Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My thanks to the witnesses for joining us today and for their very enlightening remarks. My thanks to Mr. Broadbent particularly. I was not very aware of the 1980 federal election. My recollections of it are actually a little vague.
In three provinces, Saskatchewan, Alberta and Manitoba, if you get almost a quarter of the votes, your representation is minimal. By that I mean two members. In cases like that, it is more difficult to come up with effective public policies that represent the interests of the various regions and their residents.
You are very familiar with different ways of voting and you have travelled to see what is done elsewhere. So you have observed that 80% of OECD countries have adopted proportional methods of voting, in many cases mixed or compensatory methods.
In your opinion, do citizens of those countries fully understand their electoral system and their method of voting? If so, does that encourage them to become more involved in political life, more so that the system we have had here for 149 years?