Selinger pushes for permanent voters list

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Premier Greg Selinger says he favours the creation of a permanent voters list to replace the costly enumeration process before each provincial general election.

He said such a system would be more efficient and could help increase voter turnout.

“We think it’s long overdue. We’d be pleased to work with the other parties of the legislature to advance the legislation,” Selinger said Wednesday after attending a meeting of the standing committee on legislative affairs.

Selinger said his party is prepared to introduce enabling legislation in the next sitting of the legislature to create a permanent voters list. But the start date for a new session has not been determined. Complicating matters is the fact the governing NDP is in the midst of a leadership contest.

Two NDP MLAs, Steve Ashton and Theresa Oswald, are challenging Selinger for the leadership. Neither could be immediately reached Wednesday for comment on whether they support the creation of a voters list, although the NDP has signalled its support for it in the past.

Manitoba and Saskatchewan are the only two provinces in Canada without a permanent voters list. The Saskatchewan legislature has passed an enabling bill, but it has yet to be proclaimed into law.

“We are quite eager to move it forward,” the premier said.

Elections Manitoba published a 50-page report on how to adopt a permanent voters list in 2013, but the legislative assembly has yet to act on it.

Government house leader Dave Chomiak said Manitoba chief electoral officer Shipra Verma has urged legislators to deal with the issue on the basis of consensus, but he said it’s time for action.

‘We think it’s long overdue’

— Premier Greg Selinger

“Our preference is to have consensus, but we also think that it has been dragged out too long,” said Chomiak, who has so far not picked sides in the NDP leadership race. “Now is the time to move forward on it.”

At Wednesday’s standing committee meeting, government and Opposition MLAs asked Verma technical questions about her report, but did not formally approve it afterwards.

Conservative Opposition house leader Kelvin Goertzen said afterwards his party is willing to hold further discussions with the government on the issue. But he said this matter — as well as the appointments of a permanent auditor general and provincial ombudsman — has been held up because the government has had a constant rotation of house leaders over the past two years. Since 2013, first Jennifer Howard, then Andrew Swan, Steve Ashton and now Chomiak have held the position. Ashton held the job until late December when he quit cabinet to run for the NDP leadership.

Goertzen said the Tories support the idea of a permanent voters list in principle. “We think it makes a lot of sense. Nobody has given us any indication why it doesn’t make sense. But those discussions stop and start with the changing of leadership on the government side,” he said.

Verma told MLAs if Elections Manitoba got the go-ahead to develop a permanent voters list, it would be fully operational by the 2020 provincial election.

A final provincewide enumeration would be held for the 2016 vote. It would include gender and birth-date information that would provide a foundation for the permanent list. The list would be updated through information-sharing agreements with Elections Canada and Citizen and Immigration Canada as well as provincial agencies such as Manitoba Public Insurance and Vital Statistics.

Following one-time startup costs, pegged in 2013 at $800,000 to $1 million, the permanent list would be less expensive to keep up than through enumerations. Voters could also potentially update their own information online. It cost nearly $2.8 million to conduct the enumeration for the 2011 provincial election.

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca