Electoral Reform committee  Well, probably nearly every kind of proportional representation would bring that about. The parliamentary groups would have members from nearly— I apologize for the building work that's going on here, incidentally. I don't know whether it's audible to you. Ireland is building,

Electoral Reform committee  We notice, for example, that typically.... I think this time in Newfoundland and Labrador, the Liberal Party won all the seats there, so when the parliamentary groups of the Conservative Party and the New Democrats meet, there is no voice from Newfoundland and Labrador. Quite oft

Electoral Reform committee  The difference is that if you have the mixed member system, you might find that all the members elected for a constituency would be from the same party and all the rest would be from other parties, so all the people who might be called on to do the work would be from the same par

Electoral Reform committee  Generally speaking, that's correct. The small parties don't do so well under PR, but sometimes it can work for them. A good example is the United Kingdom. In the last election, the Scottish nationalist party was hugely overrepresented. Even though their overall strength across th

Electoral Reform committee  That's right.

Electoral Reform committee  They also get a lot more votes in the European election than they do in the Westminster election.

Electoral Reform committee  Far be it from me to stand up for Sinn Fein, but there have been times when they've got close to a quarter of support in the opinion polls. So whether you like them or whether you don't, there are an awful lot of people who support them. If you look at people under 35, they're pr

Electoral Reform committee  Essentially, I think, very little. They're now beginning to teach about politics in schools for the first time, I understand, in the hope of engaging young people in politics rather more. We did have a referendum on same-sex marriage recently in which, on most accounts, engagemen

Electoral Reform committee  Let's say voters under 24, something like that, it would probably be less than 40%.

Electoral Reform committee  We've changed on those things over the last several referendums. We have a referendum commission charged with mobilizing voters and occasionally with disentangling truth from fiction. It doesn't campaign and it no longer puts out a booklet telling you exactly what the referendum

Electoral Reform committee  Surely you have to look at the New Zealand experience, if you haven't already. They've had two referendums on changing to PR from first past the post, and that certainly engaged the New Zealand public and created a well-informed debate.

Electoral Reform committee  It has twenty-three, in fact.

Electoral Reform committee  It was fourteen, and before that, five.

Electoral Reform committee  Yes. They never got beyond five seats until the last election, 2011, when they went up to 14.

Electoral Reform committee  They won about 14% of the votes.