I think my observation was that I believe under relatively highly proportional systems, even moderately proportional ones, the big national parties would be disadvantaged. In fact, it would be to the advantage of different parts of these national parties to kind of go their own way, as the Conservatives went three ways in 1993. Without first past the post, they would never have come back together. I think that over time we would have, in fact, the erosion of national parties because there would be electoral incentives in different regions, among different groups, to produce their own candidates and not be tied by a national platform. I believe the real risk of proportionality is the erosion of national parties, and I believe, national politics.
Mr. Thériault made the very wise observation that political parties are instruments of war; they're instruments of conflict. The question about electoral systems is this. Where does the conflict take place? Does it take place within the parties, between the parties, amongst the candidates? Every electoral system changes where the conflict takes place, both at the electoral level and at the governmental level.
What we're thinking about is how we organize conflict in our society—I mean that's what democracy is trying to do—and how it gets structured, and what the consequences are of different patterns of conflict. My observation was simply, I think, that proportionality would generate patterns of conflict that would be antithetical to the broad, national political parties that have been critical to our national development.