Thank you for your presentation this morning, Mr. Ouellet. It was very clear.
As the member for a very rural, isolated and enormous region, I am very familiar with the problem regional organizations have with finding the necessary resources and volunteers to campaign.
For example, in my region we have to run five separate campaigns with volunteers in every one of them. I know most of the other parties don't have any volunteers, except in one of the main communities, because the difficulty...and I'm not saying this to pat ourselves on the back. We have problems getting volunteers. But everyone is struck.
What I find with our discussion so far is that it's been very high-minded, very noble, and very disconnected from reality. Every one of us around here knows that if we simply counted on advance polling days, none of us would be here.
We get elected because we find our vote, we get our volunteers to pull that vote, and we phone our people who are strongly supportive of the vote. And at 6 o'clock, half of them haven't gone out to vote and we remind them to go out and vote. So getting the vote out is as much based on volunteers and trying to get people to come out. Every party is becoming increasingly challenged.
It raises the question: if at the end of the day we're turning to our volunteers and to our Elections Canada staff to do two full days of elections when we're already challenged to bring out enough volunteers for one day, are we actually going to see an increase in voting, or are we going to have a more difficult time pulling our vote because we are putting more strain on the staff who are being brought forward and the volunteer base?