The meeting is officially opened. Welcome to the 37th meeting of the Special Committee on Electoral Reform. It's hard to believe that we've met that many times, but we've been quite busy, since I think it was June or July.
For the benefit of the witnesses, we met quite a bit during the summer in Ottawa, including quite intensively in August.
We've been on the road for two and a half weeks now. It's great to be in St. John's, Newfoundland. It seems that wherever we go, the weather is nice, so I think we're bringing some good weather. That may augur well for our report.
We have three witnesses with us today for this first panel. We have Amanda Bittner, associate professor at Memorial University. We have Christopher Dunn and Robert Ring.
I'll give you a brief overview of how we proceed. Each witness will have five minutes to present. Then we have one round of questions and answers when each member of the committee is allotted five minutes to engage with the witnesses. That five minutes includes questions and answers. If you find you weren't able to answer a question properly because of the time limits, it doesn't mean you can't finish your thought the next time you have the floor. In fact, sometimes a member, when it comes around to them, will say, “You weren't able to finish your point answering so and so. Please take some time to finish your thought.” We're pretty flexible in the interest of gathering the most insight that we can.
Without further ado, we'll start with Professor Bittner, for five minutes, please.