Electoral Reform committee  Hello, my name is David. I'm going to to talk to you about STV, voter's choice electoral reform. I am honoured to be here to speak to you on the traditional lands of Treaty 7. I view electoral reform through the eyes of a voter not associated with any political party. My goals

Electoral Reform committee  I think we need to respect the boundaries of our provinces and territories and I think we have to leave them as they are. I would leave the MPs as they are, unfortunate as the situation is, with one MP in each district. The question of the larger districts in provinces is a fact

Electoral Reform committee  I think the northern territories are very large. Nunavut is probably one of the biggest electoral districts in the world. We made them individual territories, and I think we need to respect that. I have no issue with keeping them as they are. I recognize that in northern provin

Electoral Reform committee  My point is, how often do voters do this when they're not aligned with their MP? It's not a big issue.

Electoral Reform committee  There are two reasons. One, a three-member riding requires 25% of the vote to get elected. A seven-member riding requires 12.5%. There's a marked difference in those two. If you plotted this out, it would be a long curve that goes out like this, so I don't think three-member ridi

Electoral Reform committee  I think the number one thing, front and centre, is something I call equal legislative power. What that means is under STV in five- to seven-member districts, if they had 100,000 votes to elect an MP, every MP would be elected with 80,000 to 90,000 votes. Every MP has the same aut

Electoral Reform committee  I have just one more comment. If under mixed member proportional somewhere between 60% and 70% of the MPs are elected with first past the post, they're probably elected with 30% or 40% of the vote, 30,000 to 40,000 votes. Why not elect MPs, all MPs, with 80,000 votes instead of s

Electoral Reform committee  I think we should proceed and implement it now, and I think after two election cycles we should have another go-around to see if we can't make it better. If people wanted to have a citizens' assembly then, I think that would be wonderful, but I think we're long past due the point

Electoral Reform committee  I thought the idea of combining different regions was unique. I probably wouldn't have done that myself. I don't know the answer to whether or not it gives us equal legislative power to the voters. That's the key thing that I'm driving at because we are a representative democracy

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, for two reasons. One, if you catch a voter early while they're still studying civics, I think they become a voter for life. That's one piece of the equation. The other piece to the equation involves long-term decisions that MPs make. Frankly, they're going to live with the d

Electoral Reform committee  I wouldn't do it simply because I've been at a couple of group sessions where they are talking about proportional representation and changing it, and the level of understanding in the general population is extremely low. I think if you try to get people to pick between three diff

Electoral Reform committee  I'm happy to do that. I think there's no question that you are a legitimate committee. Our system up until this point in time has been first past the post. We have a majority government. You can agree with the system to get there or not, but that's what we have. This committee w

Electoral Reform committee  I still wouldn't have a referendum. I think there are rights issues in here, in the Charter of Rights. We're moving slowly, as a country, toward effective representation. We're not there yet. In moving toward effective representation, I think we should take a huge step that way,

Electoral Reform committee  I go beyond that, because unless the body we elect is a mirror image of the people of Canada, not only in terms of political leanings but also in terms of ethnic background, race, and gender, we don't have effective representation. Effective representation means that we should ha

Electoral Reform committee  No.