Those are very good, important questions for us. The issue of having polling sites on reserves has been an ongoing challenge for us over the years. It's something that we tried to improve in the last election. We did try to engage, and we did engage ahead of the last election with local first nations reserves in order to increase the presence.
Now, first nations do not always wish to have a polling site. I know for Monsieur Therrien in his riding that this has been a historical situation where we have not been successful in having a polling site there. We have to respect that, but we do have to make efforts to make sure we can respond to the demands of first nations and that they're engaged earlier rather than later.
In the last election there was an increase, but not as much as we would have liked. We had 389 reserves with polling sites, compared with 366 in the previous election. It was a small increase. There were a few instances where first nations would say they did not want to have a polling site, and once the edicts were issues and there were local discussions, then they wished to have a polling site. This is a challenge, but to the extent possible we've adjusted to that. I do not know of a single case where we were not able to accommodate a request for a polling site at a first nations community.
In terms of what we're doing, we will have returning officers engaging locally. We plan to have them start in January or February, after Christmas, with first nations reserves. Whether or not there is an election—this is not an indication—they will be starting to engage with first nations to talk about sites, but also to talk about safety measures and recruitment.
We want as much as possible to have first nations serving their communities, so the more we can recruit locally, the better it is for us. It helps simplify the process for everybody.