Hi. I'm 61 years old and I've had a chance to vote in 26 elections, both federal and provincial. Provincially my vote has counted 25% of the time and federally it has counted 0% of the time, so that's led me to become an advocate and a supporter of Fair Vote Canada.
I know that Fair Vote Canada has already submitted a report to you, so I'm not going to repeat that, but I'd just like to tell you that I'm a hopeless idealist. I still believe in government for the people by the people. Right now we have government for business by big corporations, but I believe in democracy. While I don't believe that voting is necessarily the most important part of democracy and certainly not the only part of democracy, it does have a very important job: to elect our government.
As a lover of democracy, I have always been interested in politics, like Mr. Dixon, from quite a young age. I've always taken part in political things for as much as my time, money, and energy allow. I have spoken about this to both my MPs, Scott Simms, when I lived in that area, and now Ken McDonald, who is currently my MP. I certainly advocated for proportional representation with my neighbours and my own political party and I have attended meetings to support it.
The most important thing to me is that we have diverse voices. We need a strong opposition to have good democratic government, and that includes a strong, vigorous, and free press, which we no longer have. That is one of the reasons we have a lot of voter disengagement, because right now I feel—especially in the last election—it was like prom queen and king voting all over again. We weren't really voting about issues. We were just voting for the most popular candidate.