Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you to the witnesses for being here.
I'm going to go a bit along the lines of Mr. Louis but also of Mr. Ruff.
The turnout in the 2025 election federally was around 69% overall. For those who actually vote from overseas, of those who requested the ballots, the turnout was 2.5%. Of those who actually voted, it was about 2%. That's a pretty enormous difference. Certainly, one would think that some of that is a lack of interest from folks who have been outside the country for a long period of time. Clearly, there must be more than that, and that would relate either to a lack of information on the part of folks who could vote or to obstacles.
Look at some of the other countries. The Americans vote eight times as much as we do in terms of folks outside the country. The French vote 35 times as much as we do in terms of folks outside the country.
I guess I'll say a couple of things. First, is there academic literature that actually looks at best practices and why there are such differences between western democratic countries in terms of the mechanisms they use to encourage people to vote? If the answer to that is no, what are the things that we could do to try to make it easier for folks to vote?
I mean, we used an example, I think, in one of the earlier sessions. It takes a week to get to Hong Kong. It takes a week to get back. There are all the processes of registering. If you think about Canadians who are living in Nepal, that's much worse than Hong Kong. It just seems to me that having only one mechanism that clearly is pretty clunky is not a way to encourage participation.
Maybe I just throw all of that to both of you.