We had two different types of conversations: in the whole group, 160 people in one go, and in small discussion groups with 12 people in each room.
A key thing for us was.... We had Ken Carty, who presented to you. In the big room, he talked about the stability of first past the post. Then we all went to smaller rooms and talked about the instability as policy lurches back and forth. We live in British Columbia and have seen the government go between Liberal and NDP. That's our experience, as voters, that policy lurches and is often brought about by governments that didn't have the support of most of the voters. They had majority seats, but minority support.
When we were looking at proportional systems, we knew that probably two different parties would come together and cobble together a true coalition majority. We really liked the idea that instead of having a party leader and a party with less than 50% support, and instead of them going off in one direction that most of us didn't want them to go in, they would have to pause for a moment and talk with other coalition partners, at least the other coalition leader, and go through issues, talk about them, discuss them, and come to better solutions.
We really liked the idea that policy would come from more talking and less quick acting because, as you probably heard, when there is a policy lurch one way or the other, there is an enormous amount of disruption that can happen in society.