Okay. That's good, because that's not the intention of this committee, nor its mandate.
Just for context, our mandate, which I'm sure all of you have read, is to change.... It is to offer to the government some ideas, and then a model which we recommend for change to improve our system, to make it a better behaving system, a more accurate system.
In that context of change, I want to turn to you, Mr. Hughes, for a moment.
The New Zealand experience is often held up: “New Zealand, New Zealand, New Zealand”. We hear a lot about you, and often people arguing for opposite things use New Zealand as an example to somehow try to prove their points. The context for the change that New Zealand went through was rather special. There was a high level of voter discontentment and maybe a gaff from a prime minister promising one thing that was not as written on the paper.
Up until maybe this morning, the context we were operating under was also unique in Canada. We had an elected government with a majority under first past the post also committed to making a change to the system that got them elected, understanding the false majority that was achieved, similar to that of the last government we had, which was 39%. Yet this morning, the Prime Minister was musing that maybe people are happier now ,so the mood for change is less, and so maybe the commitment is less. The unique alignment of stars to get change through is important.
I want to get to a point Ms. Ghose made about how voters see things differently under a change. She said that there are no so-called safe seats, seats that have traditionally voted one way to the extent that they kind of get ignored, not just by the party that has the seat, but also by the other parties, which think they can't get the seat.
Was there any cultural change that went on in New Zealand in the way that voters experienced the campaigning of parties? What happens on policy if those voters remain relevant because their votes affect who will form the next government?