Mr. Chairman and distinguished committee members, I will confine my remarks to the public education campaign to precede a plebiscite.
When you recommend to the Parliament of Canada how to do this, please do not follow P.E.I.'s example. We have been kept in the dark. I called the chief electoral office in P.E.I. about a week ago, and I was told that there would be a mailing to every household in October. Voting starts October 29. There is really no time for public discussion or discussion among our friends. I think a lot of people, like me, are perfectly ignorant of the nuances of mixed member proportional representation and dual-member proportional representation. The only one of these five that I understand is first past the post, which is the only one I've ever seen. I understand it, and I fear that this is the one that P.E.I. is going to pick on its plebiscite, because we are ignorant of the other methods. Whether this is planned by the establishment or accidental I don't know, but we are certainly very much in the dark at the present time about these methods.
Our media has let us down badly. There has never been a good discussion that I know of in any of the media about what these different methods mean. I am very disappointed about that, and I am very disappointed about our government not letting us have an opportunity to learn about the other methods. This is really not a fair plebiscite, so far as I am concerned, I really think it should be postponed for about six months, but that's not going to happen.
Anyway, that's all I have to say.