Thank you, Mr. Chair.
The Nunavut Association of Municipalities represents 25 municipalities in Nunavut. Each mayor is a member of NAM. In preparing for our testimony here, to be honest, our mayors are very practical people in Nunavut, and for good reason, but we got lost in talking about the electoral designs, proportional representation and stuff, so I don't have a lot of comments on that because as a board we just backed away from that whole thing.
I do have four comments from our board, and I'd like to pass those on to you. The first is on electronic voting.
Everybody agreed that would be a good thing, but before it can happen in Nunavut, there would have to be a substantial upgrade to the Internet infrastructure, and probably before we got into that, some kind of Canadian standard would have to be set so that everybody could participate equally. I know the Internet connections up north here from Grise Fiord to Kugliktuk really vary. I could imagine on election night they'd probably be jammed right up in light of the infrastructure.
Second, we did talk about mandatory voting, and we don't support mandatory voting at this time. I know there's a whole range of constitutional issues regarding it, but if there was mandatory voting, the mayors wondered how it would be enforced and monitored, because up north here people could come up with a whole range of excuses: couldn't find a babysitter, had an accident on the way to the polling station, or perhaps the weather is bad, which is not uncommon in the north.
Third, we focused on Senate reform, and everybody believed that the Senate should be an elected body.
Fourth, the last item we discussed was similar to what NTI mentioned here, but we arrived at it completely independently. It was that the mayors felt that in territories such as Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and even perhaps looking at northern Quebec—Nunavik—and Labrador, if there's a way to establish a minimum of two candidates per riding, that should just be put in there. The mayors felt that would be a more accountable arrangement and it wouldn't leave us hanging onto one candidate, which is how we operate right now.
Those are our comments. I don't think I stretched it out to 10 minutes, but that's okay. I'm available to answer any questions anyone may have.
Thank you very much.