First of all, thank you for coming to the best-kept secret in the country. I think we have the most beautiful province in the country, and hardly anybody knows about it. Now that you've seen it in its glory, you can all come back sometime.
The first thing I want to say is that I am a citizen. I am not a stakeholder, nor am I a client of the government. I'm a citizen and I get to vote and I would like my vote to count. To me, counting would mean that if a party gets 39% of the vote, they get 39% of the seats. If they only get 39% of the seats, they wouldn't be a majority government.
I don't have any empirical evidence to prove that a coalition government would be more effective and produce better legislation. I just have a feeling, being a person who seeks co-operation instead of confrontation and really doesn't like the political partisanship that gets in the way of intelligent discussion and good decision-making, that the better the intention of the people around the table is toward coming to common decisions and approaching something intelligently rather than with partisanship, then the better the decision-making we'd have at the end of it all.
That's what we're looking for. We're looking for really intelligent people to be thoughtfully thinking about the entire country. You're the government of the entire country. You have regional interests, but you're supposed to be looking at the health of the entire polis here in Canada. Partisanship really gets in the way of that, I find.
I have been a candidate four times, twice provincially and twice federally. The most dispiriting thing that happens is when I go to a door and somebody says, “Why would I vote? My vote doesn't count.”
Thank you very much.