Beginning late this week, Canadians in eight provinces will be visited by enumerators wearing flashy yellow badges and asking questions that will help compile the voters’ list for the impending federal election.
The April 10-16 enumeration will be the last ever in Canada, at least for a federal vote.
In fact, voters in Alberta and Prince Edward Island already have had their last enumeration. Voters’ lists compiled for recent provincial elections will be used for the federal list.
The names registered this year will form the base for Canada’s first-ever federal permanent voters’ list.
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After that, the voters’ list will be updated regularly using data collected by federal or provincial agencies. In future election campaigns, voters who are not on the list or who have moved will be able to have their name added.
“In future, (the permanent list) will eliminate the need for door-to-door enumeration, the single most costly and time-consuming element of conducting an election,” chief electoral officer Jean-Pierre Kingsley told a news conference April 2.
He said privacy provisions have been written into the new election rules to require that the information – name, address, gender, citizenship status – can be used only for electoral purposes.
Election law overhaul
The permanent voters’ list is part of an overhaul of Canadian election laws which takes effect April 26.
It will shorten the election campaign time to a minimum 36 days from 47 days and stagger voting hours across the country to allow release of results on election night to happen within an hour or two nation-wide.
This is aimed at calming complaints that once polls close at 8 p.m. on the Prairies and British Columbia, the television news often already has declared a winner based on results from Eastern Canada.
Kingsley said 99,000 temporary enumerators have been hired in 271 federal constituencies across the country to conduct the door-to-door questioning.
Normally, names of potential enumerators are passed on to Elections Canada by the sitting MP.
However, one Saskatchewan Reform MP won some national publicity this time by denouncing the old practice as patronage.
Yorkton-Melville MP Garry Breitkreuz advertised the positions in local newspapers, promising to pass on to Elections Canada names of all who applied for the job, which will be worth close to $400 per enumerator.
Breitkreuz said the old way of doing things was merely a local form of patronage, the low-end of the chain which ends with lucrative lifetime appointments to the Senate.
“These jobs should be open to everyone in the constituency, not just Reform supporters.”
