Yes, absolutely.
We followed the advice of our public health officials, which was very similar to the advice that public health officials across the world are giving when they're talking about any sort of public gathering. We were essentially putting in place the same sorts of measures you would see at any retail establishment. We ordered plenty of personal protective equipment. We provided advice to our returning officers that they should be looking, both for their returning offices and for polling locations, at larger spaces to accommodate social distancing and limiting the number of people who are at a location at any time.
We had ordered more face masks than we actually needed, because most people brought their own. Of course, like Mr. Garrity, when we were home during the period when things were in lockdown, we began thinking about how we were going to run an election during a pandemic. We were in a minority government situation. We had postponed both provincial by-elections and municipal elections. We had to immediately start thinking about those things. At that time the advice was very fluid, even on masks. We ordered enough disposable masks for every elector in the province. By the time the election came around, people were wearing their own masks.
We had quite a robust media campaign encouraging people to vote early and to take advantage of other voting opportunities. We were using the term “flattening the election curve”. In New Brunswick you can vote at any returning office in the province. We were encouraging people to vote at the returning offices, which were available from the time the writ was issued, to take advantage of advance voting days and to vote by mail.
We used a modified vote-by-mail option for our residents in long-term care facilities. That's really going to be an area that has to be looked at and considered in quite a bit of detail. It will be different. Every province has different rules in place as to what's permissible in terms of visitors at long-term care facilities. In speaking with other colleagues, even what's considered a symptom that keeps people excluded from, whether it's public spaces or....
It's really about taking seriously those recommendations that public health is making with regard to any retail establishment, particularly when you're looking at long-term care facilities, and being prepared for a large increase in individual voters taking advantage of those opportunities.
We didn't see the increase in the numbers of mail-in ballots that they did in British Columbia, for example, but it was an exponential increase in demand. In New Brunswick, normally we don't even keep track of the number of mail-in ballots. They have been lumped in with other special voting opportunities. We'd be lucky if we got 100. We processed 13,000 mail-in ballots. In comparison to B.C.'s 700,000, it sounds like nothing, but when you have a system that's designed to handle one or two in an office, it does have a large impact. Managing voters' expectations of what can be done with mail-in ballots is very important as well.