Madam Speaker, that is a very thoughtful and insightful question and one that is extremely important to our sovereignty and electing a parliament that is a reflection of all Canadians.
We need serious parliamentary reform. In terms of reforming this institution, too much power now rests with the Office of the Prime Minister and far too little power with parliamentary committees and ordinary members of parliament. When we talk about parliamentary reform, we should also reduce the power of the PMO to call an election whenever it wants. We need fixed election dates and fixed budget dates.
We should take away the power the Prime Minister's office has for nominations and for nominating committee chairs. We had a big crisis in the finance committee last week where the finance committee wanted to elect the member for Etobicoke North as the chair. We have nothing against the current chair but we had interference from the whip of the Liberal Party in terms of imposing the will of the Prime Minister's office according to Liberal members of parliament on the finance committee. We need serious parliamentary reform.
On the electoral side, we need electoral reform. This parliament does not reflect at all how the Canadian people voted. Forty per cent of the people voted for the Liberal Party and it has 60% of the seats in the House of Commons. That happens time and time again. In fact we have had very few majority governments elected by the majority of the people.
Most countries in the world do not have our kind of electoral system. In fact if we look around the world, only three democracies use our first past the post system, and we are talking of democracies with more than eight million people: India, the United States and Canada. We saw what happened in the United States in the election a year ago in November. Al Gore got 550,000 more votes than George W. Bush. Who is the president of the United States? George W. Bush. We have those distortions in every first past the post system.
What we are suggesting is that we strike a parliamentary committee that will look at aspects of proportional representation so that when people vote in election campaigns their vote will count, that no vote is wasted, and every vote is counted equally, so if a party gets 10% of the votes in the country it would get about 10% of the seats in the House of Commons; if it gets 20% of the votes it would get 20% of the seats in the House of Commons.
We have to move that way in terms of making people involved in the electoral process. The turnout is plummeting. In the last campaign only 61% of the people voted. In the campaign before that it was 67%. Back in the 1960s and 1970s it used to be 75% or 80% of the people. People are disengaging from the process.
We need political reform in terms of parliamentary reform and political reform in terms of electoral reform so that everyone is equal, everyone's vote counts and no one's vote is wasted. That is part of saving our country and part of renewing Canada.