Yes, in making the case for list PR, I tried to make the case in terms of principles and not in terms of any particular country. Because it is the most widely used electoral system in the world today, we know a lot about it. There is plenty of empirical evidence in different countries, different societies.
We don't just have to look at Denmark. Now, Denmark has one of the highest voting turnouts in the world, so if you are looking at turnout, you could say that Denmark has been pretty successful with it, but we don't have to look at just Denmark or Spain or any other country.
What I tend to like about list PR is not only that there is a mountain of evidence for it, drawn from different places, but that it is a very flexible and adaptable system. In other words, you can construct a Canadian model of list PR that might be quite unlike the exact model used in any other country, but it would be designed for the Canadian environment. I don't try to do that in a 2,500-word brief, but I could do it.
I taught a course at U of T a few years ago on electoral systems. This was a graduate course, and I had three really bright graduate students. I had them each design an electoral system for Ontario. One was list PR, one was STV, and one was MMP. They worked at that for the semester and wrote a nice paper on it. I'd be glad to send any of you the paper, if you're interested. It was titled, “Three Options for Electoral Reform in Ontario”.
The point was not that we were adopting the Swedish system or the Spanish system. The point was that we can take the principles based on the evidence from a number of different places, and not just one country, and apply them to a Canadian environment and get the kind of representation in Canada that we think we should have, and the kind of responsiveness to voters that we think a parliamentary system should provide on an ongoing basis, and not just on election day.