Thank you.
I'm Cori Longo. I'm here representing the Canadian Labour Congress. We're an organization that represents 3.3 million unionized workers across the country. We have a campaign for proportional representation, and that's what I'm here to speak on.
I just have to say that all the young speakers before me are pretty invigorating and pretty eager. I just wish that the committee would listen to them.
I love voting. I've voted ever since I had the first opportunity to vote; however, I'm not pleased with the current voting system as is.
I'm a supporter of proportional representation, and mixed member proportional representation at that, and simply because I don't believe that first past the post is fair. It's unfair and it's severely outdated. Many countries have gone beyond that and looked for better voting systems. I still can't wrap my head around how a majority government can be formed when they don't receive a majority of votes. That just doesn't make sense to me. We don't have to look very far for examples of where parties with 30% of the vote or 30-something per cent of the vote are receiving more than half of the seats.
We can look at whole regions and whole cities that are blacked out with one colour. Of course, not all of those people voted for that party. The voices of all of those people who voted for somebody else aren't represented or aren't heard. In 2015, I believe, I saw a statistic that said nine million votes were wasted and didn't count. This system doesn't work well, and it also lends itself to strategic voting. Strategic voting is the grossest thing ever. Nobody likes to do that. It takes the heart out of why you would vote. If you're not voting based on your values or convictions, you're voting based on just who could possibly win. You can't choose a candidate. If you really favour that candidate and you can't vote for them, why would you possibly vote? The system that we currently have disengages the public. Proportional representation would make sense for me. If a party receives 30% of the vote, okay, they should get 30% of the seats.
I just wanted to say that proportional representation would speak to young people. Their vote would count. It also would increase the representation for equity-seeking groups.
Thank you very much.