Thank you.
When we began looking into the issue in 2005, the members of the House modernization committee had visited Scotland. That was the major event relating to electronic petitions. Scotland was somewhat of a forerunner in the field.
Since then, a large number of legislative assemblies have put in place e-petition systems, some more advanced than others. While they cannot all be put in the same category, many of the assemblies, including the Northwest Territories' and Quebec's, showed bold thinking by bringing forward e-petition systems. In fact, I believe you are going to hear from representatives of those two provinces' legislatures today.
A number of countries, particularly in Europe, developed e-petition systems of varying degrees of sophistication. Some countries have a relatively simple system in place, while other assemblies, such as the European Parliament, have taken a much more comprehensive approach. So there are variations in terms of how quickly the different systems came about and how advanced each of them is, but a lot of work has been done in the area.
The report prepared by the analysts lists a lot of these countries, or legislative assemblies.