EdinburghNLP/nunavut-hansard-plusplus huggingface dataset:
It’s those individuals that move in and out of territory for work or education, it’s hard to establish when they actually begin their twelve month residency requirement, especially if they are off to work.
You’re still a resident of Nunavut, but not if you’re working and your family lives in Edmonton or Yellowknife or wherever, and then you come back and you haven’t been there for twelve months, you put your name down as a nominator.
How does the returning officer determine if there eligible or not, that’s I’m carious about that.
Ms. Kusugak: I think Mr. Orr would like to respond.
The way the Act is set up is listed in section seventy five of the Act, the Returning Officer is obliged to refuse the candidacy whether the Returning Officer is aware that a person is not eligible to be a candidate, or the nomination papers are not available.
The Returning Officer is fulfilling a statutory function in asking questions about residency requirements for nominators.
Of course the Returning Officer can only refuse it if the Returning Officer knows or is aware that a person isn’t a resident.
So I see the questioning function is part of the process.
The actual refusal can only be done if the Returning Officer is actually aware that the candidate is not eligible, or the nomination papers are not properly filed.
I think that because residency is an even more difficult issue.
The Returning Officer is still obliged to ask these questions, only if they are satisfied that there is a problem can they refuse a nomination.
I guess when it becomes a problem for the candidate is after they filed their papers the candidates’ scrutineers go in there and they review, Then if they see that the nominators are ineligible and they can prove that they are ineligible and if you only have fifteen nominators and that one person is disqualified, then the candidate if disqualified.
It is in best interest of the candidate to come in there with fifteen, then another fifteen, or another thirty, or another one hundred so that the chances are better that they won’t be disqualified.
I want to ask about Election Day. On election day in my riding of Cambridge Bay, the very first person that showed up was an elder, Joe Tadjuk.
He likes to walk every day.
It must have taken half an hour to get to the polling station.
And then he was told that he had to go home to get some information to prove that he was who he was and that he lived in a certain house.
Everybody in the town knows where Joe Tadjuk lives.
It happened to a number of elders.
They had to be taken home because they were filling in their paperwork at the polling station.
We all knew who they were, where they lived.
Again this is a small town, we all know everybody.
Why would that happen, especially to an elder?
Some people become so stupid and still manage to breathe.
Ms. Kusugak: I might say to begin with that training issues are something that we deal with on an ongoing basis and that our Deputy Returning Officers, by in large, try hard to do a good job.
They really work one day out of every few years.
They are trained often over the phone if the constituency is one made up of several communities.
It is not an easy thing to be trained for a one day job.
I think most of us would not like to be judged on average in what we did on our first day on the job.
It is however the way elections work and people are responsible for the details and for conducting elections fairly.
I am suspecting that people were overzealous, is all I can guess.
For voters who are not registered, not on the voters list, when they come to vote, if the Deputy Returning Officer, themselves, after the person has signed their registration or signed to vote, if they are not known to that person, the election official can ask them to give some kind of identification to prove that they live where they say they live.
They are who they say they are.
It was never our intention that people’s grannies to be asked to prove that they are Nunavummiut.
People sometimes just misinterpret what they are asked to do.
I regret that that would be the case, but I believe that’s one of the issues we’re hoping to address through working with other agencies that deliver elections.
If people work for a number of elections, then they work more often, then the procedures become more ingrained in them etc.
And also it speaks to making complimentary procedures that work for all our elections.
I do understand that it is an issue, other people that run elections in Canada, they bring people into a room, and they do there training centrally, actually quite often they’re retired people, that have been bureaucrat or managers and etc, and they work in every single election.
It is not the case for us; we often have people that work for one election and never work for another one.
Sometimes we have people that like the work, and make sure they’re there every time, it’s a very varied situation.
I would just say that I’m sorry that that happened, and I’m glad to know about it and we’ll work hard to make sure it doesn’t happen again but again in three or four years, we are likely to be dealing with many new people at the polls.
Chairman: Thank you Ms. Kusugak.
I must compliment the officials in Cambridge Bay.
I think they did a remarkable job in reading the results, there were no spoiled ballots.
You usually you get a couple of spoiled ballots.
The folks and elders in Cambridge Bay are very patient and understanding.
They went home and got all their information and came back, they participated, they were very happy about that.
I’m sure they’re happy that they got the results that they voted for.
The other incident that occurred during the election in my riding concerns Bathurst Inlet and Umingmaktok.
On the night of the election, the Bathurst folks were able to get their votes in but the folks in Umingmaktok were unable to.
Their snowmobile broke down enroute or something happened there.
How do you deal with a situation like that, where people have actually cast a ballot, but they didn’t get them into a polling station at Cambridge Bay before the election closed?
Ms. Kusugak: Actually Bathurst and Umingmaktok were places where people were able to vote by emergency methods, the returning officer from Cambridge Bay has lived there for a number of years, was able to send out information.
Sometimes it’s very handy living in small communities, she had been working part time at the post office and knew when the mail bags were going to Bathurst and Umingmaktok and sent the people there a lot of information.
As well, she sent them calling cards for the satellite phones, and a number of people in both of those communities, I understand, were able to vote when they were in Cambridge Bay for other business.
Over the number of days we had voting in the office the returning officer, or the advanced poll, and others took advantage of voting by emergency method, which is via satellite phone.
I was unaware that there were people that somehow didn’t make it to the polls, there were not that ballots out there, there were not ballots in Bathurst or Umingmaktok, people either voted when they were in Cambridge Bay or they voted by emergency method over the radio and satellite phone, which is the same thing.
Thank you Ms. Kusugak, perhaps my information is incorrect; I heard that some folks in Umingmaktok just didn’t get a chance to vote.
On the night of the election, it was a bit troubling for the folks in Cambridge Bay because while I knew the election results around 8:20, nobody else knew the election results.
I was over in the CBC radio station, sitting on a little stool.
They wanted to interview me about the election results, but we were waiting for your office to declare a victory.
An hour and a half went by and I was still sitting on the stool.
People weren’t aware of where I was, and I couldn’t tell anybody.
I wish that I could have told folks.
How would you deal with that situation in the future in terms of Cambridge Bay and Kugluktuk, when the results come in, to get election news to the folks as fast as possible?
Ms. Kusugak: Thank you, very much for the question actually.
There are two sort of issues in that question.
One is getting the results out and the other one is producing the results and the other one is communicating them to the public.
Our responsibility is primarily to get the results right and that they will be upheld by any judge or any recount procedure that comes along.
We certainly, if there is one thing that we have insisted on with our election officials is that they don’t do anything until their numbers balance.
From the time that the numbers balance in Cambridge Bay, or any other community, and they were sent by fax to our office and then sent to CBC in Iqaluit or to the other display places was a minute and a half.
We even checked to make sure that nobody had written numbers backwards or made an adding mistake that this was in fact the correct amount, and then it was sent to CBC.
I believe that one of the plans that we have for the next election is that we will run election central, probably from Rankin Inlet in a more central time zone.
The broadcasting began in the Eastern time zone and so they had been on the air for what they felt was a long number of hours before they got the results from the West.
I have been talking to my colleagues in the Northwest Territories who are now in one time zone and they said that they were really the same number of hours in getting the results as we were, it is just that they were condensed into one time zone of reporting rather than three.
When I watched the federal election results, it was the same thing.
It was between 1:30 and 2:00 in the morning when I stopped checking on the results and they were still polls to be heard from in Nunavut and in the Northwest Territories as well.
Of course what can happen is that anyone can see, when there is an election on, if there is a trend when the counting is being done.
People can walk out the door and know that so and so had way more votes than so and so, they are obviously the winner.
My job is to produce numbers that add up and to make sure that every single ballot that was there that day is accounted for.
That is what the Deputy Returning Officers and the Returning Officers have to do.
We certainly want to produce results as quickly as possible but I think that my main job is to make sure that we got the right one.
I would be humiliated if there was a judicial recount and we discovered that there was not through any judgment call, that there was a big difference in the number of ballots that were reported to have been there as opposed to the number that was really there.
I think accuracy is my most important role.
I do believe that we need to also that the people in Cambridge Bay deserve to know the results of that election.
I think either we hold all elections within the same exact time, in other words beginning at 7 o’clock one place, 8 o’clock another place, 9 o’clock another place and ending at those different times so that everybody stops voting at exactly the same moment then we will have the results in a more compressed timeframe but I think that you would have to decide what is the most important element to you in all that.
Is the convenience of voters at the polls or is it the reporting at the end of the day.
I have certainly mulled it over, part of it is again, I’m sure part of it is the training issue and an experience issue and there are a whole lot of factors that contribute to that unhappy result.
I appreciate Ms. Kusugak’s problems in resolving that issue.
What concerned us in Cambridge Bay was, I knew the results at 8:20, but by 10:00 we still didn’t know the results officially.
Folks were wondering where were they.
That’s when the CBC let me sit in the chair there.
People were wondering where did Keith go.
I don’t know how long it takes to count votes and reconciled.
I had the results at 8:20 and it seems to me that you folks should have probably been able to have them reconciled and make it official by 9:00 or 9:30.
I’m not sure how you do that, but because we were getting results from other ridings and they weren’t taking that long to come in.
I think it’s an issue you have to look at very closely in the future.
There were phone calls and flurry of e-mails and letters from concerned voters in Cambridge Bay.
I’m sure that they hit your desk and hit the desk of the CBC officials fairly quickly there. I was left as a candidate trying to explain what happened.
As a candidate, I could have let the secret out but I didn’t.
I wasn’t sure of my position officially whether I could declare myself as a winner knowing the results.
I don’t know what the penalty is under the Election Act for candidates to declare themselves a winner so everybody knows what’s going on.
Chairman: Thank you for the comment.
Mr. Curley (interpretation): Thank you I would also like to welcome Sandy and Patrick Orr.
The question I wanted to raise, I want to ask what they think of where they were given a chance of one week for the elderly, especially the handicapped to vote, this went well with people involved, how does election officials feel about this process because I think that’s one of the newer parts where when it’s open they can vote within a week.
I would like to hear what she thinks.
Chairman: Thank you. Ms. Kusugak.
Ms. Kusugak: Well, the new provisions worked very, very well in the constituencies where I’d say the returning officers were sold on them, because then they communicated them and advertised them the best.
Voting in the office of the returning officer was extremely popular, Iqaluit, Cambridge Bay, many other places, we received a lot of compliments that people could go and vote at their convenience for that long period.
In some communities, there were returning officers that may have been used to the previous election act for many years and rather thought, I wonder why were bothering with this, and didn’t advertise those new provisions very much, and as a result they weren’t used very much.
The mobile poll, again, was extremely well received and it was used a lot in constituencies where the returning officer made it known.
You know we don’t have such a discrepancy as would show up that the number of people that would use the mobile poll, for instance, I’m sure that if we’ll pretend to use Rankin Inlet South as an example, I’m sure it would be impossible that Rankin Inlet South would have no people that needed a mobile poll, while Rankin Inlet North had fifty of them.
If I get those differences showing up, than I would assume that the process has not been well advertised within the constituency.
And I have noted that in some cases and we will be certainly looking at that as a training issue for next time.
We’re also in the process right now of re-appointing or appointing new returning officers, and based on what everyone find when we look through the ballot boxes now and on the way that they responded to things during the elections, some new people will be appointed and in some cases, the previous people will be re-appointed.
I’m wondering if there are any other factors here, my comment really was how popular is a week long...I don’t know exactly what you call it, if you call it a mobile polling station if that is what it is, but I didn’t realize it wasn’t all that available or promoted in some other communities.
I however do know that the press made them good provisions within the election system, I was just asking whether or not this was well received or not.
If the larger places like in Iqaluit don’t want it, fine, but in places like Rankin Inlet I know it was quite popular.
My other question had to do with the compliance agreement, I want to know, step by step exactly how it’s determined.
I do know that the Integrity Commissioner is responsible for deciding how the compliance agreement should be entered into.
My question really is this, how does he actually choose which particular individuals he is going to enter into compliance agreements with.
That is the first question.
Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Mr. Curley.
Ms. Kusugak: The Integrity Commissioner bases his decision on the seriousness of the offence and... if we can repeat, the nature and gravity of the Act or the admission, the penalty provided for it in the Elections Act, the public interest of justice, and it says any other factor that the Integrity Commissioner may consider relevant.
In this election, I believe compliance agreements were offered to all of the people that the RCMP charged under this election.
Hopefully aware that it involves all the reporting requirements that if we’re not complied with; financial returns as well as all the other requirements of the post elections stuff.
My point really is, if the compliance agreement were offered to all of the individuals, what were the reasons, that you know, that the other candidates didn’t, financially did not wish to enter into an agreement with because only three did enter into a compliance agreement as far as the report is concerned.
Mr. Orr, did you want to answer that?
The report of the Chief Electoral Officer was current on the report at the time the report was made.
I have attempted to ascertain how many charges were done, how many compliance agreements were entered into.
I have not been able to get that information from the Department of Justice Canada, I’m not sure if the Integrity Commissioner’s report, which was also tabled I believe today, might have that information in it, we have not seen that report.
But I believe that the way the Act was interpreted was that a person had to be charged first before compliance agreement could be offered to them.
So if a person was not charged, there was no compliance agreement offered.
I believe that a letter went out to everyone making the offer that they are being invited to negotiate a compliance agreement with the Integrity Commissioner.
Once that letter went out there is a process by which there is a request for certain conditions to be complied with, an undertaking to comply with them, and then a successful negotiation of that within a certain period of time.
The process is entirely in the hands of the Integrity Commissioner.
Most of that was done after a meeting we had with the Integrity Commissioner and other enforcement officials.
We are not actually a party to those negotiations.
I am sorry that we can’t give you the exact conclusion of all those but we do know that it was at least offered to them to whoever was charged.
I certainly appreciate the response from the official.
The reason I am questioning that is not so much my particular riding, but we do know that there were a lot of reports in the press of how many have been in jeopardy and maybe charged as a result of election infractions.
My point is this is the only probably the most important part of the participation of the people in the election process is democracy in action.
We have heavy handed approaches as far as the institutionalized representation.
See if we can throw things off with the RCMP, Integrity Commissioner picking on the poor guy.
We have no legal aid service bombarded with those requirements.
They don’t have faxes.
They don’t have all the avenues that we use the email system.
I am not 100 percent sure that if one letter was sent whether it got there or not in time to get the charges entered.
Are we really doing enough to make sure that they do comply?
Certainly we looked at, since this election, things that we can do better the next time.
We really felt that we worked very hard with all the candidates to assist them to get in their financial information.
Our office has a 1-800 number.
We certainly can offer great bilingual support.
From the time before voting day we have been contact with the financial agents and the candidates.
Shortly after that period we were in contact with them again of what needed to be done.
As the end date approached the 60 day period, after the election we were in contact with them again to remind them if they felt that they were going to be late in getting in their financial returns that they needed to get in contact with me to get an extension.
Only one person actually did do that and they were granted an extension and got their financial information in.
After that time we still contacted people and reminded them to get it in.
When we realized that we are now in the end of May and we were still missing information from 29 candidates and their agents.
Then we had felt after registered letters, etc., prior to this that we had no alternative but to follow the Act and to report those cases.
I would like to say that there was nothing in common that we could judge from the candidates and agents that did provide their financial information in time.
There was equal numbers of young people and older people and people in large communities and people in small communities and people with what looked like a lot of financial support and a lot of people that didn’t were equally seemly able to get the information into us and than not able to do it.
We reduced the requirements; they had been substantial under the previous Elections Act.
For an awful lot of people this was down now to one page with just some supporting receipts, etc.
We tried to make it as straight forward as possible so that people that did not have access to somebody with a lot of strong financial background could do it.
When we set up the system I said just remember people in very small communities, imagine that there were eight candidates that were trying to run from Grise Fjord and they all needed financial agents.
Think of how we can support them best.
We tried to make a situation where somebody that’s ever worked in an hamlet office or at the office at the Northern or the Co-op could handle these financial considerations.
So we do feel that we provided the backup necessary, we’ve done a bit of a review.
We provide plain language information for the candidates and their agents, I think next time we’ll make sure that the agents get their own set of background information that’s delivered to them.
We will try to run phone in sessions where they can learn more about what they need to do.
I think that we provided a better situation than they had previously, at the same time I think that as my job as the administrator, sort of the defender of the Act, is to make sure that for individuals in Nunavut, if they give money to a campaign, that they know that the money was spent on a candidate’s campaign and not for any other frivolous purpose or for their own.
The residents of Nunavut need to have that assurance that the money has been used properly and that I am the only person that is in a position to provide that.
The deadline for providing the financial information is sixty days after the election, and after that our role in, we must give the information than to the RCMP and how they choose to act after that is up to their policy.
Thank you for the information Sandy.
The sixty days I was just going to get to that, should we consider extending that time, is that time enough to complete the reports and so on, if we can extend other timelines, reporting requirements, should we be considering extending that time or improve the actual requirement, maybe have the local returning officer involved in communicating with those individuals.
What more could we do to try and ... I know that you alluded to some but one easy way out is to extend the time to complete the reports.
Ms. Kusugak: Yes. I’ve given some thought to that.
As I mentioned, people can ask for an extension, and in some cases, one case, somebody phoned to say they haven’t got the bills back from Northwestel and we knew we could include those after that fact.
It’s a strain on us as a small office and means that we have to have people employed much longer process of reminding people very often of their obligations beyond a certain point.
I’m not sure that increasing it to ninety days would really help in that process.
With the financial agents that we talked to after the election, they said that they felt the time period is one of the questions we asked them about, and they said that they felt it was a reasonable period to get the information in, that they didn’t have a problem.