I can understand the argument that there is a conflict for the politician who's voting on rules that then help them or don't help them get elected. We can look throughout history at some examples of how certain political parties have tended to be disadvantaged by the system we have. I think there is evidence to suggest that the NDP, throughout history, has not.... Sometimes they've done really well. In 2011, they did really well, but some other times, the party's votes have been distributed more thinly across the country, as opposed to being concentrated in a single province like the Bloc Québécois in Quebec, for example. The Bloc Québécois, being regionally concentrated, tends to do a little better in the first-past-the-post system than the NDP would.
However, if we start talking about what you use as opposed to the House of Commons and who else should make this decision, it's much easier to think about that in theory than it is to think about it in practice. In theory, we assemble 50 really smart people and get them really jazzed up about electoral systems, and we put them in some kind of cone of silence where they have no conflict of interest of their own and it is not going to be penetrated by political parties—none of this is really possible—and they spit out the right electoral system. Then what? There's no accountability for those people.
