Electoral Reform committee  Thank you very much, Chair. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk again with the Canadian Parliament about this really important topic. There are really three issues that I think are worth highlighting. Number one, what are the key options on the table? Those are partl

Electoral Reform committee  I think that's a very good question, thinking about the process. I think that we can contrast New Zealand and the U.K. We know about Brexit, but we also know about the vote that they had on the alternative vote system. Those referendums, I think, were a problem in lots of differe

Electoral Reform committee  I just thought the system they used for the electoral reform was better than the system they used for the flag, which, of course, got voted down again, cost a lot, and didn't actually get through. The first system worked, with a longer period between the first and the second of t

Electoral Reform committee  Strategic voting can be seen as a problem, but it can also be seen as a virtue for other reasons. Think about, for example, the second ballot system, which is used in France. That's a majoritarian system, and it's designed to create large parties. In the first ballot, in France

Electoral Reform committee  It's a change of voting system. We can see the same in Germany and in other countries that have mixed member systems. It's far more difficult for women and other minorities to get elected under first past the post in single-member districts than it is under the party list. In s

Electoral Reform committee  You can also use quotas, obviously.

Electoral Reform committee  Diversity is really critical, particularly because societies now are increasingly globalized, and émigré populations need to have citizenship rights and voices in representative bodies like Parliament. A couple of things can be done. Clearly, if you go towards a mixed member or

Electoral Reform committee  Would you like me to go first? Think about the Bundestag. Here we have two MPs who are elected through different methods. One is in the single-member district and one is the person who is elected in the party list. There isn't a lot of ambiguity in the sense that there is still

Electoral Reform committee  On that last point on representation, you also have think about minor parties. The old idea of parliamentary representation is that you go through your MP, and irrespective of party, you are representing the constituency you're a member of. It does mean that small parties are exc

Electoral Reform committee  The first point is absolutely right. Smaller parties would likely become better represented, such as the Greens in Canada, because they'd get a more proportional share of seats, depending on how that works through. How does it affect the members? This is a complicated question.

Electoral Reform committee  Some of the problems you mentioned are there in western democracies. It's not really about either a majoritarian system or PR. A crisis of confidence in parliaments and their role and their power is very much affected by globalization and the loss of sovereignty of countries, whi

Electoral Reform committee  I have a quick response. Think about the U.K. right now, which has six electoral systems that it's working with quite happily. You have first past the post for Westminster, you have a party list for Europe, you have additional vote for the mayor of London, and you have AMS in Sco

Electoral Reform committee  Strategic voting is all about the size of the party and your calculations for whether or not your core party, the one you really support, is going to win or not. You do that under every system. There's a marvellous book by Gary Cox about strategic voting. It's slightly more comm

Electoral Reform committee  Deliberation takes time, especially since, as we've mentioned earlier, people don't know about other systems. The best answer is to have more flexibility to abandon the deadline, which was an early promise made, I'd argue, without a lot of thought about what the consequences migh

Electoral Reform committee  You want to get rid of partisan interests to get this sort of consensus. For that reason, I might depart from my colleagues to say that an election that has to be on party grounds in the first place is a problem when you're dealing with constitutional issues. Backbenchers might n