Thank you.
Yes, deterrence is an aspect of the public interest, both specific deterrence of the individual and general deterrence of others who might be so inclined to do the same thing. These are matters to be considered as well.
I have to point out, however, that there is a remarkable ethic at work in Canada in Elections Act matters, and that is lawfulness. There isn't, it seems to me, a great deal of need to generally deter people. There isn't a plague of double votes wilfully undertaken. My own inclination was to look at the individual: can we deal with the individual without taking this matter to court? This may change if my investigations indicate that we do have a particular offence that needs to be dealt with more seriously. Keep in mind that the courts so far are giving out conditional discharges and small fines for matters that we bring to court now, and I don't know how much deterrence there is in that. In any event, you're right, it is part of the public interest.
Regarding statistics on voter fraud, I referred to the two cases that I did simply because they're finished, they're done with, and I wrote them up. With respect to the one in northern Saskatchewan, we sent investigators from Ottawa to do the investigation on the Ahtahkakoop Reserve, to interview people. We got good compliance and assistance from band officials in particular. Some people refused to talk to us. We have no magic in that. We have no more authority than anyone else to get cooperation. It was reasonably expensive, but we sent people from Ottawa to do it because we didn't have anyone locally and we needed to get on with that.
There was a lot more work involved in the one in Edmonton Centre, because for individuals who our screening process indicated might have voted in the wrong electoral district, we had to go door to door and speak to them and find out why they voted here and why they hadn't voted there. We came up with a systemic problem, as you know, in the voters list for that area, because in Alberta on your income tax return you can put your business address or your accountant's address, and your driver's licence may also have your business address. So there was difficulty with the voters list, and that is addressed in the press release by Elections Canada as to how they hope to deal with that. That one was considerably more expensive because it required, as I said, door-to-door collection of information and data. I can't give you the dollar figures or the hours or what not.
On voter fraud, my conclusion wasn't that we didn't have any hard evidence. My conclusion was that there wasn't voter fraud. There was no organized voter fraud, that's for sure. There wasn't some organization moving voters into one district who shouldn't be voting there. There were individual cases of people voting in the wrong place, if you will. We found no evidence of double votes, which is important. People weren't voting in one place and voting somewhere else, voting twice--none of that. It wasn't just an absence of evidence, in my opinion; it was an indication that there wasn't voter fraud.
The voter fraud we do find is individual cases of double voting, wilful and otherwise, but not organized voter fraud. Those two investigations are examples of it's not being there. The Spadina one is still ongoing, as you know, and I can't comment on that. It hasn't been resolved yet.