Thank you. My name is Carl Stieren, and I live in the riding of Ottawa–Vanier, where I vote.
First, thank you to all the members of the electoral reform committee, all you hard-working members—and there's more. I attended your last meeting, and to your credit, I could not identify by political party who was speaking at that meeting. You all raised points that were valid and non-partisan.
Second, the percentage of the seats in Parliament should match the percentage of votes for each party. Germany did it, New Zealand did it, Scotland did it after the Second World War, without a referendum but with careful consideration by all political parties. It was the conservatives in Germany who said, “Hey, wait a minute. We can't have list proportional; we need single member”, so they invented mixed member proportional.
As for lead time, we've had nearly 100 years since Parliament has been discussing electoral reform. We've had the lead time.
Third—and who would have thunk it—the last method proposed for proportional representation, in my opinion, turned out to be the best. Rural/urban proportional representation, with top-up seats, as suggested by Réal Lavergne, can keep the size of one-member rural ridings. That's with a nod to Nathan Cullen, whose riding is larger than Poland. We should do that.
Finally, we should design a system that should ensure that a party that just meets the threshold of nationwide votes for proportional seats always gets their matching proportion of seats. If we had a party that met, for example, a 4% threshold of the vote, they should still get 4% of the seats. If this means enlarging the House of Commons by 10%, that's a small price to pay for democracy.