Madam Chair, on the first piece, I guess it is a sort of a chicken and egg thing. My feeling on going to electoral reform, and I think I probably got it backwards, is that we cannot really go to electoral reform until the parties are truly democratic. In order to put people on the list, it has to be done in a fair and transparent way. We need to know how that list would be arrived at. It would have to be something that one would feel comfortable with as a party. In France on the parity issue, they passed a bill saying that for every other person on the list it should run woman-man-woman-man or the parties would have to pay a fine. All of the parties paid the fine.
I think one needs to feel that there is a buy-in in terms of what one is trying to achieve, whether it is a parity law or whether it is proportional representation. I guess it is an interesting challenge now. I think the Globe and Mail editorial this morning was fabulous in terms of understanding the risk of some of the methods of proportional representation, which will not achieve the advent of more women and more of the under-represented people but will tend mainly to diminish the effect of political parties.
Second, the blog has been fabulous. What they talked about in the Congress Online project was a sort of anticipatory approach. For example, on same sex marriage, two summers ago at the Ontario Superior Court ruling, as soon as I had five letters on it I was able to put up what I thought, which people feel can deter other letters or can encourage letters from the people who disagree.
I found in the last election that the content I created for the website over those years of just writing what I think about things became a sort of documentation, which I actually then used in election brochures or certainly on the issues part of the site. It is not a formal blog, but I have been doing this now for three or four years, I think, and it is interesting.
In terms of the text messaging and cellphone piece as well, it is interesting in terms of how we have to be like Gretzky and skate to where the puck is going to be. I was at a blogging conference at Westminster a couple of summers ago when they changed the date, the time and the place of the meeting and everybody was there at the right place at the right time just because of text messaging. It is interesting. I have not figured out how to blog from my BlackBerry yet, but we are working on it. I find it very satisfying.
Also, even when I am being introduced as a speaker, quite often the introducer will remark on what I have blogged. I remember that when I got back from Israel Don Newman on Newsworld commented on comments about what I felt in Israel, comments that came straight from my blog, which beats the two year old biography that is on most of our websites.
There is no question about it, though, that when I became a minister the department and my staff were quite worried about me just blogging away. But I feel that one puts up what one believes in, along with comments linked to articles one has liked and all of that sort of thing. I do not have the formal blogging software that automatically makes the links. I have to make the links myself in an HTML format. By doing it myself, though, I have found out that no one on my staff can say they cannot do it.