Thank you, Mr. Graham, for that comment.
When I was a deputy returning officer, this technology was being used in the polling location that I was responsible for near Fergus, Ontario. Even there, in a relatively established area, there were challenges with the Wi-Fi, using the modem to connect, to the point that I had to physically move locations to connect. So there is that challenge.
What I found interesting and informative from the CEO's testimony is that 90% of voters voted at locations that employed this technology, whereas 50% of the locations employed the technology. That certainly takes into account a lot of the challenges that are faced in a number of areas. When we look at how the results came in, how they were tabulated, we see that the speed with which the results initially came in for the vast majority of the ridings, the vast majority of the polls within the ridings, showed the success of that. But we waited for some period of time to hear back from those locations that were using traditional tabulating of paper ballots. I think that's informative of how it worked. Certainly, the testimony he provided us in terms of the success rates—between 99.4% and 99.6% in terms of connectivity throughout the day—is positive, worthwhile and good to hear.
Whenever we, as a committee, or Canadians talk about new technology, there's always the concern of interference. The system that's been undertaken, as the CEO mentioned this morning, is really technology that is 30-plus years old, so it's not as though it's new in that sense, but it's certainly a new use of it.
But the ability to use that technology and also have the hard-copy ballots saved and maintained afterwards is worthwhile.