Thank you very much. Thank you for the kind invitation to appear. I will say that I managed to raise quite a few eyebrows yesterday when I told my colleagues I was going to Parliament Hill to appear in front of a committee at 11 a.m.
I realize I only have a few minutes, so I'll keep my comments short. I did manage to make some notes that you can look at.
Most of my comments deal more specifically with some of the advance polls, in terms of “not the day before”, and I know my colleague Dr. Pammett will be maybe making some comments on the Sunday before the election day poll, and I'm happy to answer those questions. I thought I'd just take this opportunity to make a couple of quick comments about advance polls in general, and also on part of the title of the act, increase the opportunities to vote, and to make some general comments about other things this committee may wish to look at or other considerations in terms of increasing voter turnout.
I think the best way to look at the first purpose of any of these changes is this. Will these changes create the kinds of things we want, or what might some of the unintended consequences be? If, at the end of the day, the consequences are larger or more detrimental than the purpose, we might decide to tackle the problem from a different perspective. However, if the purposes are achieved with minimal problems, then certainly this process is worthwhile.
So what do we know? As members of this committee know, more and more Canadians who vote are voting in advance polls, but while the number of Canadians voting is going down, the number of voting Canadians who vote prior to election day is increasing. According to Elections Canada data, we now have over 1.56 million Canadians voting in advance polls, so this is becoming an increasingly large number of Canadians and a larger number of the electorate. It's an important constituency and it's a growing constituency.
The question is this. Will increasing the number of advance polling days actually increase voter turnout in Canada? Unfortunately, I'm not convinced it will. First, in the absence of any good survey data, we know very little about who actually votes in advance polls in Canada. Barry Kay and Chris Cattle, in a piece they did for the Canadian Parliamentary Review, argued that differences in advance polls and poll results on the election day results--