Right. On the surface, that's one of the benefits to a mandatory voting law. A downside, which you can see in the research, is that when you have mandatory voting laws you get fewer women elected. I have a statistic that I'll find in my papers here. Generally in states where there are mandatory voting laws, there is a decline in women's representation from when there wasn't mandatory voting.
The other thing I would say is that it doesn't necessarily create a situation where there will be consideration of those issues. Certainly there is a new voting base out there, but in single-member electoral districts, as we have in most winner-take-all systems and in our system, there is an incentive for parties to find the wedge issues that will get them elected in the ridings in which they need to get elected in order to hold just enough power to form a government. That won't go away with a mandatory voting law, but they'll start to consider the incentives.
It's not necessarily a foregone conclusion, but the incentive is to maybe work slightly harder to get power in those ridings where you need it. There's no reason to believe that if one part of the country is disadvantaged.... Atlantic Canada is an example. I wouldn't say we are necessarily disadvantaged, but if we were to become so, the fact that all of us can vote won't have much of an impact if the population is growing in other places and they continue to hold power.