Well, that's very nice.
I'll come back to some of the other aspects that I'll now have time to raise, but let me just tell you that if I were talking to someone who didn't know anything about electoral systems except our existing system—in which they know that if they vote for somebody and that person gets more votes than anybody else in the district where they live, that person will be elected—they may think that means that the overall result is proportional to the party support, which it isn't. Very often it is quite distant from that relationship. I think this is televised; I imagine there are many people listening to me who think that.
Let us think of the alternatives. The simplest proportional system, as you know, is to take the whole country, and each party provides a list. If 40% vote for a party, 40% of the seats go to that party. That's the way they do it in the Netherlands. Most countries that use a proportional system use lists, but they're based on regions.
MMP works as follows. As I said, the crucial principle of MMP is that you still have one person in the legislature who represents you. I'll give you a concrete case; I think that's the best way to describe it.
Let's imagine that here we are in Ottawa and let's say that in greater Ottawa there are ten seats in this Parliament. When the election comes, everybody in greater Ottawa has two votes: one for their local representative and one for the party that they prefer. For these 10 seats, the district is divided into six districts—Ottawa West, Ottawa Centre, Ottawa South, Ottawa East, Vanier, and so on.
There are six districts, which would be bigger than the existing districts—perhaps about one-and-a-half times as large, in terms of the number of voters. Those six seats would then be allocated to the person who wins them. Let's say that four of those seats were won by the Liberal candidate, one was won by the Conservative candidate, and one was won by the NDP candidate. We now know where the six seats are.
Now, there are four more, and the four more come from lists submitted by each party. The percentage overall was 40% for the Liberals, 30% for the Conservatives, 20% for the NDP, and 10% for the Greens. The Liberals have won four seats: 40% of ten is four seats, and so the Liberals have the right number of seats. The Conservatives have 30% and have won one seat, and 30% of ten is three, so two from the list go to the Conservatives. The NDP has 20% and it has one seat, so it gets one seat from the list. The Greens, who have no seats but have 10%, also get one seat from the list.
The overall result is proportional. I've made it nice, with rounded numbers. It's never quite so neat, but the basic principle is the same: each party has an exact number of representatives proportional to the support that it has in this district, and everybody has their own MP. Everybody has one person of whom they can say: “I voted for that person. If I have a problem that I need my local representative to deal with, there is that one person who can't say no.”
On the other hand, let's say that there may be some local Greens who basically would like to have had somebody to represent them, but there was nobody elected from their party. Now they do have somebody, and instead of going to their local MP, who might be a Liberal or a Conservative or an NDP, they can go to the Green member from greater Ottawa to bring up their particular concerns.
That's how the system works. There are many aspects to it that I'll be happy to talk to you about. We have the experience from New Zealand, from Scotland, from Germany, and from other countries. We can learn from that experience and apply it to Canada, and that's what I suggest we should do.
Thank you.