Ms. Simons, I think I'm very much like you. I started off, even at the beginning of this process, very much a fan of the idea certainly of exploring it. I think I need to put this quote on the record from your book, from Professor Ronald Rivest from MIT. He said that coming up with the best practices for Internet voting is like coming up with best practices for drunk driving. You don't really want to go there.
We've had several moments of testimony from people in your field who have advised us very strongly to either not do it—that's usually what we hear—or be so exceptionally cautious to leap ahead into this because of that question. I've always imagined the scenario in which during the course of an election night, if the system were to crash, whether the results would seem valid. I've not yet fully contemplated the idea of some months after an election someone comes up, as Yahoo just did—which I assume are pretty good at the Internet, being Yahoo—and says, “Oh, by the way, two years ago we were hacked.”
Ms. Rooij, I take your point well about any system that would lead to, as Ms. Sahota was exploring, the idea of anti-immigrant policies or xenophobic policies. We wouldn't want an electoral system that produced policies like Japanese internment camps or Chinese head taxes or banning Muslims from a country, as was a suggestion by a leading Republican candidate for president. Any system that would produce those types of policies must have an inherent flaw within the system, clearly. Yet, all of those came and continue to come. Having parties elected purely on one issue, narrow regional principles like the Bloc Québécois becoming the official opposition under first past the post, or the Scottish National Party winning 50% of the vote yet 95% of the seats under first past the post....
It reminds me of the caution, as you just pointed out, around referendum. It's much easier to spread the myth and the fear than it is to explain change, and it's easy to spread the myth that somehow a proportional system leads to racist parties running countries. We look for a system that expresses the will of Canadians, and I don't think the will of Canadians is actually for things like banning Muslims or for barbaric practices hotlines. Our system has a way of correcting. We just need a system that doesn't distort the will of voters.
A last point is that the mandate of this committee is change. We're changing the voting system. That's our work here. Under that rubric, because that's what we're doing, which system would you recommend we change to?