Thank you.
I just want to urge all of you to reject proportional representation. PR has many shortcomings, but with my limited time to speak, I want to focus on how it amplifies fringe political viewpoints and discourages moderation.
Under PR there is no need to try to broaden your party's message in order to appeal to enough voters to form a majority government, because everyone knows that it's just going to be a coalition government anyway. The problem is that then you have duly elected MPs receiving taxpayer dollars to promote extreme fringe viewpoints that might only be shared by 5% or 6% of the population.
Televised debates would feature moderate politicians, like yourselves, sharing the stage with, for example, anti-immigrant or anti-French party leaders, granting their messages legitimacy and some measure of equivalency. We're already seeing far-right parties polling in first place in many European countries that have adopted PR. These are parties that not long ago had only a handful of seats, but all it took was an economic downturn and a refugee crisis and now these fringe parties could be leading coalition governments.
PR proponents will argue that we need to trust the voters to trust democracy, but that's a false dichotomy. If it were true, we wouldn't lock the Charter of Rights and Freedoms up behind a constitutional amending formula. If we really trusted democracy, then minority rights in this country would be subject to whims of 50% plus one, but because we understand that even democracy is not perfect, we organize our Constitution in such a way that we ensure that our better nature prevails against the occasional fleeting passions of the public. We should absolutely do the same thing with something as important as our electoral system.
With ranked ballot, for example, you allow for many parties, but they must each jockey to be voters' second or third choice. This means they cannot simply pander to their existing limited base if they want to get elected. This is the incentive toward moderation that a 5% or 10% threshold under PR can't hope to provide.