Hello. My name is Brenda Oslawsky, and I'm on the national council of Fair Vote Canada, which is a member group of the P.E.I. coalition for proportional representation.
It's been more than a year since the current provincial government announced a plebiscite on electoral reform. In my experience of going door to door and at event stalls, I found only about 20% of Islanders were aware of the plebiscite. This is after a year. Fewer than that were aware of the electoral options or what proportional representation is.
A plebiscite or referendum is not an efficient way of deciding this issue, or probably any issue. We didn't bring in the vote for women or the Charter of Rights with a referendum. In Switzerland, which decides many things by referendum, it took two referendums to finally gain women the right to vote in the early 1970s, decades after other western European countries. Only two of the over 90 countries that have PR have implemented it through a referendum or plebiscite: New Zealand and Switzerland. Ultimately, a referendum or plebiscite may simply be a way to thwart an idea whose time has come: if a citizen has a right to vote, they have a right to have that vote count or matter.
Thank you.