I wrote an article in the Manitoba Law Journal, which did a run of what would have happened in Manitoba if we'd had PR light all along. There were some majority governments and some minority governments, so I thought it actually worked pretty well.
PR light means you keep the current system, but add a small number of seats to compensate for the disproportionality of the first-past-the-post system.
The way you allocate seats in the PR light model, the proportional part, is not that if the Liberals get 40%, they get 40% of the PR seats; you find out who's most under-represented. Let's say the Green Party had 5% of the vote, but got less than 1% of the seats. You would say, “Who is the biggest victim of first past the post?” They would get the first PR seat. Then you would say, “Okay, who's most under-represented? You get the next PR seat.” It's compensatory. It tries to counterbalance some of the dysfunctions of first past the post.
The idea of “light” is that we would predominantly keep the benefits of the existing system and we would try to mitigate it by having a limited number of PR seats. By “light” I mean we could still get a fair number of majority governments. So it would be “light” enough that if a plurality of people, a strong plurality, want a majority government, we could still get it, and it would be the most reversible one, because you wouldn't have a whole lot of people who owe their jobs to proportional seats voting against going back because their jobs depend on it.
PR light seems to me now, seemed to me then.... In the book the argument was that the best two system candidates from the criteria were first past the post and PR light. That continues to be my view. It's just a question of where the balance of wisdom lies, in light of what's happened since then.
In terms of the idea that we have to do something, the Liberal Party platform had a lot of really good stuff about open government. It also said, on Senate reform, “We don't want to spend a lot of the people's time on constitutional negotiations. We want to get on with the priorities of the country.”
Even though this is one of the many things I spend a lot of time on, I'm not sure the biggest priority of Canadians right now is redoing the election system at a fundamental level. There are a lot of open government reforms we can do within the system. You can read the Liberal Party platform; there are about 30 proposals, and I think about 29 I agree with. There are a lot of reforms you can do without doing a fundamental reform of the system, and we would be the better for it, having a more democratic, pluralistic Parliament regardless of who wins. All you need is a good initiative.