Thank you.
I concur that Canadians are as intelligent as New Zealanders and I just reject the argument made by the Liberal minister and the Liberal Party that Canadians are too uninformed, too stupid, too unwilling to learn to be capable of making a decision on this matter themselves.
This leads me to the questions I wanted to pose to Professor Cooper.
Professor, you made the comment that there is no best electoral system. I would submit to you, however, that there is actually a worst electoral system, and that would be not MMP or STV or alternative vote. It would be simply a system that has a predictable outcome on the vote—that is, it shifts the nature of how the next election would turn out even if Canadians have the same preferences they now have. We can guess at how that would work by looking at, for example, projections that have been made as to how different systems would have affected the outcome of the 2011 and 2015 elections. I think what we need to do is avoid a situation in which the mandate, real or imagined, the government got in the 2015 election is used to effectively change the rules of the game so that even if everybody voted the same as they did in those elections, we would have had more seats for the governing party.
Yesterday we heard from Harold Jansen, who did a study that showed that the alternative vote system would have produced improved results for the Liberals both in 2015 and in 2011, and pointed out a previous study that shows that earlier elections would have similarly been changed in favour of the Liberals. He said that on the three occasions in Canadian history when provinces adopted a system—didn't hold a referendum but simply adopted a system—that was distinct or different from first past the post—and this would be B.C. in 1950, Manitoba in 1921, and Alberta in the 1920s—the driving force was partisan self-interest of the party then in power. The new system would favour that party. Then when each of those three parties switched back to first past the post, they were similarly driven by the naked partisan self-interest of the party then in power, which would benefit from going back to first past the post.
The question I'm asking you is this. I believe this is the most convincing argument for a referendum. I say this without any prejudice as to whether first past the post is better or worse than other systems. I'm asking whether you agree that I am right that this is the real reason that a referendum is in this case a useful safeguard for the Canadian people.