Thank you very much for this opportunity.
I'm a professor emeritus of physics at Simon Fraser University, and a member of a small group of citizens called Burnaby/New Westminster Citizens for Voting Equality.
We've been working on getting electoral systems in place at several levels of government over the past nine years, systems that are fair to the voters. The basics are very simple. Every voter should have the same legislated power. I want you to put that into your mind. Every voter should have the same legislated power. If anyone doesn't agree with that, you're going to have to come out and tell me who should have more legislated power than others. I don't think it can be done.
The most important function of a member of Parliament is voting on legislation. An MP cannot vote yes to a bill with the right hand, and no with the left hand. An MP cannot represent everyone in his or her electoral district. In practice, an MP only represents about half the constituents. From this it follows necessarily that an electoral district must have several members of Parliament, multi-member districts.
There are about 50,000 actual voters in an electoral district. What we need to do is to form groups of 50,000 voters who have similar ideas, similar values, and each group to elect their representative, each group to elect their MP. This can be done with suitable ballots on which the voters indicate their preferences.
The best known system for doing this is STV. Voting in it is simple. The ballot has a list of candidates and the voter ranks some of them first, second, third, etc., as many as they want. The counting system is designed to accomplish the objective. STV is a candidate-centred system that gives the voters the most power. Thoughtful and popular independents can readily get elected without great expense.
It gives a party MP the power to exercise independence from the party since, if ejected, he or she can be re-elected as an independent. In these respects STV is superior to MMP, which is a party-centred system.
STV was the voters' choice in British Columbia in 2004.