I'll go with the last one first, because we did actually calculate the costs. There would be a one-time cost of $6.8 million for information technology, and then of course for every election, in terms of recurring costs for staffing of the additional polling stations, $30.4 million. So that's the cost.
In terms of consultation, the bulk of it has been obviously of the academic research. The research, I can tell you, has been done by very impressive people. I talked about Pammett and LeDuc's study. Louis Lavoie has done a study that we looked at. André Blais, Louis Massicotte, Agnieszka Dobrzynska.... I think perhaps the most interesting one is the 2001 study that was done by the Centre for Research and Information on Canada, which is a very stimulating piece, and I encourage you to go to it anyhow, as people who are obviously interested and involved in politics.
But you look at folks like André Blais; Marc Chénier, a very impressive author and a contributor; John Courtney; Donna Dasko; Agnieszka Dobrzynska; Fred Fletcher from York University, and I think most people know him; Mark Franklin; Jonathan Malloy from over here at Carleton; Louis Massicotte, Université de Montréal; Alain Pelletier, who came from Elections Canada; Jon Pammett; and Lisa Young, out of Calgary, who has done a fair bit of research on voter turnout, and she comes up with all kinds of different conclusions all the time.
There's an abundance of research. I'd go beyond that to say there's a lot of research that's outside of the political realm, and I'll maybe save that speech for answering another question.
But I think one of the mistakes that's often made in looking at this stuff is to limit ourselves only to the political horizon, because we're really looking at an overall decline of community involvement over the past half-century or more in every kind of community organization that exists. I shouldn't say it so sweepingly—“every kind of community organization”—but generally speaking, community involvement has been in decline for a bunch of reasons.