I want to thank all three witnesses because it's a very helpful panel. I wish I could spend time with you, Marie Burge. Let me just say that I completely know what you're talking about. I'm from Cape Breton and I ran for office in Pictou county. I had people say to me, “I wanted to vote for you, but my uncle has the job in the winter with the snowplow.” I don't know that everyone around this table would believe the level of transactional political awareness that happens probably to this day and probably more in the Maritimes than anywhere else.
However, I want to dive into the question about women getting elected under PR systems because there is an ongoing little debate that happens around this table.
Jane Ledwell I want to ask you, because I think you put your finger on it, about the culture created by first past the post. It's not just the culture that happens in Parliament where we can exercise great collaborative tendencies on our own as individuals. You mentioned that with proportional representation, your analysis was—and I think I got this right when I was taking notes—we see a decrease in negative campaigning. My concern around first past the post and the incentives for hyper-partisanship and for wedge issues is that it resides much more in the people who are never elected and the public never sees, the political strategists who run campaigns.
I wanted to open up the campaigning lens and ask you more about that before I turn to a few other points. What did your analysis show about the nature of campaigning?