Thank you for the opportunity to address you this evening, it's an honour to be here. You've been listening to folks speak all day, so double thanks.
Expert witness Professor Wiseman, whom you heard in the early part of August, I think, described self-appointed electoral reform elites. Well, here I am; I'm one of those. But I would say that ER advocates aren't born; they're made. I became an electoral reform advocate on May 2, 2011, the night that Stephen Harper won his majority government. In his victory speech he said that Canadian values are Conservative values. That didn't really seem quite right, since 39.6% of the popular vote is actually 24.2% of the eligible vote. It's therefore not exactly the support of the majority by any means.
In the last five years I've become an electoral reform advocate and I've had the real honour and opportunity to speak with thousands of Canadians in my area, in high schools, university classrooms, community information tables, meetings and events of all sorts about our electoral system. In that time I learned that you can teach a 10-year-old how to use an MMP ballot in less than two minutes. I learned that many people see an MMP two-vote ballot as solving their problems. They say, “Great. I can vote for the candidate I like and the party I like. Super. That solves my problem.”
I learned that if you asked, “Do you think that 39% of the popular vote should result in 54% of the seats and 100% of the power?”, almost uniformly Canadians will say “No, that's not fair.”
There has been a lot of talk in the last couple of weeks about Canadian values. What are they? Do they even exist? I believe that the principle of fairness and equality is a fundamental Canadian value and a keystone in our democracy, and should be enshrined in our democratic system, which can only mean proportional representation. I would simply like to say one more thing—that's actually my thing about PR.
Only one more thing. Speaking to Ms. Romanado's point about whether the electoral system—you know, women, chicken, eggs, electoral system—not electoral system, but many people have encouraged me to run for office over the years. Would I like to serve the public good? Yes, absolutely. Would I like to participate in policy-making? Yes, very much so. Would I want to engage in a culture of adversarial politics? No way, José. Regardless of gender, an adversarial culture repels many good people. A renewed parliamentary culture based on collaborative and consensus policy-making—which is encouraged by PR—might draw different kinds of people to seek public office, and I think that would be a really good thing.
Thank you, everyone. Safe travel.