Good afternoon to all committee members.
Welcome to all the witnesses here this afternoon.
We welcome Leslie Seidle, Research Director, Canada's Changing Federal Community. We welcome, as individuals, Larry LeDuc, Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, and Hugo Cyr, Dean, Faculty of Political Science and Law at the Université du Québec à Montréal.
I will briefly touch on the witnesses' credentials.
Professor Leslie Seidle is research director for the Canada's changing federal community program at the Institute for Research on Public Policy, and a public policy consultant. He was also senior research coordinator for the Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing, and is author of Rethinking the Delivery of Public Services to Citizens and numerous articles on immigration issues, electoral and constitutional reform, public management, and political finance.
Professor Larry LeDuc, as I mentioned, is professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. His publications include Comparing Democracies, Dynasties and Interludes, The Politics of Direct Democracy, Absent Mandate, How Voters Change, and Political Choice in Canada, as well as numerous book chapters and articles in journals such as Electoral Studies, Party Politics, Political Science, and Canadian Journal of Political Science.
Dean Hugo Cyr is a member of the centre of interdisciplinary research on diversity and democracy, of the Quebec association of constitutional law, and of the UNESCO chair for the study of the philosophical foundations of justice in democratic society. He was a visiting scholar at the European Academy of Legal Theory in Brussels and has served as legal aid with the Honourable Justice Ian Binnie of the Supreme Court of Canada.
So I think we're going to have a very interesting, stimulating, and rich discussion this afternoon. I believe our witnesses have 10 minutes each, and then what we typically do is have two rounds of questions in which every member around the table gets to ask a question and you get to answer for five minutes. So the Q and A for each member is five minutes, and then we do a second round in the same format.
Without further ado, we'll start with Mr. Seidle.