Mr. Speaker, once again, I know the member from Vancouver who just interjected would not agree with his party on this. He is more progressive than most of the sort of Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble people who populate that particular caucus. That is an important issue. Some of them, not necessarily the ones who are there now, but some with cowboy hats sit right behind him during question period. That is the stance of that party. It pretends to be democratic and populist right across western Canada but it says and does exactly the opposite things when it comes to the House of Commons.
I would be very interested during questions and comments to hear whether or not the Alliance members will support the member for Saskatoon—Humboldt's private member's bill which would effectively deny the democratic rights of 63 members of parliament, representing one-third of the population, to be recognized as political parties. On the other hand, they get up in the House and say they would support this bill that would reduce the number of candidates needed to have one's name on a ballot from 50 to 12.
There are other items we have to deal with when it comes to elections. One is the whole question of the voters list. There were about a million people left off the voters list in the last campaign. Primarily, they were people from low income areas and younger people. We need legislation on that as soon as possible. We had a commitment on that from the government House leader, who was in charge of the Canada Elections Act in the House of Commons, about a week or so ago.
The final point I want to make is we should do what the Canada Elections Act says we can do. We should look at a different method of voting. If we look under clause 2 of the bill before us, it says:
The Chief Electoral Officer may carry out studies on voting, including studies respecting alternative voting means—
As we said on our opposition day on Tuesday, we should be striking an all party committee to look at incorporating some elements of proportional representation into our voting system like most countries in the world. Almost every country in the world with 8 million or 9 million people has some PR in the system.
This morning we heard from the prime minister of Great Britain, the mother of our parliamentary system. In the last few years Great Britain has incorporated some PR into the Scottish parliament and into the Welsh parliament. It elects all its members to the European community in Brussels through proportional representation.
According to the Jenkins commission, which was set up a few years ago to look at electoral reform, the British parliament will probably adopt very soon a method of PR, if not in the next election, in the election that is coming in about five years time.
If the mother of parliaments can do that, we should be modernizing our system as well by moving toward a system of proportional representation that will allow the votes of every citizen to be treated as equal: all votes would be equal; all votes would carry weight; people could empower themselves; and there would no wasted votes.
The irony of the present system is that often Canadians do not vote for their first choice. Canadians often vote for one candidate to stop another. A good example is my friend, the right hon. member for Calgary Centre. Thousands of Liberals, New Democrats, Green Party supporters and progressive people voted for him to stop the Alliance in Calgary Centre. They did so because he was more progressive. Obviously he is more progressive. I recognize that fact. He is a very progressive member of parliament. He is a red Tory. He is a progressive Tory, a very progressive person.
If we had a system of proportional representation we would have a system where people could vote for their first choice, vote for their philosophy, vote for the ideology. If it were a German type of system they would have a vote for their local MP and then a vote for their party preference in terms of a parliamentary list provided by each of the political parties. They could be voting for their first choice. Their first choice and vision would be part of the Government of Canada and the Parliament of Canada.
We should be looking at this as one of the possibilities in terms of passing the bill. The chief electoral officer could look into various systems of voting, different alternatives of voting and strike a committee to do just that.
We support the bill at second reading. The other parts of the bill are largely technical. Part of it is just making sure that the English version coincides with the French version and vice versa. We will be looking at some of those in more detail in committee.