Mr. Speaker, two points. First of all, in reference to the students and people who travel south and the military, I know about special ballots and everything will be there to vote in the same way. My question was regarding the requirement for a street address and whether that would negatively affect that procedure, would they now need to have a street address where they did not before? Hopefully that is covered by the amendments in Bill C-18.
In relation to the extra voting days, because people can vote by special ballot the day the writ is dropped, I am certainly in favour of having a system that is very flexible with good advance polling days because one or two days does not always help my constituents. As the member said, I have a huge riding and voters could easily be outside their poll and still in the riding, but impossible to get there. It is five or six hours in three directions to get back to my riding and a lot of people would not do that to vote, especially driving in minus 40°. As we discussed earlier, a lot of them travel outside the territory. They often go south for reasons of work, to visit family or other reasons so that one day or two days is not necessarily enough. There needs to be flexibility over the whole system.
There is one other problem that arises, and hopefully the committee will look at this. I was in a hospital last election day visiting people who were sick and a couple of people were there who had come from out of town for a couple of hours to visit people in emergency. They could not vote because people have to be at their poll to vote. That is disenfranchising people and hopefully that problem can be addressed in the future.