Thank you for this opportunity.
I'm obviously another advocate for proportional representation. Minister Monsef, at the town hall meeting in Kitchener, said one of the things she really wanted to happen was that Canada could be recognized as a model for democracies around the world. There are 85% of EU and OECD countries currently using proportional representation. Canada is one of the 15% that isn't, with gross distortions, frequently wasted votes, and all of the other problems that people had cited. We are not currently an example.
I would like to focus on two specific things that haven't been mentioned much so far. One of them is the business of a threshold. Most countries that use proportional representation obviously have a threshold. People talk about proliferation of a single issue and fringe parties and so on. One must remember that aside from the five major parties in the last Canadian election, 17 single issue or fringe parties gathered less than half a per cent of the votes.
That problem, I think, is somewhat exaggerated. A threshold of 5% has often been mentioned as being used in some countries. My feeling is that's too high. In the 2008 election, five million Conservative voters got 143 MPs, and almost a million Green supporters got zero MPs, instead of the 20 or so that proportional representation would have given them.
Five per cent is a fairly high threshold considering that. The threshold could be much lower and still be recognizing up to half a million—200,000 or 300,000—Canadians who deserve some representation in Parliament. That's a major consideration.
With regard to the various systems, whether they're STV with multi-member regions, MMP with top-up MPs in addition to the single-member constituencies—which has a lot to recommend it—an MMP, I think, is getting a lot of traction as something that would work in Canada.
The simulations that have been done using various systems and looking at all the results seem to be consistently showing that the larger parties gained proportional representation; the smaller parties often do not and are often still quite under-represented.
I am recommending that whatever system is used, and if it involves regions in order to use top-ups and so on, it be large enough to guarantee proportional representation. Proportional representations for larger parties and not for small parties is not proportional representation.
Thank you.