Mr. Speaker, the member opposite can claim he is operating on his conscience if he wants to. I know the people in my riding have made it clear that they elected me to vote their will in this place.
He keeps hearkening back to history. He even went back as far as the Greeks this time. I will repeat that at the turn of the century there were very few people who had control of the dissemination of information. We live in a totally different era. He mentions that some of the people are poorly informed. I suppose that is because they make a decision that is different to what he would like.
I will give him an example. In March in California people were asked to make an interesting decision. Someone proposed that “None of the above” be added to the bottom of the ballot so that people who did not want to vote for any of the above would mark “None of the above”. The argument was that this would cause a greater turnout of voters.
Arizona has that on its ballot, but it has never increased the voter turnout, so the citizens of California rejected it by 65%.
I disagree that there is any evidence from Switzerland, from Washington State, from Oregon, from Arizona or from California that people do not think very carefully about their decisions or that they are not informed when they make their mark on the ballot.