Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to our witnesses for coming here. We're glad you came.
I think, Mr. Hébert-Daly, you've been here before. So thank you. It's always a pleasure to see you.
I'm not sure, Mr. Mortimer, if we met before, but I very much enjoyed your presentation, and actually the questions I have are directed to you because you give some interesting details that I thought were worth mentioning.
The first one is your suggestion of using the legislation on a trial basis. By-election turnouts are, of course, notoriously bad, and anything we can do to boost them presumably would be beneficial. So it's not a bad idea. I guess the concern I have is that we've just heard Elections Canada mentioning they would have some logistical problems in pulling this together within the limited timeframe.
Unfortunately, until you asked your question, I hadn't thought of asking this to the Chief Electoral Officer, but the question is, do you think there'd be a problem, logistically, with preparing by-elections in a short period of time, or do you think those logistical issues would be less likely to be a problem in terms of the advance time that's necessary, whether they could be done perhaps at a more advanced rate than the pace that Elections Canada is proposing for dealing with a general election?
Then I have a second question, and if you can answer the first one, I'll get back to you on it. It's a more specific thing.