Thank you for this opportunity to speak. I am a volunteer for Fair Vote Canada and was recently elected president of the organization. A lot of you already know me. I've met you in this room many times. I live just down the street, a 10-minute bike ride away, even when it rains.
I'm going to talk about the last section of our brief, which is on the different systems, MMP, STV, and rural-urban, and I'm going to do that in two and a half minutes, which is about how much time I have left.
Our general approach is to bring forward more than one proposal simply because we're a very complex organization and people have different preferences, but we are unanimous in one thing. We're unanimous that we want proportional representation and we're unanimous that we want serious proportional representation, real change not just cosmetic change. However, we've limited ourselves to three options here that are options that have been tried somewhere else in the world.
Rural/urban, you might wonder, has that been tried anywhere? Yes, it has been tried in Sweden, and it combines MMP and STV, which are systems that themselves have been tried. As a combination, it's something that we can be fairly comfortable with.
I'd like to talk about two values that when we consult Canadians, because we've been consulting with Canadians on this for 15 years, are primary for them. The first one is fairness and equality of every vote. That criterion is extremely important, because when we look at what's wrong with our current system, that's what's wrong. That's what has to be fixed. So anything that we put forward has to perform strongly on that criterion of equality.
You saw the simulations yesterday that Byron Weber Becker put forward. All three of the systems that we are putting forward have high levels of proportionality, but it does depend on how they're designed. If in this committee room, if in Parliament, you want to keep the multi-member ridings fairly small, you want to keep the top-up regions relatively small, you're going to have to sacrifice proportionality. So how do you manage that trade-off, and that's where rural/urban comes in.
Rural/urban gives you very high levels of proportionality by combining both multi-member ridings and top-up seats, and that allows you to have slightly smaller electoral districts. That's valuable if it's what you're after, so that's one of the basic arguments there.
The other thing we've heard a lot of is the importance that voters accord to voter choice. In terms of MMP, this means two things. They like the two votes that you get in MMP and they like open lists. We hear this over and over and over again. We also hear that a lot of voters like the idea of STV, once they know something about it, because STV maximizes voter choice. They like the fact that they can vote preferentially, even across parties if they want. They like that they can elect independent candidates if they want. They like the idea of having more than one MP who they can turn to and they like that all MPs are accountable directly to local constituents.
If you like voter choice, if it's an important value for you, under rural-urban PR, you can use STV and you can use ranked ballots, so it gives you those options, and you can use best runners-up for the top-up seats. In conclusion, we recommend that the special committee should propose whatever option among the three they consider most democratic and acceptable to their fellow parliamentarians.
I'm open to questions about any of these systems during the question period and we can look at other values, other desiderata, if you like, such as simplicity or local representation. I had those in my first draft, but I had to take them out because I just didn't have enough time. I also have some thoughts on designing a system that could be most politically acceptable at this particular historical juncture. That might be a question that might interest some of you to tease out with me.
Thank you.