Electoral Reform committee  Exactly. It's the Liberals coming in with a minority, with less than 50% of the votes. If proportional representation is the name of the game, if that's our criteria, then they don't have a majority government. They don't have a majority of the votes, and they would need to have a coalition government.

Electoral Reform committee  No, you don't. That's the whole beauty of it. The votes are fixed at the time of the general election. On going across the aisle, you're still representing your same riding and you're still fixed with your same vote, so you get no advantage from crossing the aisle.

Electoral Reform committee  You are your own party.

Electoral Reform committee  The party with the most votes, the party that has the weight, is the party that becomes the government.

Electoral Reform committee  Not at all. The party with the most weight would be the party that got the most votes. If your party has 60% of the vote with only 40% of the seats, it becomes the government, because it would have more weight than the other parties.

Electoral Reform committee  James Wilson will be testifying before you in Fredericton on the same idea.

Electoral Reform committee  Yes. When the Liberal Party said they're going to change first past the post, what they meant—it's semantics—is the current system, first past the post with unitary voting. I thought about that, too.

Electoral Reform committee  Independents come from a party where the party line is there is no party. When I thought about this, it seemed to me that if an independent were to win, then he or she would get a vote, like every other party where you agglomerate all the independents as a party. That would be my solution.

Electoral Reform committee  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Quebec, and thank you very much for your invitation. This commission has been given the mandate of recommending a voting system that both incorporates proportional representation and maintains local representation in a non-complex manner, yet all the many systems that have been proposed to this commission involve unacceptable trade-offs between these two criteria.