Mr. Speaker, the first past the post system tends to really distort the composition of the House of Commons. If we look at election after election we can see good examples of that.
I think of 1993, for example, when the Conservative Party was wiped out. One would have thought that nobody voted Conservative in the country. The party had two members, the member for Saint John and Jean Charest. However, the Conservatives received some 17% of the vote. It took over a million people or thereabouts, if my recollection is correct, to elect a Conservative member of parliament.
As much as I opposed the Brian Mulroney government, we should have had an electoral system that gave that party some representation which would have reflected the proportion of the vote in the country. What has happened now is even worse than that. We have the regional divisions that are setting into the country where we have people in the various provinces and regions voting as a block for their particular party. We come to parliament now with five regional parties. The Liberal Party itself is basically a regional party centred mainly in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec. That is not good for the unity of the country.
If we had PR it would force all parties to address the regional issues. It would force Liberals, for example, to address the issue of the farm crisis in the prairies, which they are not doing now because they do not have any members of parliament from there. It would force my party, the NDP, to address the issues of Quebec because a vote in Quebec would be worth as much as a vote in Regina. That is not happening in the current political system.
The other thing it would do is radically change the voting patterns in the country. People could afford to vote NDP in rural Alberta, Liberal in rural Saskatchewan and Reform in Newfoundland and the votes would count. That would change the voting pattern in Canada and the Canadian people would all of a sudden find a parliament that reflected the way they felt in terms of the common good of Canada.