Good day. I just want to say welcome to P.E.I. It's very 1864, delegates from Upper and Lower Canada coming down to Charlottetown. It's awesome. It's perfect. It's very apt that you guys are here, so welcome, everybody.
I just wanted to echo some of the other people who are here supporting proportional representation.
John Nater, you had a concern earlier regarding the districts and the fact that some of the members would be list members and some of them would be representing a district. One of the options not on the literature that the panel is studying but that we are looking at in P.E.I. is the dual-member system. It's pretty interesting because the solution I think to the concern you were discussing is actually to combine the districts. In P.E.I., for example, we'd be guaranteed four. Therefore, if we ended up with two districts of two each, that would be four. We wouldn't have to double the number of MPs across the country. We could keep the number of MPs relatively the same.
By combining the districts you have a couple of advantages. You're alleviating the concern of list members who aren't accountable to a particular region, so you take care of the concern about lists. You get more collaboration between parties—I think that Marie Burge was mentioning that earlier—so you get more collaboration, people working together. It also still offers regional representation.
To one of the other concerns, regarding stability over time, essentially in our current system we have these massive shifts. You have a blue majority and then you have a red majority and you have these huge shifts. Proponents for the first-past-the-post system like to say that it's more stable and that minority governments don't work. But as Darcie mentioned about the total number of votes representing the people, it would actually be stable over time. If you had a minority government system representing, say, 10% Greens, 20% NDP, and so on, representing what the people believe, the next election wouldn't shift very much, and the election after that wouldn't shift very much. Over time, you would have a stable representation in those minority governments, which can work and works in many countries.
Thank you.