Well, if a student or a homeless person is in a similar situation where they were...they'd be in a position to deal with it.
I know this committee canvassed those issues extensively at the time they dealt with Bill C-31. That's not the content of the bill before us, so I don't want to spend too much time plowing old turf. I think what we're trying to do here is to deal with the specific problem of voters in the rural context for whom identification normally has an address but not a civic address. It's a consequence of the identification problems.
I know there were provisions put in place. The Chief Electoral Officer has included attestation letters from people who run homeless shelters, for example, to deal with the homeless information, and student information from the residence that they live there. These things are all available to protect their interests, so I believe they are more than adequately protected under the bill, which you originally dealt with, C-31, and the Chief Electoral Officer's application to it.
Something that might be of interest to all of you, and this is probably not a bad thing to know about, is that there was a study done by Elections Canada dealing with the application of Bill C-31 in the by-elections in Outremont, Roberval-Lac-St-Jean, and St-Hyacinthe-Bagot. The results are very, very positive. The new requirements worked. The vast majority of voters found the identification requirements easy to meet, and they were quite satisfied with the ID verification and voting process. Most people have a favourable view of the new identification provisions.
The one I thought was most surprising and positive is that 83% of voters said it didn't take any longer to vote using the identification provisions. So from the voters' perception, it was very positive. Overwhelmingly, people had no difficulty providing the identification. For a first-time run in a by-election, that's pretty remarkable. As we indicated, this is the first time that requirement has existed.
I know they did the same in the provincial elections in Ontario. I don't have any statistics for how they worked there, though in the polling station where I was a scrutineer on election day there appeared to be no difficulties with their identification requirements.
It looks like the reforms that this committee brought forward on Bill C-31 are working very well.