I think we need to focus on what PR does. As Professor Peter Russell told the committee, it is about translating national vote shares into proportional seat allocation in the legislature. We also hear that one of the main criticisms of first past the post is that a government can get 36% of the national vote and get 100% of the power. That 100% of the power is a function of the concentration of power in the executive and a majority government's dominance in the House.
The problem is that proportional representation is about proportional representation. It's not about the exercise of power. When you look at a context in which a party that gets 15% of the vote is able to leverage its way into a coalition government or get pieces of its preferred policies in play by propping up a minority government, that is exercising significant power. Nominally when 85% of Canadians voted against you, to me that is in some ways even more disproportionate than the power exercised by a plurality government in our current system.
This is not to say that any of that is legitimate. Responsible government means that whoever can control the confidence of the legislature gets to govern, and that type of arrangement could certainly happen under a first-past-the-post system. We seem to have a culture that doesn't lead to coalitions currently.
So PR is legitimate, but I think it's important to understand and to distinguish between what PR does in terms of proportionality and what it does not do.