I think it would, because you would have to make an argument that would have some resonance in the community. You'd have to have some kind of response.
To be clear, if you have mixed member proportional, you will have single-member ridings, and you could have a situation in which a candidate wins a riding but his or her party doesn't meet the threshold, a situation they call “overhangs”.
In the German system, when you have an overhanging seat, you compensate with seats for the other parties, for mathematical reasons that I'm sure Russ could explain better that I could, or you could go the route of saying, “No, we'll just let it stand”, so if you have a very popular candidate who may be an extremist and for some reason is very popular in that riding, it's contained to that riding. It isn't something that meets the threshold, so therefore it won't be included in the calculations for the proportionality.
However, it also means that a really good candidate could win in a riding, could excel, and that party would see benefits later on. People might say, “I really like that candidate. I'm going to think about that party in a way I hadn't thought about it before.” I think it would work both ways.
I think extremism is a function of political culture rather than of the system. We are not an extreme country. It's true that we are a regional country and at times that has led to extreme problems, but I think PR would reduce the sense of regional blocs being represented in Parliament, because you should, in principle, see greater representation of all the major parties in various parts of the country, and you would still have avenues for smaller parties to break through. I think it's the best kind of balance of them all.
Again in response to Mr. Reid's question, I am agnostic about the threshold. I don't think 5% is.... I mean, that is unique to German history. There was a history of extremism in Germany, so it made sense, but I'm not sure Canada is Germany, and I think that probably a 3% threshold would work. That would be the kind of debate I would love to see us have, because we'd have moved forward so far in that case if we did.