There was a paper done and published in 2002 by Antoine Bilodeau, who looked at, I believe, the 1997 federal election and found that the Liberals would have benefited. I'm going to now rain all over the work that Professor McCormick and I did. The danger whenever you're projecting backwards is that we're using how people voted and assuming that they would have voted the same way had the alternative vote been in place. For example, in southern Alberta where I live, in the constituency of Lethbridge, it has been Conservative. It was Canadian Alliance, Reform, as far back as anyone can remember. So Liberals, New Democrats, and Green Party supporters have to face some choices about, would you vote.... That's the problem. If I look at how people say they're going to vote in a survey, I'm trying to project what's going to happen.
The hope with the alternative vote and the reason I think the Liberals would seem to do well under it—and there have been other people who have done similar kinds of analyses—is that they are a lot of other parties' second choices. That's the key. The hope, the argument that's been made in favour of the alternative vote, is that it's going to encourage parties to reach out to supporters of other parties and say, “Okay, I understand you're supporting them, but here's what we have common”, to try to seek commonality rather than to polarize.
The evidence that I have seen is that in Alberta and Manitoba, that didn't really happen. I spent countless weeks digging through archives looking at campaign material. I found one campaign thing where somebody was explicitly appealing for second choices. You just didn't see a lot of evidence of that.