Electoral Reform committee  My sense is that technically we've got a way to go yet to have things that are safe and secure enough. As I said, I'd be quite adamant about the idea that this would just be a supplementary option, and not something that would replace in any way polling stations. Even if we think we could cut down the number of polling stations, I think that would be a huge mistake.

Electoral Reform committee  It never went anywhere, but—

Electoral Reform committee  I absolutely agree with you.

Electoral Reform committee  The only solution for that is some form of proportional representation, STV, a mixed-member, a list system. You can't divide a single member seat up proportionally between parties; that's the fundamental issue. The only way of dealing with that is compensatory seats through a mixed-member system, or multi-member districts where you elect more than one person.

Electoral Reform committee  I'm not recommending that, but that's somebody really thinking outside the box. But no, that fundamental issue of, basically, wasted votes, only a proportional system can fix that.

Electoral Reform committee  Professor Lijphart published a very influential paper in which he looked at policy outcomes. He found basically no difference. They get at things differently, but it's not as if the economy performs better. So the strong majority government doesn't necessarily give you better public policy.

Electoral Reform committee  The Liberal Party, a weird, freaky Canadian thing—

Electoral Reform committee  Absolutely. And I don't say that to cast aspersions on any of you, but your motives, even if you support something for principled reasons but it happens to be in the interests of your party—

Electoral Reform committee  My issue with a referendum, again, is people not having done the homework on voting on this. The model that I like—and I that know Professor Carty was here and talked about it—is a citizens' assembly. I like the idea of having an educational process where citizens learn and make the trade-offs.

Electoral Reform committee  On the voting age, I think if we started imposing tests on maturity and knowledge, there are a lot of 18-year-olds and 25-year-olds and 40-year-olds and 50-year-olds who wouldn't qualify either. I remember as a kid being very frustrated with adults I would meet who knew way less than I did and followed politics far less than I did.

Electoral Reform committee  We did a phone survey, and I checked it. We've been looking at other parts of this data, and right away, we wondered if we had asked about this in the phone survey. Sadly we did not. We deliberately did a phone survey because we wanted to get people who weren't necessarily online.

Electoral Reform committee  The lead-up to this was that in the decade of 1910 to 1920, there were big discussions on the Prairies on this. A lot of the complaints they were having about their electoral system were exactly the kinds of things you've been hearing here and we've been talking about today, around the lack of fairness in terms of representation.

Electoral Reform committee  There's a book on mixed member proportional systems called The Best of Both Worlds?. What the authors found is that basically there were some countries with PR systems who wanted that element of local representation and had moved in the direction of MMP. New Zealand is probably the textbook case of this.

Electoral Reform committee  What has tended to happen is that there's coalition between the Liberal and National parties. In places where they have been strong, they wanted to bring in compulsory preferences to maximize that preference exchange. For example, there was an incident in the spring in Queensland where there was debate over reapportionment of the legislative seats, and then the Labor Party brought in an amendment to bring in compulsory preferences, because they had been bleeding votes to the Green Party and others and wanted to make sure they'd recapture those votes.

Electoral Reform committee  That's the hope, but as I said, I didn't see a lot of evidence of that. The closest we got to a preference exchange is in Alberta. Most of those cases happened in 1955. There was a scandal about Social Credit, and the CCF, and Liberals suddenly figured out after 30 years, “You know, if we exchange preferences, we can defeat them”, so they defeated four Social Credit candidates through an exchange of preferences.