Electoral Reform committee  We tried out voting with STV and we could manage to count to three. It's not really hard. During the first referendum, I think it was, I went to a high school assembly in north Vancouver. I had first-past-the-post ballots—for pizza, of course, because it was a high school—and STV ballots, with instructions on how to vote.

Electoral Reform committee  —they got a bunch of choices. That's one of the things we loved about multi-member districts. It was easy.

Electoral Reform committee  As you know, because you've been doing this for two or three months, with just a full-on education, this is a complicated topic. Just the simple mechanics of the system are complicated. How they flesh out when you you work through them and look at how they're going to work for voters, MPs, and governance, that's super complicated and the average voter is not going to spend the time doing that.

Electoral Reform committee  Well, that's exactly what we did do. That was exactly the process we used to determine that we preferred STV. We had two months in the summer with a new thing—it was online blogging, cool—and we just hammered out the two different systems and then we came up with the final designs in our plenary sessions and pitted them against each other.

Electoral Reform committee  That was part of the mandate of government. That wasn't our choice.

Electoral Reform committee  The referendum was set at the same time the assembly was established. But at that time, we didn't know that it was going to be a double 60% supermajority. When we all signed up, we thought it was a usual 50% majority referendum. We were only told about the double 60% several months into our process, and we all just sat there thinking that this proposal was doomed.

Electoral Reform committee  Yes. That was a huge issue for us, obviously. If you look at the map, there are huge areas—and Nathan knows—of the province and it looks daunting. How can you add districts together, a three member district of the north? How is that going to work? Mostly it's rocks and trees. The people are along small stretches of highways, basically.

Electoral Reform committee  We had two different types of conversations: in the whole group, 160 people in one go, and in small discussion groups with 12 people in each room. A key thing for us was.... We had Ken Carty, who presented to you. In the big room, he talked about the stability of first past the post.

Electoral Reform committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good afternoon, and welcome to Victoria. My name is Craig Henschel. Thanks for asking me here this afternoon. In 2004 I had the honour and privilege of serving for 11 months on the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform with 159 other randomly selected voters.