Thank you very much.
I'd like to thank our three panellists for being here this evening and the members of the audience for coming out to listen. I know that I'm the person standing in the way of the public open-mike session, so I'll try to be brief.
On the question of sitting on our hands, I was the MP who was talking about our non-clapping initiative.
My question is for you, Mr. Coffin. You talked a little bit about women's representation. Right now, 26% of our members of Parliament are women. Often folks come here and explain to us, and I love having males explain to us, why women run for politics. That being said, there are two issues. The first is the decision to run for the nomination or for office, and the second is getting elected, and we have to separate the two.
Ms. May will tell you the same thing I will tell you, which is that it is incredibly difficult to convince women to run for office for many reasons, and I guarantee you that none of them have anything to do with the first-past-the-post electoral system. It has to do with the fact that if you decide to have children as a member of Parliament, you do not have paid maternity leave, so you're on an unpaid leave of absence. There is no day care for anyone under 18 months of age. If you happen to live in British Columbia, the fact that you have to travel a long distance to go to work is not really an incentive. You're spending a good 10 to 12 hours on a plane there and back. The fact that our Parliament sits more than any other Parliament in the Westminster system, except for the U.K., could also be a disincentive.
There are other reasons women decide not to pursue public office. A lot of it is the cynicism, the adversarial tone. It's not the electoral system per se. Once we decide to run, there might be a reason behind that, but I am living proof that you can run in a non-winnable riding. I'm the proof that we women can succeed, so when people tell me that proportional representation is the Noah's Ark, if you like, plumbing for all the ills of our electoral system, it is a fallacy in my view.
I'm not against proportional representation. I don't have an opinion right now. I'm listening to Canadians, but I think we need to put the good, the bad, and the ugly out on the table because there is no perfect system. It is an ecosystem, and as my colleague said, we actually have a lot of things we can be doing that can address some of the boo-boos we have, i.e., mandatory voting; i.e., quotas for increasing women on the ballot; i.e., zippered ballots. There are many things. It's not one thing that's going to fix the system.
I just had to get that off my chest.
Mr. Pardy, you talked a little bit about your non-preference for PR systems. In your opinion, what system, if not a PR system, do you think Canada should look at, whether it be first past the post, AV, or AV-plus? Could you give us your opinion?