Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his observations and insights into the electoral process. I agree that he has put his finger right on the key point.
After the presidential elections in the United States in 2000, I remember a joke going around that the Russians would send monitors to the next presidential election to ensure it was fair, which is the reversal of roles of course.
There is a grain of truth there. If we are going to hold ourselves out as a democratic example, particularly through our electoral process, and be advisors and monitors in other countries that are experiencing often for the first time the democratic right to vote, which in my experience and in my observations in a newly democratized country is taken up with enthusiasm and high turnout rates, we should be a little ashamed that our own citizens do not participate in the same way in our electoral process.
That is the balance. If we cannot show that we have integrity, then our participation will be even less. It is one thing to have people vote for all of us in this place and then think we are not listening to them, but it is another thing entirely if they think we arrived here in some clouded way.
We must not allow that to happen at the same time as we are doing everything we can to ensure that the existing barriers, whether they are physical, intellectual, illness, or remoteness, are overcome by targeted enumeration.