There's a lot there.
I think what you're highlighting is that there are competing principles. You need to prioritize what it is you want to accomplish through an electoral system. No system is best, no system is perfect, and no system can accomplish all of these different legitimate objectives of democracy that you point to.
As to the unexpected implications, there are two things I'm not sure the committee has really thought about but I think would be worth putting on the table. First, there is the whole question of executive federalism in Canada and how that works. If we were to move to a system of proportional representation of some sort at the federal level that resulted in coalition governments, and if the rest of the premiers were still elected under first past the post and thus most had majority governments, when they meet, does the Prime Minister or a first minister of health or whatever, does she have the power to negotiate on behalf of her government, or does she have to come back and make sure that she maintains the support of the coalition partners and other parties? I think of what happened with the Meech Lake Accord, which was the first time that legislatures were brought into the constitutional process. After the first ministers came to agreement, it had to be approved by the legislatures, and that's where it fell apart. In respect of federal-provincial negations, this is something that has to be thought through.
Second, if I knew nothing about Canada and you told me about this great country and the demographics and the like and I had lived from coast to coast, I would say, “It doesn't make sense. It's not going to last. Good luck, folks. The centrifugal forces are too great.” Yet, we're about to celebrate the 150th birthday of a country that works and is the envy of people around the world. I think this is in part because we have a tradition of large, brokerage, accommodative parties. If a party wants to get to government, it knows it has to reach out to a lot of Canadians and find the broad centre. This was the incentive for the Progressive Conservatives and the Alliance to merge into a single party.
Under different systems, that incentive wouldn't have been there. They could have continued to be separate parties. Maybe that would have been a good thing or a bad thing. That's sort of a normative judgment, but it has profound implications on the way our democracy works. I think it's so important that we consider what would happen under different systems in the context of Canada, a highly diverse federal system.