Thank you, Chair.
I wanted to voice some of my concerns with the amendment as well. Perhaps it's my military background, but I tend to focus on what the aim is. What is it we're trying to accomplish with this bill? To me, the aim is to increase voter turnout.
We had many witnesses come before us, and if I remember correctly, almost all of them agreed that voter turnout would increase as a result of the initiatives we're trying to put forward in the bill. However, no one could really quantify it and say by exactly how much voter turnout would increase.
This is where my element of concern comes in. We're all interested in knowing by how much voter turnout will increase. To know that, we have to put in place the additional opportunities for voters to vote. This Sunday that the opposition is trying to remove is a critical element of that.
Here we are trying to put in place a mechanism by which to increase voter turnout during advance polls, and yet at the very same time we'd be decreasing what's proposed in the bill to do exactly that, so that when it came time to measure the results, we'd have actually undermined the results we were hoping to achieve.
In terms of turnout, as I say, in terms of conflict that people might have—they might have a moral or a religious or a conscientious objection to voting on that Sunday—they don't have to vote on that Sunday; they can vote at some other time. But for those who can vote on that Sunday, I don't think we should take that Sunday away.
So I don't really think there's an argument here, from the point of view of the voter, as to why that Sunday should be removed. The voter has choice, and I think that's what we're trying to offer to voters: choice.
From the point of view of inconvenience of locations, which is another argument that could be used here, in terms of disenfranchising churches that might have their services in the gyms at that time, I think what we did here was ask whether it is possible to accommodate that, perhaps by changing the hours associated with that Sunday—not by completely eliminating the Sunday, but simply by opening the polls a little later on the Sunday than the time currently contained within the bill.
This is not a show stopper, this idea of inconvenience to locations.
Those are really the points I wanted to bring forward. I see this as a major change. What's the aim of the bill? The aim of the bill is to increase voter turnout, and yet at the same time as we're trying to do that, we're somewhat undermining our efforts by reducing the number of days available. When it comes time to measure the outcome of this initiative, it will be less, because we've removed a key voting day, and that doesn't make sense to me.
Just to finish off, the third argument would be the one of cost raised by Madame Robillard, the $34 million. I would like to echo what my colleague said: it's very hard to fix a price tag to this, because everything is speculative right now. There are no hard data upon which to put forward the $34 million, and because we don't know how many voters might turn out, you can't break it down into a cost per vote.
In other words, we have to use reasonable judgment, and I think we didn't hear Elections Canada say the additional cost is unreasonable, that it's disproportionate to their activities right now, or that it's disproportionate to the potential increase in voter turnout that we could see. They did their analysis and said it would cost $34 million. It seems reasonable. I didn't hear anyone on the committee at that time object and say that $34 million is outrageous and in no way should the government proceed in this manner. So I don't really buy into that argument.
The other thing to say too is that the cost may very well be less, because they're talking about one day here, not about abolishing all days.
Thank you for that, Chair.