Okay, that gives me a sense.
I appreciate you sharing your personal experience with us today. It was a powerful testimony for me.
I'm going to move now to Professor Stephenson.
I had read the same article that my colleague, Mr. DeCourcey, had read. In your concluding comments, you indicate that moving to a different system will generally benefit small parties. I've been sitting here mulling it over, and I'll give you a bit of a preamble, but ultimately I'm asking, to what magnitude would small parties benefit?
I'll give you a couple of examples of what's been going through my head.
In the neighbouring riding to me, the Libertarians ran a candidate. In my riding, there was a Conservative, a Liberal, an NDP, and a Green. A number of people who voted Green, for example, said that truly was their first choice. A number of other people voted Green because it was their protest vote, and they felt that it was the only way they could say that they were disillusioned with the system. They weren't going to support any of the main three parties.
Through the research that you've done, did you get a sense of how many people might move from that protest vote? You said strategic voting is 3%. I've seen strategic voting being more like somebody who decided at the last minute to vote for Liberal versus NDP so they could get the Conservatives out.
On the question of the protest vote, in the research that you've done, have you looked at that? I'm trying to understand if it could harm some of the small parties where people would say that under a proportional representation system they could win a seat. Would that swing them to a different party or to go in to vote a ballot spoilage instead of the protest vote? Does your research support any of that or provide any indication of what voters are thinking?