Electoral Reform committee  In terms of any future work on the issue of online voting, I would say it's a fact. To my mind, there is no question of replacing traditional voting methods with online voting. We aren't able to do that. Similar to the voting options currently available to Canadians—voting at advance polls, by mail or by special ballot—online voting would simply be an additional way for electors to vote.

Electoral Reform committee  I believe so. If we want Canadians to have confidence in the electoral system, we need to make sure it's one they accept.

Electoral Reform committee  Yes.

Electoral Reform committee  I will let you and the rest of parliamentarians, our elected representatives, make that decision.

Electoral Reform committee  Twenty-six months is how long the last redistribution of electoral boundaries took. What I said before and would like to make clear here again today is that, if the appropriate legislation is in place by May 2017—as was my understanding—it should be possible to implement all of the changes by October 2019.

Electoral Reform committee  As I said, regardless of the changes to the voting system, it's crucial to fully understand the importance of the public education campaign. The more complex the change, the more intensive the campaign must be and the sooner it must start. I don't want to suggest that Elections Canada is the only authority responsible for that education.

Electoral Reform committee  The same logistical elements always come into play. Obviously, we would have to prepare the ballot setting out the question to Canadians. We would need to revise all the material that hasn't been reviewed since 1992 and redo all the training manuals for elections staff. Basically, we would have to prepare the materials to train the 255,000 Canadians who help administer elections.

Electoral Reform committee  It could be a simple exercise, and again that's speculative, but there may be a few, right? You still have to draw those lines and you still have to consider community of interest, geography, and all the factors that the commission needs to hear. I'm sure it will generate some debate, so I believe public consultation should happen on those regional groupings.

Electoral Reform committee  We need to look at various barriers. If you want to make a fundamental difference in accessibility, and that's why I mentioned it earlier, you need to seriously look at online voting. Because various groups are facing barriers—and again I'm not denying the digital divide, we need to address that of course—if you look at the disabled community, we have 3.5 million electors who suffer various degrees of disability in this country.

Electoral Reform committee  There may be other things that we can do here and there, I'm not suggesting there's nothing else, but most of the other things will be quite incremental and not necessarily make a major difference. That's on the side of the electors. On the side of political parties and their representation in all these things, there are also suggestions that could be considered in terms of making the candidate lists more representative and more diverse in representing our society.

Electoral Reform committee  There will be aspects in order to become a candidate, but also in order to reach out. Much of the campaign information is not available in formats that are accessible to those who have a disability, so we will be putting a recommendation forward to propose that we consider reimbursing expenditures to campaigns that invest in making their information available in multiple, accessible formats.

Electoral Reform committee  Again, we have limited experience, the last one being in 1992. Our estimate is that under the current Referendum Act it would be around $300 million to run a referendum.

Electoral Reform committee  I think you will find that in my report that will be released probably at the end of September. It will contain a number of recommendations that I think are needed to modernize our system, improve service to electors, and provide some flexibility to Elections Canada, to returning officers, to be able to adapt the service offered to the particular environment in which we have to conduct the election.

Electoral Reform committee  I'm speaking as the administrator of the election. It's the time required to count the ballots, depending on the system, again I don't want to generalize but subject to the system. You can look at what's currently happening in Australia where there are significant delays in computing, counting, the ballots.

Electoral Reform committee  I believe political financing falls under the authority of various committees and Parliament, itself. Many debates on the subject have taken place over the years. The point I was trying to make was the importance of keeping in mind that changing the system would likely have repercussions on the organization of political parties, by riding and by region, perhaps, and that the regime wasn't adapted to such changes.