Thank you, Madam Chair.
Certainly, we have the tools to make advance polls more available. That is something that is happening right now, so we are working on this.
Stepping back and talking about first nations communities across Canada, this is an area where we need to improve, as I said in my report and in my remarks. The service offering to first nations communities did not, generally speaking, go down in this election. The problem is the growing delta between the service offering to those communities and the rest of Canadians. That delta is quite visible to those communities and it is something that needs to be addressed.
Every election, returning officers contact first nations communities in their electoral district. They contact 100% of them. They reach out to them prior to the election. In this case, they did that in June and July, and they reached out to all the communities once the writ was issued.
In a significant number of cases—57% this time around—first nations communities said they wanted to have polling services in their community. In roughly 40% of the cases, election after election, leaders in the communities have a decision to make and they decided that they do not wish to have voting services in the community. That's something we have always respected and will always respect. Of course, there's a long history behind that choice.
In many cases, the service offering is right outside of the community, just outside of the reserve. Some of these reserves are close to urban areas, and that works well. In other cases, it works not so well if there's a greater distance.
Each case is unique. In that regard, this election was not very different than other elections.
As I said, how we need to improve first is to increase the number of advance polling opportunities, so that first nations have the same or similar flexibility that most Canadians have. Currently, that is not the case. This is something we can do fairly quickly.
Longer term, we need to look back. We're in the process right now of building a team, which will include persons from first nations communities, to look at the way we engage with and communicate with first nations communities. How do we understand their realities and their needs? How do we better build bridges between those communities and Elections Canada to ensure that the service offering is adequate and that it's well communicated?
When we look back at Kenora, there were communications problems, there were problems with understanding the needs of the community and there were problems in terms of the service offering at advance polls. These are problems that are widespread. It will take more time. We are building a team to examine in depth how we engage with and communicate with first nations, but we don't need to wait years to start taking action. There are things we are putting in place right now to improve services.