Across different countries that use different systems, these are issues. Certainly there are issues that need to be thought through. Not all forms of electoral systems would suggest that we have to move to super-ridings in the rural areas. Fair Vote Canada has put forward an interesting proposal based on the idea of rural-urban PR, whereby urban areas would have proportional representation while rural ones, basically SMPs, would stay the same. If this committee were to find legitimacy in that approach, the size of rural ridings wouldn't change at all.
What I do note, though, is that when we look at how populations are changing in Canada, we see an urbanization of the country. That's been going on for 80 years. The result is that we see increasing sizes of rural ridings. They're getting bigger and bigger because people are moving to the cities in large numbers. We see that there is already a concern about very large geographic ridings in the rural areas, and that's going to continue even if you stay with the status quo.
That's where I think Mr. Boda's ideas around electronic voting or what have you become more important to think through.