The reporting relationship between independent officers of the legislature and their assemblies I think varies a bit from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. I understand your process federally less well than I understand our process in British Columbia.
I know in our case we had an interesting dialogue recently with the legislative assembly over the requirement for province-wide door-to-door enumeration in advance of fixed-date general elections. The Election Act was amended to require that Elections BC conduct a universal door-to-door enumeration. We haven't done that since the 1980s in B.C. because we use a continuous register of electors, as we do federally.
I was preparing to conduct that exercise, and I prepared a budget for the legislative assembly. It was a substantial budget, almost $30 million. We thought it was going to have almost no positive impact, and I told the legislative assembly that, through the finance and government services committee, which is the committee that I report to.
Fortunately, because I recommended this requirement be eliminated, the legislative assembly did eliminate the requirement. We didn't use it in the last election, and instead brought forward a process of both universal and targeted enumeration. We called it voter registration uplift.
We spent about a quarter of the funding that the other proposal would have required, and we believe we had a very significant impact on the quality of the voters list. My report on the enumeration activities is being tabled in our legislative assembly tomorrow.
It strikes me as one of the natural processes in which we have these conversations with the legislative assembly. We advise on our activities. That is not to say we couldn't improve our process in British Columbia. There may be some tweaks you would like to see at the federal level as well.