I suppose the best answer to this is to think about who I am and who you have heard present to you from the P.E.I. Coalition for PR today.
I'm personally a climate change and renewable energy expert. I've spent 10 years working on this issue. For the last year, I've diverted all of my effort and energy from working on that issue to working on this issue. Likewise, people from the Coalition for Women in Government, the Status of Women organization, Council of People with Disabilities, Federation of Labour, CUPE, all of these organizations, and the Cooper Institute, trying to advance social justice, environmental sustainability, really trying to advance these issues.
All of us in the coalition feel, in common, that the current first-past-the-post electoral system is a barrier to progress on all of those issues, so we are willing to put aside our time that we should be spending pushing each of those issues forward, trying to fix this broken system. If a referendum is called, federally, what will happen nationally is the same thing that has happened here, where I've now spent literally a year of my time—I have a nine-month-old son—but aside from that, all of my time has gone into this campaign.
I don't know if we're going to succeed or not. There are so many factors at play. We are working so hard. We have volunteers going door to door who have made things like this, taking photos of people, explaining the difference between what we voted for and what we got, at people's doors. We're a very under-resourced group, but it is taking so much time from progressing these other issues.
If you want to call for a referendum in Canada, I want you all to know that you would be setting back social justice progress by a huge amount. You have the capacity to simply make a decision in this committee and that would free up the resources of all.... It's not only the financial costs to the taxpayers, it is the time cost of the advocates who would need to be running the campaigns, to educate people across the country.
I feel very strongly about that.