Thank you to both of our witnesses.
This may seem like an odd juxtaposition, having an explanation of France's system of voting for expatriate citizens and a Canadian who has been dealing with his system, but it's actually convenient, because it lets me ask Professor Frank a question relating to the Canadian voting system by providing the context of the French system.
In Canada the vote is attached to a specific constituency. In fact, in Justice Penny's ruling, in paragraph 77, he makes a point of observing that the charter right to vote is for the member of Parliament for the electoral district in which the voter resides. Obviously, a non-resident doesn't reside in any district, and the assumption we've always made is that you remain, for electoral purposes, a resident of the district in which you last resided when you were last in Canada. Of course, district boundaries change, so you are attached to an address. We figure that the address you were last in is where you reside for electoral purposes. But the point is that the charter section 3 right is attached to a specific locale in order to spread all the votes between ridings across the country.
The system that France and some other countries, such as Italy, use is to say that electoral districts will be created that are outside of the country. There are actually representatives who serve in the national Parliament who represent districts that are not part of the territory of the country. They are representatives of the interests of electors in that particular district. Wikipedia has some convenient maps that actually show where the Italian districts are and where the French districts are. They don't overlap perfectly. I guess the distribution of Italian and French citizens outside of their respective countries is not identical.
Anyway, assuming there were no constitutional difficulties—and there might actually be constitutional difficulties because of the way the courts have interpreted section 3—what do you think of the idea of having some kind of extraterritorial electoral district for Canadians who live outside the country?