Mr. Speaker, I have listened to my colleague’s speech with interest and I will say immediately that the Bloc Québécois will vote in favour of this bill at second reading, even if we do not think that it will increase voter turnout. It will give people more days to vote, and this is acceptable and desirable. We ourselves would have preferred to see measures that would increase the number of advance polling stations in each riding in order to increase accessibility to these stations. We would also have preferred to see money spent on facilitating voter registration and correcting errors in the register of electors. The real problem is the drop in turnout.
Adding two advance voting days may help some people who could not do so before to get out and vote, but I do not think that it will have much effect. We should give much more thought to particular clienteles such as young people and native people, who have very low turnout, and what we could do to increase their turnout. A much broader discussion is required.
The bill before us is not negative—the parliamentary secretary said as much—but I think that much deeper thought and other ways of doing things are required. Money needs to be invested. The costs incurred by the addition of these two voting days will not increase the number of advance polling stations in a rural riding like mine, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup. This is a riding with lots of municipalities in it. Offering people more places to vote in advance would have an effect on turnout. When people have to travel many kilometres to get to an advance polling station, they may decide not to go and not be available the actual day of the vote. Then we do not get the desired results.
I would like to know whether the people who work on elections were consulted, in either a partisan or non-partisan way. For example in my riding my riding president, Daniel Blanchet, is very familiar with election organization. In this regard, we could go much further in the present circumstances. Does the parliamentary secretary think, as I do, that a much broader offensive should be launched so as to increase the choice?
During the last election in France, voter turnout reached 85%. There is no reason why here, with the issues we know about, we should not reach that level, except that with the Canadian federal system it is not easy to make the connection between the federal or provincial elected representative and the voter’s choice. Perhaps in this regard the Canadian federal system has a democratic deficit, which will be hard to fix as things stand.