What I wanted to do is just follow up on Mr. Lauzon's comments, and this relates to the conversation you had when you came by my office. Actually I should start by saying I very much appreciated your going to our offices that way. I know your predecessor went to one member of each party, which was a good idea. I think by going to every member of the committee you set a new standard, and I applaud you for it.
The issue of having advance polls or other easily available places to vote in advance of election day, such as the returning office, I think really does make a difference. We actually went through the exercise of measuring this in my riding. When my riding was redistributed, I lost the suburban part of the riding in the city of Ottawa—Kanata—and retained the rural part. We noticed the obvious thing, which was my next-door neighbour, Gordon O'Connor, getting a much higher turnout at the advance polls than we did. At first we couldn't explain it. It certainly couldn't be personality-based; at least we don't like to think that's the case. But then we also noticed similar results related to the fact that advance polls are in our towns but not in our rural areas. So there is something there.
Here's a thought, maybe, for the other members here. We worked with our returning officer over a period of time to change the locations of some of the advance poll locations and to get an additional satellite office put in, on which she was very helpful. She was very good. I expect other members might find the same thing if they tried doing that with their returning officers. That's advice from us.
The other thing I was thinking of was that after we had our conversation I realized that there's rural, where we can do this sort of thing, and then there's remote. It seems to me that maybe there's merit to some kind of special effort, perhaps a special advertising campaign advising people in really remote areas. Remote is where you simply can't drive to an advance poll and you can't set up an advance poll. In our office I discussed the idea of how you deal with a place like Nunavut, where a community is isolated by hundreds of miles from the next community. That doesn't prevent from engaging in a wider use of mail-in ballots, for example. I don't know if you do anything of that sort, but if you don't I think there would be some merit to thinking about that as a way of boosting voter participation from folks who live in remote areas. Obviously I don't mean just in Nunavut. There are wide swaths in the country where that might apply.