I am going to pursue asking some questions, and I am going to try to get to two topic areas in the five minutes that we have. I want to ask whether you would pick up on the proposal Kirk Cameron made about dedicated first nations seats, indigenous peoples seats. I want to come back to that.
I want to thank both of you for being here, and all the people in the audience, here in Whitehorse.
I am fascinated by your proposal, Mr. Brekke. I am excited about your system, but I am wondering if we can make some tweaks to it. First, let me just summarize by saying we have had one witness before us who talked about the Condorcet preferential system. It was Professor Eric Maskin from Harvard, and I like the way you have thought of using that for half the seats and PR for the other half.
Do you think you could wrap your head around the idea that the seats for PR, in your system of cutting the number of ridings in half, keeping the number of MPs the same, and doubling ridings as opposed to bigger clusters...? I'm following you so far. But could the second MP, who wasn't elected by a preferential Condorcet ballot, reflect the national proportional vote and still be taken from that cluster that makes them both local? If the NDP are short a few seats, we could even tweak it more and say that we are going to look for an NDP woman in that seat, or we are going to look for a Green Party indigenous person. We are going to use that second runner-up spot for not the person who actually came second in the riding but meeting proportional requirements across the country.
Is that a possible tweak to your idea, or would it violate some of the principles you were using as you put this together?