Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon. Like my colleague Nathan Cullen, I am very happy to see that our first group of witnesses is predominantly female. That is important; it is a value that we share. Nathan is not the only male feminist around the table. I am very proud of the fact that the NDP caucus is 41% women. It's true that it's not by chance and that it is the result of political will and recruitment efforts to have candidates who reflect our society.
Professor Stephenson, you talked about the importance of a relationship between voters and representatives, the local, somewhat organic, connection between the two. The system that you are supporting maintains that connection. That comes up quite often; it is a concern for the people and it is understandable. People like to know who they have to call to complain.
The system you are presenting makes me think of the Irish system. I think they have between three and five members per constituency. I find that very appealing, but one of our problems is the geography of the Canadian Confederation. We often say this: Nathan's riding is 330,000 square kilometres, which is larger than Poland, and my riding is 11 square kilometres. We can easily imagine that, on the Island of Montreal, it is possible to amalgamate and merge ridings to make bigger ones, but it would be more difficult to do so in other parts of the country. Can you see a Canadian solution with multi-member constituencies in large and mid-sized cities and with the traditional one-member constituencies in less populous regions?