Thank you very much. As you know, of course, you're dealing with a complex and multi-faceted exercise to strengthen democratic institutions, of which the voting system is one very important aspect.
I'm a retired lawyer. I am also retired from teaching law part-time at Dalhousie University's law school, but probably more directly relevant to your quest is the fact that I have been elected seven times in central Halifax, twice to city council and five times as a provincial MLA. My party is the NDP. I'm not here on behalf of the provincial party, let alone the federal party, which has its own representatives.
Given my electoral experience, I have benefited from single member plurality voting. I have, however, no strong attachment to it. I support moving to mixed member proportional representation in some form. The central reason is that citizens have more communities of interest than their geographic location. Single member plurality voting does not account for that, whereas mixed member proportional representation does.
If we move to a different system, we're likely to have a more diverse and therefore more representative House of Commons. At the same time, MPs need to be accountable to citizens, and a geographic tie is an efficient and easily understood way to achieve that. Hence, MMPR combines party affiliation with a geographical link.
I want to offer two examples of the general problem with the existing system.
In the Nova Scotia provincial election of 1945, of the 30 seats in the legislature, 28 were won by the Liberal Party, and two were won by the CCF in very feisty ridings in Cape Breton. The point is that the Conservative Party, with some 30% or 40% of the vote, I believe, won zero seats.
The other more recent example, of course, is the complete exclusion of any party except the Liberals in Atlantic Canada. Of the criticisms that are sometimes directed towards proportional representation, the chief one seems to be that it tends to produce minority governments. Having sat through a number of minority governments, I have no problem with them. They can, in fact, be quite flexible.