the U.S. — there are transportation ballot initiatives and what have you — it is fairly rare in Canada, so I definitely do appreciate the added pressure that your office must be experiencing. I thank you for your work on this.

The review that you’ve given us is pretty comprehensive, so I was having a hard time trying to see where I could ask a question that would be of value to the committee. But with that said, comparing with the 2011 HST referendum breakdown that you’ve supplied to us — and I think you mentioned in your comments that you will be planning more substantive advertising efforts this time around for the reasons that were mentioned — I do notice that the advertising budget has gone up.

It’s about double. It was about $530,000 last time around, and it’s just over $1 million this time around. My questions are around that. I have three points.

I do notice that on page 2 in note 7 the advertising is planned to include radio, print and Internet. I can certainly appreciate that there is attention to the diverse communities that we have in Metro Vancouver and there are language services and efforts, in those terms.

What form of educational or extra supplemental information were you planning to administer through radio, print or Internet as far as advertising is concerned? Usually advertising is a costly undertaking, and it doesn’t really give you too much time or square footage on a piece of print to substantiate any detailed information as far as voter registration, protocols or how to vote is concerned. There was that.

The second question is: as far as allocating $1 million on advertising is concerned, are you in communication with municipalities as well as other related stakeholders that are also taking on the yes campaign or the no campaign to make sure that there is no duplication in maybe what’s already being done on this front as far as getting the information out is concerned?

Also, the third question — your choice of radio, print and Internet. Given that we are trying to reach out to the diverse communities in Metro Vancouver, were there any special considerations given for researching which ethnic media outlets would be considered, at least this time around, to make sure that we reach out to the communities?

N. Western: Well, unfortunately, our manager of communications isn’t here. But we do work with an advertising agency that’s located in Vancouver that we have worked with for many years now, including a few general elections. So our experience advertising in the Metro Vancouver area is long and extensive, including reaching out to the ethnic newspapers, as appropriate — especially the newspapers and radio.

Some of the advertising will be focused right now on registering, to make sure that you register so that you can get a ballot, get a package. Then it will change, as Jill talked about, and focus on getting that package — how to vote. Then as we get near to the May 29 deadline, “Get it to us, get it to us, get it to us,” to meet that final deadline for dropping off your ballot. There’s a longer period for advertising and more advertising.

Yes, advertising doesn’t give you a lot of real estate to get real information out there. That’s what the householder was designed to do. The advertising that we do always gives them our contact information. It pushes them to our website and to the plebiscite service offices, where they can actually get more detail.

It’s the typical advertising that we do during a general election. We do all the same sorts of advertising.

J. Lawrance: Yes. I think the focus of our advertising is on how to participate in the event. We have to be some-
[ Page 1372 ]
what careful about coordinating our efforts with municipalities because they’re not neutral in this event. We’re an independent office, and we need to focus on the administration of the event — those aspects when we’re getting our communication out — and not stray into how people should vote in the event, in terms of their choice.

N. Western: We are in contact with the municipalities, but we’re not collaborating or coordinating with them, just like we don’t with political parties during a general election. But we’re in contact with them.

J. Shin: Right — gotcha. I just have a quick follow-up question on that. You mentioned the advertising company. Is it safe for me to assume that the entire advertising budget is allocated to that company to administer your advertising efforts?

J. Lawrance: Well, some of it would be to pay for transit ads, for example, or newspaper.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Now I’ll go to Carole. I’d also like to take the opportunity to welcome you to your first committee meeting and for serving as Deputy Chair — thank you.

Just a question around post-vote and what kind of review of the process will occur. You know, you’re hearing concerns around the costs. You’re hearing concerns around the budget. We recognize it’s not your office that has initiated this plebiscite, but I think there are various concerns around costs and effectiveness of process, depending on who you’re talking to around this committee.

I wonder what kind of review will occur post-vote. Will there be a review around the effectiveness, the number of people who voted, the number of ballots that went out? I’m certainly hearing concerns from people who are talking about seeing their recycling box full of ballots, where people are just taking them out of their mailbox and tossing them away, seeing it as junk mail.

I think it’s going to be critical — I mean, my hope is we don’t see a lot of these — to do a post-review to talk about the number of ballots that went out, the success or not of getting people out to vote, and the budget costs. Because if this comes up again, perhaps that’ll give the committee a little bit better gauge of what’s been successful and what hasn’t, what kind of mailing processes have worked and what haven’t.

J. Lawrance: We always do an extensive “lessons learned” review. This process will be no different. We’ll look at every aspect. As Nola mentioned, the costs are a concern to us as well. We want to make sure that we’re doing things as efficiently as possible.

In the 2011 referendum a vote-by-mail I think turned out to be an efficient way of conducting that vote. We had a turnout rate that was similar to what we’d see in a provincial election. Compared to that approach, the costs are much lower. For a plebiscite, this is a less expensive approach than if we had an on-the-ground vote.

How effective will it be? That is something that we’ll have to look at very carefully afterwards and assess the efficiency of all of the processes that we’ve put in place.

N. Western: We will prepare a report of the Chief Electoral Officer that will be published after the event that will include the detailed results, the detailed costs, the successes and the turnout — everything that we can talk about.

M. Morris: I’ve asked the question before, during previous submissions and presentations. Probably more to your IT person.

Technology plays a great role in elections right across the country. I’m wondering: are you continually looking at the opportunity to look to more of an electronic format for voting such as this? I think particularly when we’re looking at a condensed area and within the Lower Mainland here, it might be a great opportunity to utilize an electronic system and take advantage of any technology that’s out there. It might be cheaper in the long run. It might be a little more expensive to develop, but it might be cheaper in the long run.

N. Western: We did not look at electronic voting for this, although we will be tabulating the results electronically, because we’re not going to count the ballots by hand. We’re going to scan them — use optical scanners for that.

Really, electronic voting entailing Internet voting was very thoroughly investigated and reported on by the recent Independent Panel on Internet Voting. It identified that there are still some security issues that may preclude Internet voting.

For this event in particular, it’s really up to the regulation how the event is administered. That regulation stipulates that it be done by mail and by using that number of envelopes.
[ Page 1373 ]

G. Holman: I was looking at the cost per voter for the HST referendum versus this plebiscite. You indicated initially that it’s 50 percent higher, looking at it cost per voter.

I applied the 40 percent increase to the postage in 2011, and I applied the 5½ percent inflation rate. Instead of $2.63, I get something like $3.33 per voter, because of those costs. Now, I’m not sure if I’m double counting there or not — maybe a little bit with the inflation rate.

My point being, when you make those adjustments, the cost per voter is about 20 percent higher for this than for HST. Then you’ve explained other things like, basically, higher service level and more advertising. So for whatever that’s worth, when you do a little bit of arithmetic, the difference in terms of cost per voter isn’t as high when you apply those cost escalations that you informed us about.

I guess my only question is: because you were dealing with essentially twice as many voters in the HST referendum as this, are there some economies of scale that come into play as well? Are there some costs which tend to be relatively fixed regardless of the number of voters you’re dealing with? When you compare on a cost-per-voter basis, are there some economies that come into play there?

N. Western: Absolutely, there are economies of scale. There are fixed costs. A lot of the IT costs, the information technology costs, are fixed. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got 3½ million voters or 1½ million voters. The wiring for the call centre is the same. The wiring for the processing centre is the same. So absolutely, there are fixed costs and economies of scale to be had when you’ve got a higher number of voters.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Seeing no more questions, I actually had one. I’m just curious whether or not you can let us know if you have any estimates of expenditures to date, prior to the…. I do know that you said postage…. A lot depends on what comes in after March 31, so that’s fluctuating. But do we know how much we plan on spending before March 31, aside from that?

Is there anything else you would like to provide to this committee at this time? Now is your chance. Or do you think we’ve covered it all?

N. Western: I think you’ve covered it all. I know that Dr. Archer would be pleased to present in front of this committee about this issue himself, later on, if you have more questions.

S. Hamilton (Chair): I’d like to thank you very much for coming. Again, I apologize for the inconvenience of the time. Trying to put everyone’s schedule together, it’s a tough do. I appreciate you making the time for us and answering the questions and hope to see you again.

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Chair:	Wm. Scott Hamilton (Delta North BC Liberal)
Deputy Chair:	Carole James (Victoria–Beacon Hill NDP)
Members:	Dan Ashton (Penticton BC Liberal)
	Eric Foster (Vernon-Monashee BC Liberal)
	Simon Gibson (Abbotsford-Mission BC Liberal)
	George Heyman (Vancouver-Fairview NDP)
	Gary Holman (Saanich North and the Islands NDP)
	Mike Morris (Prince George–Mackenzie BC Liberal)
	Jane Jae Kyung Shin (Burnaby-Lougheed NDP)
	John Yap (Richmond-Steveston BC Liberal)
Clerk:	Kate Ryan-Lloyd

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS(Hansard)

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REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
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SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
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