Electoral Reform committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you to members of the committee for inviting me here today. I was trying to decide how to start, particularly in a 10-minute beginning. I was going to start by saying that I think it's very unlikely that electoral reform will happen in Canada. And t

Electoral Reform committee  I don't think I've said anything particularly negative about referendums per se. It depends on what you want out of a referendum. One of the lessons I wanted to try to draw out of the New Zealand case is that the referendums—and they actually had two of them—were part of a larger

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, have had or can have, but that doesn't mean that they have to.

Electoral Reform committee  My negative example...I wrote that paper right around the time of the British referendum on the alternative vote. You have to understand, first of all, the government's purpose—or at least the Conservative half of the government's purpose—in that referendum was to basically defea

Electoral Reform committee  I'm not sure I would use the word “requirement”. If it's a constitutional question, the constitutional lawyers are better qualified to comment on that than I am. I've heard the words “constitutional architecture” tossed around more recently and that goes in circles, and no one is

Electoral Reform committee  National referendums, yes. Constructing an argument that it is a requirement somehow of a major change is a bit of a stretch for me. Whether it's a good idea along the line you were suggesting to build legitimacy, that's a normative question. We could probably kick that back an

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, okay.

Electoral Reform committee  I agree with almost everything you have just said. I think it reinforces Leslie Seidle's point about the importance of public education, which he made in response to the earlier question. On an issue like this, you can't really expect people to know a lot about different electora

Electoral Reform committee  I think we certainly need to do that. Some of the polling evidence, which perhaps others have cited in testimony before the committee—I know André Blais was here this morning, but I did not hear his testimony, so whether he was able to cite some of this or not, I'm not sure....

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, in making the case for list PR, I tried to make the case in terms of principles and not in terms of any particular country. Because it is the most widely used electoral system in the world today, we know a lot about it. There is plenty of empirical evidence in different coun

Electoral Reform committee  Yes. I'll mention two things that come to mind that I think could be done. They may not be realistic, but we could at least talk about them. One is based on what I said earlier about Japan. If this committee could serve as a vehicle for developing any consensus proposal whereby

Electoral Reform committee  Either of those is workable.

Electoral Reform committee  We have to come up with the definition of the word “local”, and that's very tricky. I think all list PR systems have districts, except for the small handful that have one single national constituency—and there are only a few of those. They're mostly smaller countries. The Netherl

Electoral Reform committee  It's a very difficult question. I'll go back to the original point you made, which was about deliberation. We need to find a process to do this that is more deliberative. Polling doesn't generally do it, because you're asking a question that people often don't understand or in w

Electoral Reform committee  There is a mechanism called deliberative polling that I was going to mention. It hasn't been used all that much in Canada, but it's more feasible now with the increasing use of the Internet in polling. If you were to draw samples, the way you do for ordinary public opinion polls,