Good afternoon, Mr. Chair. Good afternoon, esteemed members of the committee.
On behalf of the Forum jeunesse de l'Île de Montréal and of Citoyenneté jeunesse, of which I am the vice-president—Citoyenneté jeunesse is the issue table for the Forums jeunesse régionaux du Québec—I would like to thank you. We are very pleased to be taking part today in this exercise that is crucial for our democracy. We also appreciate enormously that the committee reached out to youth, which is entirely normal.
I am not going to go on at length about the proposals we submitted, because you have them in our brief. I will give you a broad outline of our proposal.
To begin, as a young person and as the representative of an umbrella organization that brings together over 250 organizational members and 300 individual members, I can say that we are unanimous. We have already taken part in several consultations regarding changes to the voting system, particularly in Quebec, where the last consultation took place in 2005. The briefs submitted to you were inspired by that consultation. We consulted many young people in the process of drafting these briefs. It seems entirely relevant that after 10 years, the same proposals can be applied to the federal level.
In our opinion, it is urgent that the voting system be changed, and this feeling is prevalent among young people.
We know that young people are very active politically, but in a less classic way, so to speak. Young people are committed in other ways, but the figures are eloquent: they distrust the current system. We thus think that changing the voting system could greatly encourage participation by young people.
We feel it is urgent to take action and change the current voting system which causes an unfortunate break between civil society and political representatives. The current voting system does not reflect the popular support given to the parties, and often creates false majority governments.
For all of these reasons, we propose a greater proportionality between the popular vote and the number of elected representatives from each party. We recommend the adoption of a mixed compensatory voting system where some members would be elected on a territorial basis and others on a basis proportional to the mixed vote.
We think it is essential to maintain the territorial representation of the population through a member of Parliament. However, we also believe that we need provincial lists to achieve the proportional aspect. These changes could lead to the achievement of gender parity. In this regard, we suggest the use of a proportional vote with lists drawn up, as I was saying, with an eye to achieving this parity. It is very rare that we do not agree with the FECQ, but we feel it is essential to seize this opportunity to create a new culture. Eventually, we would like this gender parity to be achieved naturally via popular education.
In conclusion, it seems very important to aim to gradually increase the representation of ethnocultural minorities and young people in the electorate.
We don't want to go into specific details. We don't think it is important at this stage to examine in detail all of the elements of a new voting system. The important thing is to come up with a consensus in the House of Commons so that a change takes place. The current government has given itself that mandate. It was one of its electoral commitments. It cannot back down.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.