Thank you, Mr. Chair.
In the document we were given, entitled "Potential Impacts of Extended Advance Voting on Voter Turnout", by the holder of the Canada Research Chair in Electoral Studies, the experts say, and I quote:
The use of alternative voting methods varies from one country to another, and the expanded voting time frame of Bill C-55 would make Canada a unique case in the world. To our knowledge, only Swedish legislative electoral law provides a similar combination of voting opportunities.
I would like to review a bit of the history of advance polls. At first, they were used only for people who could not get to the polls on voting day, on "D-day". They were only for those people, because they could not vote because they were travelling outside Canada or for whatever reason. They had to state the reasons why they could not vote.
In my opinion, if there higher turnout at advance polls, it is something all the parties strongly encourage. In every riding, for every party, there is almost a race to the advance polls. I have heard people say they had to win the advance polls. So all of the volunteers who are going to work on election day vote in advance. If it is winter, they encourage people to vote at the advance polls: there are phone banks, the parties have strategies to get more and more people out to the advance polls. I think it is honest to say that. I do not believe that having two elections days is likely to encourage voter turnout.
As the chief electoral officer of Quebec said, if you really want to encourage voting on "D-day", it has to be on Sunday rather than Monday, but not two days in a row.
What do you think of all that?