I'm in a state of confusion and mourning to hear the democratic reform minister say we're not just interested in getting women nominated. What you're telling us is that's the biggest barrier right now, plus the system in which we count. We know that proportionality helps women get elected once in.
We heard last night from people in New Zealand and the U.K. that under proportional systems those so-called “safe seats” or “no win seats”, depending on your point of view, diminished dramatically. Every party has to vie, and every party has a shot across the country, so it's no longer just nominating women to get your stats up.
I was looking at the statistics for how nominations went. Just in the last campaign my Conservative friends nominated 20% women, it was 28% from the Bloc, a cracking 31% from the Liberals, the Greens got up to 39%, and we did 43%. We have policies within our party to help women get nominated specifically for this.
Mr. Bozinoff or Mr. Schatten, I'm not sure who will answer this. One of the things you said in your survey was, “We have found electoral reform notoriously difficult to poll, because explaining each system adequately is challenging. We found, when the simple facts were presented, PR is favoured...because it sounds the most representative.”
What I'm confused by is the notion that you went on to explain the drawbacks, and then PR went down. Is that what you were saying in your report?