Electoral Reform committee  In fact, you heard earlier from the leader of that project, André Blais, at the university of Montreal. In fact, it has expanded to six countries. We looked at Germany, France, Spain, Canada, and Switzerland, and then we added Belgium.

Electoral Reform committee  I wasn't particularly concerned that it would be broken, because I think everyone agrees with it. The point I wanted to make was that PR systems have enough variance that sometimes that link can also be maintained.

Electoral Reform committee  It's always difficult to try to interpret the outcome of any referendum. There's an issue of information and there's an issue of the limited amount of time that voters have or want to put into learning about an issue. It's very hard to know. We do know that when referenda fail, we often find that it is related to the fact that people don't know much about an issue.

Electoral Reform committee  That would be right in line with what I was saying.

Electoral Reform committee  A mixed system isn't my recommendation at this point, just because of the types of MPs that are created, the two different classes of MPs. I think that we would have to look—if you were moving to any kind of multi-member system—at having either small districts, and then increasing the number of MPs, or slightly larger districts by merging some together.

Electoral Reform committee  What it comes down to is that parties put forward candidates, and then the voters choose among those candidates. If there were laws or incentives, let's say, put in place for parties to have more diverse slates of candidates, that would improve the representation as we have it. There are a lot of concerns about simply having candidates put forward.

Electoral Reform committee  I guess I'll start with strategic voting first. Strategic voting, I would say, is far less prevalent than people might expect. I think the estimate I've heard from the past election is about 10%, but typically it's more like 3%. It's not as high as one might expect. When we think about electoral systems, what we have to remember is that any change we would make, if we're trying to estimate what's going to happen, is based upon preferences as we know them today.

Electoral Reform committee  Thank you. I should say that I'm a political science professor at Western University.

Electoral Reform committee  When I speak about electoral reform at all, certainly to my students, the devil is in the details. Of course, any change is going to involve many small decisions that will affect the trade-off between accountability and representation. Today I'd like to provide comment on two aspects of representation that I think are really essential to consider when thinking of any kind of change, especially to a PR system.