Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I would like to begin by wishing you, as well as to all our Muslim brothers and sisters from Quebec and the rest of Canada, Eid Mubarak—in other words, happy end of Ramadan.
I will take 10 seconds to continue to encourage people to use hashtag #ERRE to send us comments or questions on Twitter while we are in this meeting. We do look at the comments.
Minister, thank you for joining us. This historic opportunity to reform our voting system so as to make it much more reflective of the voters' will is very exciting for me.
As we know, the Conservative Party is in favour of the status quo, which is a system that creates significant distortions. For instance, your government was elected with 39% of the votes, but it accounts for 60% of the members in the House. There have even been times, in past elections, when the party with the most votes would lose the election, as it had obtained fewer seats, and that is completely unacceptable.
In the latest election, people sometimes had the impression that their vote was lost. It was actually more than an impression, as it turned out. The figures were analyzed by the Broadbent Institute. According to the figures, for each Liberal member elected, 40,000 votes were needed, while 70,000 votes were needed for the Conservatives, about 85,000 votes for the New Democrats and approximately 600,000 votes for the Green Party member. So I can understand that people are feeling frustrated, even angry.
At the NDP, we deeply believe that a Parliament should first and foremost reflect the diversity of opinions within society.
Jason Pugh, an individual who lives in Mr. DeCourcey's riding, asked on Twitter a few minutes ago whether we should adopt a system whereby a party with 30% of the votes would be allocated about 30% of the seats in the House.