Thank you to the witnesses. I want to acknowledge that we are on the traditional territories of the Dene and Dogrib first nations and many more. Mahsi cho for the welcome here in Yellowknife.
I wanted to explore some of the things that came up in both witnesses' comments. I don't want to generalize, but I think Mr. Lambrecht was much more willing than Mr. Wasylciw to say that a change to our voting system would change the culture of politics. I saw the two of you on different sides of that divide.
I want to make an observation and then ask for both of you to comment. I stand more with Mr. Lambrecht only because I've been in politics for 10 years, and it never occurred to me that one of the problems with first past the post was that it rewards cutthroat, nasty politics and punishes co-operation.
I don't think first past the post by itself has reduced the amount of co-operation and collaboration that we used to see in politics, because I worked for the Government of Canada in the minister of the environment's office in the mid-1980s. We had the same voting system, but we had much more co-operation.
On top of the things that have occurred that relate to the way first past the post rewards hyper-partisanship has been a trend toward unending campaigning. The election ends, but the spin doctors aren't let go so that they can go someplace to get relationship training and to try to become full human beings again. They actually keep working to destroy any thought of goodwill. That's all relayed in Susan Delacourt's book, Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them, this notion of targeted, sectoral.... If you know that all you need to do is get 35% of the vote across Canada and you need to get out your base, then what you want to find is the wedge issue, or what's now called dog-whistle politics.
I would say to my friend Sherry that you can't generalize from one woman's experience. I've spent a lot of time on the phone trying to talk women into running, and one of the reasons they don't want to is it strikes them that the atmosphere of politics is toxic.
Those are my observations. I ask both of our witnesses if that affects their thoughts about how our political culture is impacted or not impacted by our voting system.