Thank you. My name is Bob MacKie. Years ago when there were Progressive Conservatives, I was president of the Langley—Abbotsford Riding Association. I understand the Conservatives not wanting a majoritarian voting system that would appear to favour the Liberals. Personally, I'm lucky. I voted for and got a great representative, Elizabeth May.
In 2008, almost a million Canadians voted for a Green Party representative. Not one of them got that representative. In our last federal election, for all parties, that was true for nine million Canadians.
There was a time in Langley—Abbotsford when you could have elected a mailbox if it was a Progressive Conservative candidate. This is not good representation.
I am vice-president of Fair Voting BC, and I believe that in a representative democracy the government has a duty and an obligation to all Canadian voters to ensure fair and equal representation.
Duverger's law in political science states that majoritarian voting systems drive us toward a two party system, which I particularly fear as I watch the U.S. election.
Canadians cannot honestly be expected to know the impact of changing the voting system, and they should not be asked to make that decision without knowing.
A simple practical solution is to try out a made-in-Canada proportional representation solution, such as the rural-urban PR voting model. We could then have a referendum, or better, do a $1-million survey and save $299 million.
I'll finish with a passage from Arend Lijphart's book Patterns of Democracy, which has particular meaning for me because I grew up in Lachine, Quebec, and I vividly remember how close we came in 1995 to having Quebec separate from Canada.
In the most deeply divided societies...majority rule spells majority dictatorship and civil strife rather than democracy. What such societies need is a democratic regime that emphasizes consensus instead of opposition, that includes rather than excludes, and that tries to maximize the size of the ruling majority instead of being satisfied with a bare majority: consensus democracy.
Consensus democracies have multi-party systems and proportional electoral systems.
To the committee, I will say that I know your work has been exhausting. I hope you will all be in our history books or Wikipedia.