Thank you so much for coming here to Charlottetown.
I am a musician, an activist, and an incurable political junkie. I am looking around this room at the faces of people who have the opportunity to make history. You've been given such an incredible task. What you are about to do is the most important thing in Canadian democracy since women got the vote.
I feel the excitement in this room, and I know you can do it. Even if we fail with our flawed plebiscite here in Prince Edward Island, we are all working so hard. You are the people who can get this job done.
I've been voting for 40 years. Sadly, I have never voted for the winning party, but I am not a particularly unlucky person, because in most of those cases I was in a group of 60% of the country that was not represented by the government in power. You have as little as 38% of the popular vote giving a party 100% of the power, and that happens in Prince Edward Island over and over again.
A couple of years ago, we had a very unpopular highway project, and in an informal plebiscite, 93% of Islanders said, “We do not want those hemlocks coming down. The road is fine the way it is. We don't want to spend that $26 million.” What happened? The government with 38% of the popular vote rammed that through.
This makes the work of activists absolutely gruelling. In my lifetime, I have spent so much of my time when I could be writing songs coming to meetings and begging people, who were actually being paid, to do the job, to do the right thing. But 60% of us go home empty-handed because the power continuously lies with so few.
I am happy to say that I ran for the Green Party in the federal election last year, and 75% of the Green Party candidates in Prince Edward Island were women. We had a very strong showing. I had a great experience, but I knew there was no chance of winning. I am very concerned about the state of our democracy, but this woman will not run again under first past the post.
Please, make history. We have great confidence in this committee.
Thank you.