Thank you very much for the kind words. Our people have been working very, very hard. I will pass on your comments to them, for sure. Thank you for that.
Yes, when it comes to mail-in ballots, I don't think we have any concerns with the capacity. Five million votes, when we have mechanized equipment to deal with that, will not be an issue. We continue to work daily with Elections Canada to work out some of the finer details.
One thing we all have to kind of understand is the way that Canada Post is built. We collect and deliver mail. When we collect mail, that collection is based on over 200,000 induction points. Every red mailbox, every post office, every Shoppers Drug Mart with a dealer in the back—all of those are the more than 200,000 induction points within our system. Those induction points are cleared Monday to Friday. They are cleared at different times of the day. We overlay on top of that our transportation network, which is built to deliver mail on a two-day standard for local to local mail, a three-day standard for regional mail, and a four-day standard for national mail.
We have to understand what that would look like to the voter who has a ballot they wish to cast. We need to understand what language we are talking about when we say “mail by” a certain date. If we say “mail by the close of the polls,” does that mean people will feel confident that they can drop off their ballot at 5 o'clock in the afternoon in the little red box by the corner of their street on their way home after work, when that box was perhaps cleared at 3 o'clock in the afternoon?
We have to understand what that means so that Elections Canada can take that advice and understand how best to communicate that to the voters and to give voters a very clear understanding of when they need to deposit their votes so that they can be collected on time and delivered on time to elections officials.
Those are all the details we are in constant communication with Elections Canada about to understand and to work out. Those are the things we need to clarify over the coming weeks as we go through this.