Thank you, Chair.
Look, I don't have a problem, and I'm not impugning the motives of the mover of the motion. I don't have a problem at all with the procedure and House affairs committee studying barriers keeping people from being able to vote. This is something that should be of concern at all times to members of Parliament, particularly to those members who are regular members of this committee.
The wording of the motion already presumes that the issue is as prevalent as has been stated by an individual colleague in the House of Commons, and the solution is also presumed in the text of the motion, which basically says that the problem is real and that the solution is to do it this way. If that's the case, then I don't know what we're going to study it for.
I'm from a riding and represent a riding that's largely unilingual, even though there are many people in the riding who do speak different languages, but most everybody I know who is a Canadian citizen and eligible to vote gets along just fine in one of the two official languages. I know, even here in the province of Alberta, that there are polls, and we used to ask these questions during the census—and I'm pretty sure we still do—about what languages people operate in. We would know about different regions of the country. Elections Canada would have access to information on different regions of the country and what primary languages are being used in a particular polling station. It wouldn't matter if it were one of our traditional aboriginal languages, whether it's a language that's being used in the north by Inuit, whether it's a language being used in Vancouver by those speaking Cantonese or Mandarin or those in a neighbourhood in Toronto who would be speaking a dialect from South Asia.
The notion of being able to print our ballots in more than the two official languages presumes that there's no alternative way to communicate to prospective voters what's on the ballot in a language that they can relate to. That would be something maybe as simple as having an interpretive sign placed inside the voting box in the particular language that cross-references with the ballot, for example, but that's not what's going to be discussed in the terms of this motion, because the motion already presumes what the solution is.
I would be much more satisfied, Madam Chair, if the motion were not as descriptive on what the solution is and more descriptive on what the problem might be. Then the mover of the motion would find that they would get much more support from this member of Parliament.