My name is Linda Sheppard. I'm here because I've been involved in grassroots politics for many years, as you can tell from my hair.
I've been very frustrated at how difficult it is to make change. It's as a result of that experience that I'm coming here today to advocate for change to a proportional voting system.
Like a lot of Canadians, until about 12 years ago, I didn't actually think much about the voting system. I didn't realize that we could elect a majority government with 39% of the vote. At the same time that I started to be aware of what kind of a system we were using, I also learned about countries that use a different system, countries that I highly respected for their social policies and for the fact that they did elect more women regularly, countries like Sweden, Norway, and New Zealand.
As you know, in those countries, if a party got 39% of the vote, they ended up with 39% of the seats, which means that there is a broad base of political views represented in the Parliament regularly, much more so than under first past the post.
But for me, like other women who have spoken here, one of the cruxes of this is that many systems in countries that use proportional voting regularly elect more women, and certainly more women than countries that use first past the post. I think that, since we're over 50% of the population, I want a legislature that's about 50% women. That's not unrealistic, and we can do it. I think the best way to get there is to start with a proportional voting system because that facilitates parties putting up more women candidates, and we will elect more women.
I ask your committee to recommend change to a proportional model to facilitate this change and many of the other positive ones that will result when everyone's vote elects someone to represent them.
Thank you.