Okay, $34 million, sorry. I thought I heard $37 million, but it's $34 million.
Witnesses gave different estimates. These are purely estimates, because we don't have any clear parallels of the number of people who would be enfranchised, and the numbers ranged from a 1% to 3% increase in voters.
It wasn't clear to me if it was 1% to 3% of those who are already voting, or the percentage of total eligible voters in the country. But let's take the more conservative of those numbers, the lower of those numbers, and take 3% of the 16 million participating voters. There is in fact a universe of something like 25 million potential voters in Canada. So 3% in the universe of participating voters, 3% of the more or less 16 million--I actually worked this out while this particular witness was talking--boils down to 44,000 more voters. I would say that a bill that accomplishes getting 44,000 more Canadians to vote is a very worthwhile bill. When you put it in those terms, suddenly the costs don't seem so significant.
In all fairness, some of those voters would come out, I believe, at the first Sunday, because the advantages of Sunday voting are there whether it's the Sunday before the election or the Sunday prior to that. So some of that universe would come out. I don't know the percentage. None of us can know this because we haven't gone through the exercise yet.
But I would submit that given the fact that the Sunday is very much like the Saturday that precedes it and the Friday that precedes that and the Monday that comes after, in that it's only at limited voting stations, you are facing a situation in which it would be a further advantage to those who are in the same kind of socio-economic demographic groups who are already taking advantage of the voting. It would be an advantage to them, but it would not, nearly as much as that last Sunday, advantage those people who are unable to take advantage of advance polls by their nature.
So on that basis, I would strongly urge people to reconsider this amendment and the others that are allied with it that effectively remove that last universal Sunday of voting.
I feel strongly about this, Mr. Chairman, because this basically reflects the kind of riding I have. When I had a half urban and half rural riding, I had one of the wealthiest suburbs of Canada, Kanata, as part of my riding. And now that the riding has been split and I've moved to the rural area, I'm aware of the fact that the area I left behind has the highest turnout in the entire country for advance polls. The area that I now represent has a much lower turnout at the advance polls because of the kind of consideration that I'm describing: people who don't have flexibility in their hours, people who are shut-ins, and people who have to walk to get to the polls.
I remember on one occasion going down Highway 38, a highway in Frontenac County, in my riding, and seeing a woman pushing a stroller along the side of the road. She had to push her child down the side of a highway, which is a not a safe thing, to get her to a day care centre, and we wound up giving her a lift.
You're talking about, in many cases, people of lower socio-economic status who can't take advantage of something we've intended to make available to them, and that's what I'm pleading for. And I'm pleading it in all sincerity, on behalf of everybody who finds themselves in that kind of situation.
If you take the extreme example of remote communities such as the ones in Nunavut, where effectively there are no advance polls in practice, there simply will be no advance polls at all under the change of the law, whereas we would have permitted, under the new law, a polling station in each of those remote communities where you can't get to the next community where the advance poll is because it's a plane flight away. And Nunavut is not unique, but it's certainly the most dramatic example of that kind of thing.
Finally, with regard to the remarks on observant Jews, my point is not, as Mr. Angus, I think in all innocence, suggested, to pit Jews against Christians; my point is to draw attention to the fact that we didn't bother, as a committee, to get any observant Jews. I am at fault too. And being the only one on this committee who has actually got a Jewish background, I'm more at fault than the rest of us. Having said that, it doesn't change the facts that if you're an observant Jew you can't use a vehicle on the Sabbath; you can't use a writing implement and make a mark, that's considered work. This is not something that any Christian faces, because this isn't the interpretation that any Christian group, of which I'm aware, gives to scripture. So this is a significant impediment.
Adding the first Sunday, again, does make a significant difference, and I think it's good. I'm happy that none of the amendments are considering removing that Sunday, but I do ask you to keep this in mind as we deal with this. The impositions, not on all Jews but on observant Jews, are more significant than we might realize.
Mr. Chairman, I'll stop my comments at that point.