Mr. Speaker, I am not sure where the member gets the idea of party hacks from unless he is looking at the Senate, where prime ministers in the past appointed a lot of party hacks. I do not want that kind of system.
What I want is an open, democratic system where we have the best of both worlds. We have local MPs, such as in Germany. There are 13 countries using the mixed member proportional, where they have local MPs and they have PMPs also elected proportionally. The proportionalists are used to compensate for discrepancies in the first past the post system. Those MPs elected on the proportional lists can represent regions. They can be elected directly. There is no reason why they cannot.
We can use such things as a single transferable ballot. There is no reason why we cannot have rules and regulations that say that people that appear on the lists have to be democratically elected through a convention, through a primary, through one member, one vote, or through a single transferable vote. Then they are responsible to their own constituents in their own province and their own region.
The senators today are supposed to be representing their provinces. We have six in our province of Saskatchewan who are supposed to represent Saskatchewan. There is no reason why we could not have some proportionally elected MPs from Saskatchewan to represent Saskatchewan as a whole.
There is nothing there that contradicts anything he is saying. They would still be accountable. They would still be elected. They would still be accountable to constituents every four years when they would go back for election. They would still have riding offices. They would be no different from us. They would be elected riding by riding. We are elected riding by riding. They would still have constituents. Their constituencies would be bigger, but they would still be accountable. It is still the same principle.
This is the kind of thing that operates in 13 countries in the world and there has been no conflict in terms of class one and class two MPs. I wonder what problems the member sees with that kind of system.