One thing I would note is that we don't often see countries changing electoral systems. When we do, we see big jumps. To go back to New Zealand, we did see a big jump from before it had the MMP system to after.
However, I would point to the fact that parties still play a very important role and that parties are still choosing candidates. The single-member districts that are a component of that MMP system still make it a challenge, in many cases, for the number of women or Maori—the aboriginal population in New Zealand—to increase, but increases have occurred over time.
You need to look at the institution and the institutional constraints that are currently there. You are right about the various factors that have made it difficult for women, in particular, to get involved in politics. Those are things that have been talked about a lot and I think need to be discussed. You pointed exactly to what the challenges are: a large country with long distances of travel far away from families. Do you move your family to Ottawa? Then where is your representation in your home community? These are all very difficult things that are more specific to Canada than to Britain, Germany, or other countries, which might fit into one province, although we still see those challenges at the provincial level. People in New Brunswick complain all the time about how far they have to travel from their constituency in the North Shore to get down to Fredericton. When you compare that to someone coming from the Northwest Territories down to Ottawa, those are big differences. That does have an impact.
We could look at quotas. I don't think it's really part of what our culture is. We could look at other things that could be taking place. You have to be aware of what the culture is prepared to accept. I come back to what is realistic, what is doable. If we are not going to do a significant overhaul of our electoral system, think about the incentives that are there to encourage parties to nominate more women and other under-represented groups. If you just look at the parties themselves and how well they do, you see that different parties have different incentives. The New Democratic Party actually has regulations about when they can hold their nomination meetings. It can be done only after they have a certain diversity of candidates running for nomination. They do that. They've taken that as a stance themselves.
The others haven't done that, but when the Liberals have a leader who has said, “We want to have more women” and the parties have responded, change has occurred. Internally, parties can do things to make change. In my mind, the real roadblock has tended to be parties.