I should like to say as well that it's clear to us from our research that it's not only the case that people who vote on election day vote in advance because it's more convenient and that it's only a movement back and forth of regular voters. Rather, what advanced voting has done in Canada, at least in 2006, was to give people who were at the margin—people who probably found voting inconvenient on the day of voting, who may have worked in retail or had other reasons to not vote—an opportunity to vote. So when we say that six out of ten voters who voted in the advance polls would not have voted otherwise, we feel this quite strongly.
The overall impact probably does ceiling out at 2% or 3%, but we should like to say there are a couple of other factors to take into consideration. The first is that voting is habitual, that when people vote for the first time it predicts very strongly that they will vote throughout their life. When people don't vote in the first one or two opportunities they have to vote, that gels into a pattern very quickly. So the knock-on effect of increasing voter turnout by two or three points can be higher in elections later on.
I should like to say finally that I think politicians, and certainly political scientists around the world, scratch their heads at what can be done to bring more youth into the voting process generally, at what can be done to close this widening and quite massive gap between young people and older people. This bill won't do it, but what it will do is to give some youth and some old folks and some people in the middle who are on the margin and who find voting inconvenient a reason to go and vote, because they'll have one extra day to do it, then one day of advanced voting at the back end as well.
The effect isn't large, and I think our own opinion would be that it's for parliamentarians to decide what the price of a vote should be in terms of actual participation. I don't know what a deal is.