Electoral Reform committee  That's a much simpler question, with all due respect. Electoral systems are complicated. I know that separation is very complicated—

Electoral Reform committee  I know that average voters are extremely intelligent and extremely dedicated and want to do the best for the country, because I worked with 150 other randomly selected voters, and they were all dedicated. They all had very intelligent comments and opportunities to speak their minds.

Electoral Reform committee  That's a very interesting question. We discussed it on the assembly. Shoni Field, an assembly member, looked at Ireland and their multi-member districts, and she plotted out everyone's home who was a TD, a member, in Ireland in the district. She found that they're not all clumped together in small centres.

Electoral Reform committee  There are two aspects to that. The assembly members really like the idea of more competition, and Canada is paying more attention to voters to get the vote. We also recognize that, because of the preferential ballot, if you want to get elected, you can't say horrible things about the other candidates, because you may need their support.

Electoral Reform committee  The only purpose of having a referendum is to not have electoral reform, unless you can clearly define a way to educate voters about the choices and options that are put before them, and I don't see how that's possible. That's exactly why the citizens' assembly was created. We spent 11 months learning about the system, hearing from the public, and deliberating.

Electoral Reform committee  Yes. If you look at MMP, MMP is better than what we have now. You get the same results on the local side; still, 50% of the voters will not be represented locally. The districts will be 50% larger, or twice as large, with a single MP doing the local representation and all the constituency work.

Electoral Reform committee  Yes. If you read through the law commission report, I think I counted 13 times where it says that their goal was to add an element of proportionality to our current system. By definition, that's either MMP or MMM. That's where they started. In their discussion of the different systems, they described STV in a reasonable way.

Electoral Reform committee  They would triple, probably.

Electoral Reform committee  We talked about this extensively. When you group districts together and have a multi-member district, instead of being able to be elected with a small plurality of 30% or 40% of the voters and leaving 70% or 60% or 50% of voters unrepresented, in an STV election in a three member district, only 25% of voters maybe are not going to be represented.

Electoral Reform committee  Academic studies were done and people were polled after both referendums. What they found from both referendums is that the more voters understood about STV, the more they liked it. In the first referendum, a lot of voters knew about the assembly. They knew that voters had found the system and that it was coming from voters.

Electoral Reform committee  On the assembly, people who lived in the Skeena—Bulkley Valley area wanted to be merged with other districts. They wanted a multi-member district. Fifty per cent of people up there are not represented at all, let alone represented locally. For the guys who are represented locally, it's great for them, but for the other half of the voters, they don't have someone in government representing their point of view.

Electoral Reform committee  In Canada, the electoral system is province by province. It needs to be self-contained within the provinces, so we don't mess with those requirements. Nunavut, Yukon, and the Northwest Territories are individual elements with one MP, so I think those are going to be single member districts, clearly.

Electoral Reform committee  The understanding we got from rural assembly members was that they wanted multi-member districts because multi-member districts would give representation to more of them, and it would give more of them the ability to hold their MLAs accountable and to have the choice of which MLA they would want.

Electoral Reform committee  I think it's clear to everybody that the double 60% supermajority required was an attempt to stop the reform from happening. It was planned. They had the best intentions when they set up the assembly. Gordon Campbell lost the 1996 election, and I remember that election night. He had the most votes.

Electoral Reform committee  The one thing to remember is that a single MP is not going to be able to represent everyone in that district, because there are many different opinions in a district. To represent multiple points of view, you really need multiple MPs. In that circumstance, you have to figure out a way to elect them.