Electoral Reform committee  I want to start by thanking you for promoting me to a professor. I've never been that before. No doubt proportional representation, particularly extreme proportional representation as they have in Israel, gives organization and voice to very small groups of sentiment, some of which can be quite extreme.

Electoral Reform committee  I guess my response to that would be that your aims are very good and noble, but unless you all agree, I don't think anything is going to happen—at least not anything productive. If the government party uses its majority to go ahead against the opposition parties in this committee, there is going to be a big fuss, a big fight.

Electoral Reform committee  I can't add any more. Yes, absolutely, the public should be consulted on a specific model, but first of all, who is going to design the model? In British Columbia, it was the citizens' assembly. Here it might be you. They have to have specifics. You are absolutely right.

Electoral Reform committee  I think they have to meet, just as you have to meet here in this committee. I think you have to be in the same room, and you have to do it seriatim, time after time. Get to know each other. Get to know the facts. Get to know the public. It's very much a learning process. It's just one small point of the whole political world, but there's a lot to be learned about electoral systems.

Electoral Reform committee  First of all, I don't like lists—

Electoral Reform committee  —but if I have to have lists, they should be open lists. I appreciate that a closed list will give you guaranteed gender balance, guaranteed ethnic balance, and all of those kinds of things, but I am one who is for strengthening the voter, not the political party. There always has to be a balance.

Electoral Reform committee  I don't have any documentation prepared. However, it seems to me that you could, if you wished.... You could start with the British Columbia model and then adapt it to the national purpose. You maintain, for example, the parity of gender. You maintain the same number of people per riding.

Electoral Reform committee  I'll use a more or less neutral example, because Alberta would be all over the place in terms of its representation.

Electoral Reform committee  There's the virtue of being the chair.

Electoral Reform committee  It would be more centralized, I think, because all of a sudden no group could claim to speak for, say, Alberta.

Electoral Reform committee  For British Columbia, yes. I work with the citizens' assembly. When I designed it, I had no views on electoral reform. Following their logic and deliberations, I thought they came to the right conclusion for British Columbia. Nationally, you have a different issue. Canada is a federation; British Columbia is not.

Electoral Reform committee  Yes.

Electoral Reform committee  It's because it's a part of our basic law; it's a part of the rules of the game. That said, it would have been something that Parliament could easily have done before 1982 and there wouldn't have been any question about it. Whether it was a constitutional change or not, who cared?

Electoral Reform committee  Thank you. That's a very good question. There's absolutely no doubt that such empowerment is absolutely essential to the credibility of a citizens' assembly. The assembly had a lot of credibility because the people knew, and the members of the assembly knew, that whatever they came up with would in fact be put before the people.

Electoral Reform committee  If this committee by whatever means, whether a citizens' assembly or whatever else, comes up with a proposition that is then affirmed by the people in a referendum, then in my opinion it is legitimate.