Jim would know better than I, but I think in the first election in New Zealand after proportional representation was introduced, there were 34 parties that ran—something like that—but not all of them achieved membership.
It isn't that one day we change and then the next day it's all going to change. Maybe I'm exaggerating my worries, but I think if I can put it another way, our experience with parties historically has been that they have performed nationalizing roles. I know not everybody agrees with that.
I think you had Kenneth Carty here early in your meetings, who argued this. I think also that one can broaden it, and I know that brokerage parties are supposed to be bad things—and I've criticized them myself—but brokerage parties have the merit of being open and bringing people together. I especially appreciate that today, when there are all sorts of other forces in society that are causing fragmentation, the Internet being the obvious one. Nobody reads the same newspaper anymore, and actually that's a good thing today in Halifax, because nobody's reading.... There are online blogs and various sources of news, where one reads for confirmation. So one reads and gets one's point of view confirmed, and I think that would aid this proliferation of parties I'm talking about.