In going through it, I didn't see anything regarding different impacts in different areas of the country. I'll tell you the sort of thing that occurs to me, and I'm wondering whether there's anything you have that either supports or contradicts the hypothesis I'm going to put forward. It seems to me that in an urban area you're unlikely to see as much of a change in voter participation as you would in a rural or remote area. I used to represent a partly urban, partly rural riding—now it's all rural—and the obvious point to note is that going to an advance poll in a rural area frequently involves a long trip. Especially when you have aging populations, as you often do in areas where there's population decline—such as the one I represent—many of them no longer have driver's licences and they are dependent on family members to get them out to the polls, that kind of thing.
In a remote area—Nunavut comes to mind—you have a situation in which if the poll isn't the poll in your community, the one that occurs on voting day, you really can't vote. So advance voting, at least prior to the implementation of this bill, would be more a theoretical concept than a reality. I would expect a greater level of shift there in terms of voter participation than I would in an urban area, where essentially it's a choice between going to the high school a block away on voting day or someplace that's three or four blocks away on another day.
Do you have any comment or any familiarity with that?