Procedure and House Affairs committee  I have heard that there are two kinds of objections to the use of Sunday as the effective second voting day. One is the problem with a potential conflict with religious observance and concern that some people may have with that. The second is more administrative—that is, evidently about 10% or 11% of our polling stations are located in churches.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  My comment is on calculating the incremental cost of this initiative. I guess I would caution against simply saying that the way to do that is to take the $34 million estimated cost and divide that by the likely increase in the number of people participating through advance polling.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes, well, that's a good question, and I've not spent a lot of time thinking about what that would look like. But I think if one were to imagine what kind of study would be useful, one example would be to put in place the proposed change--let's say we're looking at advanced polling on the Sunday prior to the election and on the Sunday prior to that--in selected constituencies on a trial basis and actually measure the impact on voter turnout in those constituencies relative to constituencies overall.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  On the Australian case, I guess that's an exception to the decline in voting turnout generally, because the provision of compulsory voting means that if you don't turn up at the polls, you're going to get fined. Consequently, there hasn't been much change there, even though there's been a change in the way in which people are exercising that franchise.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It's been a while since I looked at data on the accuracy of our register of electors. The provision that we have in this country that allows people to register at the polling station I think provides an important safeguard to some inaccuracies that we have in our voter register.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes, I have two brief comments. I've not had an opportunity to read the paper written by the colleagues from the University of Montreal, but I'm not sure the finding was that seniors were the ones who are more likely to take advantage of this as much as older people were. So if there's a positive correlation with age, that suggests it could be the middle-age group as well.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The trends suggest that an increasing number of Canadians are taking advantage of opportunities to vote outside their regular polling day. I expect those trends will continue. I would expect initiatives that make it easier for people to exercise voting outside of regular voting days will lead to increased participation.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think the evidence is pretty consistent that there has been an increased demand for voting alternatives outside one-day regular voting opportunities. We see that in an increased demand for postal voting; we see it in an increased demand for advance voting. And we see more people taking advantage of those opportunities.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you. My opening statement is very brief. From the end of World War II until 1988 voter turnout in Canada was in the order of about 75%. In the five elections since 1993 turnout has sharply declined and now ranges between about 61% and 65%. The intent of Bill C-16 is to reverse this trend and to do so largely by increasing the number of advanced polling opportunities.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Good morning. My name is Keith Archer. I'm a professor in the department of political science at the University of Calgary, and I'm the director of research at the Banff Centre.