The current government loves to talk about values, and most people have expressed the value here as being that Parliament should be as inclusive and representative of the diversity of political views in Canada as possible. It's very clear. I think a lot of people take this as a core value, and it's clear that only the PR system does accomplish this.
We've also heard that many Canadians do like to have local community geographic representation. I would also add I don't think most Canadians have been asked, “Which would you prefer, local representation whose opinions you totally dislike, or distant representation where the values accord directly with yours?” People may be surprised at what such a poll would come out with.
The current system is good at local representation; however, PR can accomplish this. You can define by law how many people by gender, ethnic community, indigenous people, even age.... It's just a matter of details. One can accomplish this. There's no problem with that.
The best system is perhaps a mixed system. Just because of the size and geographics, you can even have the bottom 25% of seats, the largest area seats, basically stay the same, and perhaps in the political sense they can be double. Geographically they would probably be still immensely smaller than those distant ones. The mathematics of that can be worked out on how they share, perhaps, offices for ombudsmen-type divisions. Again, that's a matter of detail.
There are many problems with the current system. Other people have listed them. I don't really want to go into that, but it's just crazy when you can have a majority of the population vote one way and get a majority for the second party possible. This has happened in Canada.
The current system has the advantage that it votes in centrist parties. That is why I am against also doing a sort of listed or majority thing, because it's going to advantage the centrist thing, and also for a referendum as well. Most people are going to say the systems are broken. Well, they're centrist, and the majority will defeat minority views, and we'll just be left with the same system.
Thank you.