My name is Krista Lee Munro. I live here in the west end, in the federal riding of Vancouver Centre. I'm a public transit bus operator in the city and am an elected representative and activist in my union, Unifor. My union work includes education, working on social justice and political action, including work on elections and electoral issues.
I'm here today because my membership is ready for electoral reform. At our national convention in August, delegates representing over 300,000 Canadians voted overwhelmingly to support change to our electoral system. We don't want to have to counsel our members to vote strategically in the next federal election. We want change.
I'm not going to offer my opinion on what form of proportional representative voting I think we should use. It's not an area I know a lot about. I'm not a political scientist.
What I am is a bus driver, and in this town bus drivers do know a lot about referendums. I hear every day from people who voted yes in our transit referendum and people who voted no in our transit referendum. Both groups of people are unhappy. Referendums don't work for complex issues. It won't work for this.
Unifor doesn't want a referendum or other process that will make proportional voting impossible at the next election. I don't want a referendum. I have here a loonie I got in my change earlier today. It commemorates 100 years of women having the vote in Canada. I'm not going to get into the big asterisk that should be asterisked, that not all women got that vote until 1960, but what I am going to say is if that referendum were called in 1916 or 1917, or 1949 or 1953, or any of the other times select groups of women were granted the right to vote, it would not have passed. It would have taken years and years for those voting rights to be granted. We don't have years and years. This opportunity is once in a lifetime and may never come again.
A large majority of MPs elected in our most recent federal election stated they were committed to electoral reform. They were elected with a clear mandate to eliminate first past the post, to govern. The Canadian people have already voted on this issue.
Again, I and Unifor are calling for a new electoral system where we maintain a local representative, where our politicians are elected proportionally to the votes they received, and where every vote counts.
Thank you.