Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to start with questions for you, Professor Ward. Then I hope I can get to you, Russ, as a fellow British Columbian.
There's this issue around thresholds. I'm picking up on a conversation that Scott Reid and I are having across the table about the Green Party and the cut-off. I wanted to agree with your point about a different voting system. I'm not taking a position on this at the moment, but I wouldn't fear a 5% cut-off if we were in a system in which there were lists and you had to have a threshold.
After the strategic voting wave of 2015, we talked to a lot of pollsters who watched what happened to our vote. We lost half of our vote in the last week of the campaign, and that was because people began to say, “Right; I have to stampede to the party that I want to vote for strategically.” It sounds like a pathetic turnout and it's hard for me to look at it and say that we only got 3.5% of the popular vote, but when I look at all the other parties in Canada combined, the smaller ones, I see that they got less than 2% of the vote.
We do hear a lot in the back-and-forth about the downside of PR when people talk about smaller extremist parties that make it into parliaments. They're usually talking about the Knesset very specifically. I will give you a wide open moment to say anything you want to add about how using your preferred choice of what sometimes gets called “the best loser”, but which you kindly call “the runner-up”, would mitigate against extremist parties getting a foothold.