Thank you, Mr. Green.
First, I'd like to thank you for inviting me. I'm a retired professional engineer. My job number one these days is to be a grandpa for three kids.
I've prepared something here. I'm not sure where this reform thing is going to go, but I wanted to leave something for my grandchildren, so they at least knew we tried. One of the things that happens when I don't sleep very well at night is that I watch Supreme Court hearings. When I get tired of watching that, I sometimes fool around with mathematics and things like that, to make sure that my left lobe is still connected to my right lobe.
One of the things I ran into, and I have some training in mathematics, of course, because I am an engineer, was a minimization exercise. There is a way to maximize representation in a numeric sense, if we can spot something. The basics of democracy is one man, one vote. The basis of our parliamentary system, both in Ottawa, and in Edmonton, and in our provinces, is that we have something that should be roughly equivalent equality between representatives. We shouldn't have one rep, for example, like Ms. May, who I guess represents about 660,000 votes in this country and has one seat.
Even more disturbing than that.... It's not about PR for me or my kids, as much as we're concerned with the cleavages that have been happening because of the first past the post system. To hear people talk in Ontario and Quebec, as I have in my various previous travels heard people talk about Alberta, you'd think there wasn't anybody here except true blue Conservatives. Fortunately for us, in the last election we stopped the circus that we see playing out in the United States, which is something that Cicero and the Roman senate would have been commenting upon in terms of giving them circuses.
What I stumbled into was this. If you calculate the number of seats allocated within each province by the number of votes by that party, you get a number. It's just a calculation. You then pick the first party with the most votes and allocate the seats in the House by a declining plurality order. If you look inside your own website, you publish two numbers: how many votes and what percentage. If those ridings that have the largest plurality are filled first, then what will happen as you go down the list is that you'll get...in Alberta's case I think we should get 21—how many seats there are mathematically—and you fill the ones with the highest plurality first.
Then the second party gets its chance to fill its seats by plurality order, and guess what? All the parties that came in second, third, and so on, who won outright in first past the post, will also get filled. At the end of the day, out of the 338 seats, you'd only adjust 67 of them in order to get much closer to a situation where each MP represents roughly the same number of voters. It would not be like we have today. And I'm not selecting the Green Party for any reason, other than that's the most exaggerated circumstance.
If you do the numbers as I have, if I didn't screw up here because it was the middle of the night when I was doing this stuff, we had in the last election.... I did the math just to see what the House would be if Joe Green were configuring it. Over a million Canadians voted and are not represented in the House of Commons in any context, either as an elected MP or with a party that they voted for. If you do nothing but just allocate on a declining plurality order, that number decreases quite dramatically, to something in the order of 200,000 people.
Doing nothing but leaving the machinery alone, which as you all know is very well respected around the world.... We do not have hanging chad problems in this country. All of that machinery works well. The judicial recounts work well. We don't have to change any of the machinery. All we need is an adjustment in how the official seats are filled. My suggestion is that if we do it with a declining plurality order, we'll get very close to the objectives of PR and all those various things.
We'd end up with a minority government, but guess what? We don't elect trained seals. We elect each representative to participate in making public policy. You folks make and decide on what the public interest is.
That's all I wish to offer. I did the math, and I sent the spreadsheets, and I hope I didn't make any errors, because it was late at the time. That's all I wish to present. I would not have even appeared, except that it was a trick and it may not be obvious. But that's what I did.