Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, Mr. McCurdy, for being here.
I'm glad that you brought a provincial perspective to this. It's appropriate and it starts to help us think about leadership. There have been a number of attempts provincially to bring in some sort of voter reform. There are some that point to national as the place where we have the leadership shown, and what provinces suddenly pick up.
I want to get to the question of that nut that's hard to crack, the low voter turnout, why people turn away.
My colleagues have heard me refer to it many times, so I'll do it again. After the Manitoba election, Elections Manitoba did a study, looked at non-voters, people who did not participate. They had a 57% turnout as well, I think, so don't feel too bad. Within that group, at least half of those voters had the feeling that the outcome was predetermined, that they lived in a certain type of riding. They had become rational about what is an irrational act, which is voting. They had rationally figured that they voted another way than their riding typically did. There's no rational act to go out and vote if it has no effect on the world. This is sometimes called “the wasted vote”. Tracking it back, some people have argued at this table that that's not a wasted vote, that's still an expression of.... You said you shared this similar experience of having voted many times and not seen your vote reflected in any kind of way. We're just looking for motivations for people to participate in our democracy because we know what happens when people don't. We get degraded policy and more cynicism.
Can we make that connection for voters in Newfoundland, where they're going to feel like their vote is going to matter a bit more?