Thank you.
I hope that they will go and vote anyway, whatever the voting system.
One of the problems with the current voting system is the fact that a member can be elected with very few votes in a riding. Some people are elected with 30% of the votes where 70% of electors in a riding voted. Their vote is counted, but not taken into account. They will not be represented in Parliament by a member who shares their values and their ideology.
In the previous election, there were 9 million votes that did not elect any members of Parliament. So when people say that they will not be voting because they feel that their vote does not count, they may be right. Under our voting system, every vote that is put into the box will not necessarily translate into representation in Parliament. However, in the case of more proportional voting systems, like those that are used in many countries, if a party obtains 15% of the votes, it obtains around 15% of the seats. The NDP supports that system.
Mr. Thompson and Mr. Dobie, you spoke of the importance of local representation. There are proportional voting systems with dual votes: the local vote and a vote using a list of members, such as in Germany, for example. There are also proportional voting systems such as in Ireland, for instance, where ridings are somewhat bigger and where three to five members can represent the same geographic area. This means that all of the MPs have a local link to their citizens. For instance, there could be two members from a certain party and a third one from another, which allows electors to speak to the member who belongs to their party, the one they feel most comfortable with.
Could the Irish system, with larger ridings and several MPs, satisfy your wish to maintain a link between the local MP and the elector?