Mr. Speaker, the member made a minor factual error when he cited the number of countries of large geographical size in the world that have the first past the post system. He mentioned two of the top three. Russia and China are both larger than the United States. Therefore, strictly speaking, it is two of the top four.
Leaving that aside, he also made the observation that it is difficult to maintain the unity of a continent sized country, such as Canada or the United States, without a first past the post system. I would dispute that and then invite his comments upon the observation.
Australia, where I lived for several years, does not have a first past the post system. It has a single transferable ballot at the level of the house of representatives, its equivalent to our House of Commons. The Australian system has not created any form of disunity.
At the level of its senate, Australia has a system in which each of its six states has 12 senators. The senators are elected through a form of multiple voting in which each elector gets to choose 12 candidates from a list which can have, depending upon the state, as many as 100 or more candidates for office.
Some problems can be pointed out in the Australian system, which I will return to later in the debate, but it causes no national unity problem.
The first past the post system has had splendid success in other countries. However, we should consider our unity problems, the current ones, as well as the more spectacular conflicts of the late 1970s and the early 1980s when there were only two Liberal members west of the Ontario-Manitoba boundary and only two Conservative members between 1979 and 1980 in Quebec. We see therefore that the first past the post system has served our national unity very poorly indeed.
The United States is one of the most spectacular failures of national unity in the world. Its first past the post system ensured that the democrats would dominate the south prior to the civil war and that a variety of parties, first the whigs and then the republicans, would dominate the north. That was one of the primary reasons for the tremendous split in the U.S. congress, and particularly in its senate, which was one of the fundamental reasons for its civil war.
In looking at the spectacular record of failure, would the member be willing to consider the possibility that there are alternatives that perhaps create a superior sense of national unity in large, ethnically diverse and geographically dispersed countries such as Canada, Australia or the United States?