Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
As I'm sure you have heard, New Zealand switched to mixed member proportional in 1996. They also had dedicated seats for their indigenous population. For Canada, I think New Zealand's experience will be much more useful as a road map than anybody else's who's used mixed member proportional or any other system without making the change to it. This is why I think New Zealand is the most important comparison case.
People will say, as I know I said when I was a younger student, that in 1996 there was a jump immediately from 21% women in the New Zealand legislature to 35%. Since then, though, it's remained pretty stagnant. They go between 34% and 41%. It currently sits at 38% after the 2014 election. This just suggests that although we've moved the bar, New Zealand is still stalled.
The reason, I think, has to do with where the women are. If you just dump the women into the party list seats that are meant to be top-ups, New Zealand shows that most women came from that. People actually said that New Zealand shows that women can't win in the districts. We know from places like Canada and Britain, and especially from Canadian voters, that Canadian voters certainly don't discriminate on the basis of sex, yet in the New Zealand experience you saw it, and then people actually started to articulate that women can't win in the seats.
The difference between 1996 and 2014, when they had their last election, is that women were about 30% of members from both district seats and from list seats. What we've not seen is parity. New Zealand switched their electoral system, and it gave a certain kind of access point for women. I'll concede that when they made that particular system more proportional, women got into the legislature through those list seats, but they've not hit 50%. What it enabled people to do was to explicitly say something sexist about women's abilities to win elections, which we know from other cases isn't true. What we end up seeing now is an equalization between women in the districts and women on the list, but they're still 20 points away from parity, so there are still informal barriers.