Thank you, Madam Chair. I am happy to be here.

I will make my presentation in English, but I can answer questions in both languages.

I'm actually just coming from a session of meetings of the Canadian Political Science Association, which is part of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences taking place at the University of Ottawa right now. In fact, at this session I was just giving a paper on declining youth political participation, which is an area I've been working on and have written books about, and we have some pretty scary new data. This is comparative. It's not only Canadian; it's all advanced democracies, and Canada is certainly one of the more acute examples of that. It means that it's not simply that young people vote less when they're young and more when they're older, but there are generational phenomena that show that the current generations are voting less when they are young and are likely to vote less when they're older.

It's part of a wider phenomenon, which is the sense of duty to vote. The sense of duty to pay attention to politics isn't what it used to be under previous generations. This has something to do with means of communication, the arrival of the Internet, and so on. But most democratic countries, as far as I can tell, are making efforts, therefore, to make the vote more accessible under these circumstances, rather than less. It's hard to get real detailed information on very specific aspects, like the aspects that are in this particular law, but in general the tendency has been for countries to figure out what the impediments are to voting and to try to remove them as much as possible.

I'm not going to repeat the arguments made by the former and current heads of Elections Canada and the arguments you've heard today. It's very hard, in the context of what's happening in general, to understand the need to tighten this particular law or other laws. Focusing on these laws, I cannot see why we have to require, for example, registration after the writs have been issued. Especially now that we have fixed election dates, the idea that we have to wait until the writs are issued before somebody can apply to vote from outside of Canada, strikes me as quite.... I'd love to know the reasoning behind that.

I couldn't find other countries that are so restrictive in terms of when people can get on the lists. What we do know is that of the countries to which we can compare Canada, almost none are really as restrictive as we are. For example, as you may know, Americans can vote forever outside of the country. We are restricted to five years. In the United Kingdom it's 15 years. I have more data about other countries, but very few.... Only Australia's sort of close to us. They allow six years, but they allow you to renew if you actually apply. This five-year limit—it's five years and you're out—is something that is hard to understand.

Of course, the problems with producing the kind of information needed in order to actually have access to the vote...I think the critiques you've heard are quite compelling.

You may know there are countries that really do make it easier to vote from abroad in different ways. For example, some countries actually have electoral districts simply to represent their expats. The French do that. Some of you may know that expats from several countries, Portugal, France, and so on, actually have direct representation in the Parliament and they vote directly for their own representatives. Quite a few countries make it possible to vote in different ways.

There is postal voting, which is the way we do it, but there is also voting at embassies and voting sometimes by proxy. That's something I'm not too keen on but there are some countries that do it. Now, countries like Estonia, which have introduced electronic voting, are also working on introducing electronic voting for people outside the country.

In general what we're seeing are more efforts being made to facilitate the ability of people to vote in the country but also outside the country, to vote and to participate in the political process.

You've heard the reasons put much more eloquently than I could in terms of why it's important to have that electoral connection, but I must say I have some difficulty understanding why, in Canada, we feel the need to tighten these restrictions.

I'll leave it there. Thank you.

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