Thank you so much.
My name is Suzanne MacNeil. I'm president of the Halifax-Dartmouth and District Labour Council, representing 25,000 unionized workers across all sectors and in multiple unions across the Halifax regional municipality.
I'm here to put in a word for some system of proportional representation as we consider electoral reform. The bottom line that I want to bring from our workers is that the system we have now needs change. We inherited first past the post from colonial Britain. A few things have changed in our country since 1867.
We would suggest that we're not necessarily married to any one system or another of proportional representation. We do have a number of good things to say about the mixed member representation, but our main point here is that no party should be able to win a majority of seats without a majority of votes.
The second point is that any electoral reform must include some system of proportionality. In a number of the discussions about electoral reform across this country, we've also heard about alternative voting or ranked balloting. Our concern is that this could actually compound some of the problems we have with our current system of first past the post. We would urge the committee to consider that as something that's not desirable.
The other thing I want to emphasize is that as district labour councils, we do a lot of grassroots work in our community. One of the biggest things we hear workers and their families and citizens in general say about the voting process is that they're worried that they're going to waste their vote. There's a really big psychological disincentive toward voting for someone who you think won't get in. Or there might be strategic considerations. Oftentimes we try to argue with people that, no, it is their democratic right to vote for who they want, but our system still really provides a counter to that argument that we try to make.
I would draw your attention to the results of our last election, in which nine million votes did not contribute to electing someone. That's nine million wasted votes. That's the population of the prairie provinces and the Atlantic combined.
Thanks.