Electoral Reform committee  A how-to-vote card.

Electoral Reform committee  The problem is that we don't have a lot of cases. We really just have Australia. That's why I was bringing in Alberta and Manitoba. It provides a useful other set of cases that give us some other evidence. I don't think there's anything that would preclude other parties from doing well.

Electoral Reform committee  There was a paper done and published in 2002 by Antoine Bilodeau, who looked at, I believe, the 1997 federal election and found that the Liberals would have benefited. I'm going to now rain all over the work that Professor McCormick and I did. The danger whenever you're projecting backwards is that we're using how people voted and assuming that they would have voted the same way had the alternative vote been in place.

Electoral Reform committee  My three would probably be fairness, representation, and participation. I would like Parliament to look like how people actually voted, so there's that basic element of fairness. I say that as somebody who lives in southern Alberta, where it's a foregone conclusion. I can pretty much tell you, even before the votes have been cast, how it's going to turn out.

Electoral Reform committee  If you go back and read the Grain Growers' Guide between 1911 and 1921, there would be articles on how to improve your crop production followed by detailed articles about the single transferrable vote. The interest of the Canadian prairies predated even Ireland's adoption of STV.

Electoral Reform committee  These are people who are very comfortable with online technology. I will absolutely tell you that it overstates the extent of the comfort. I can't tell you by how much, so bear that in mind. The other thing we find—indeed, any political science research that does surveys—is that the kind of people who are willing to sit in front of their computer for 20 minutes answering questions about politics are very politically interested, so we get a very high voter response.

Electoral Reform committee  Thank you for inviting me to appear before this committee. The way we translate citizen preferences into votes, and then those votes into seats, is fundamental to how democracy works in Canada. A serious discussion about the way we have been and could be doing this is long overdue.