Electoral Reform committee  Thank you, and thank you for allowing me to come to speak with you today. I really love the button you have that silences the microphone. I'm sure many of my students would like to have a similar button. Thank you again. I appreciate the leadership of this committee in allowing

Electoral Reform committee  We can look at a bunch of different areas. Your question is multi-faceted, so we could go on. Ridings change. They are often arbitrarily decided. I think the community itself is abstract. Historically, the local riding connection was quite abstract. It depends on how far you wa

Electoral Reform committee  I would agree with that comment. Through Canadian history, the relationship between the local and the federal representative has been paramount. I would argue that there are multiple systems that can perform representation. In terms of size, geographic size seems to be no bound

Electoral Reform committee  Well, it's interesting to look at how government has changed. We're approaching our 150th anniversary, and almost all of our institutions have changed except for the voting system. The Constitution has changed. Who can sit in Parliament has changed. The number of MPs has changed.

Electoral Reform committee  I'm sorry.

Electoral Reform committee  Thank you very much. Do you mean a ranked ballot, the idea of just changing the ballot? The ranked ballot is an interesting reform, because now you'll get rid of this idea of false majorities. No candidate will be elected to Parliament who hasn't won 50% of the vote as the firs

Electoral Reform committee  Thank you for that question. I guess the short answer is yes and no. I've been following the testimony of some of my colleagues and I was particularly interested in that of Professor Thomas from the University of Calgary on women in Parliament. She studies this aspect directly,

Electoral Reform committee  In this case, yes. Professor Pippa Norris is someone I quite respect, so she could say it better than I could, but I think the answer is yes. I'm just going to say yes, and now I won't get cut off on the microphone. I think that when you look at our voting system, you'll see th

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, there's definitely some evidence that Canada is doing well in certain areas. When we look at where people of colour and indigenous members are being elected, they usually have strong demographic populations in those ridings, which is great and leads to some important obser

Electoral Reform committee  I would end, then, by pointing to Saskatchewan as an example. Where are the voices of francophones, the francophone Saskatchewan population, or indigenous populations in urban centres who don't have the chiefs speaking for them on the national level the way they do on reserves? T

Electoral Reform committee  I think it provides an opening. If the voting system is to empower voters and citizens, then the question is, can we do better? The data points out that most Canadians see the federal government and the provincial governments as the sites of political power in the country. I thin

Electoral Reform committee  Well, here is a question I would respond with. What is the incentive to vote if you're a Conservative in downtown Toronto or if you're a New Democrat in rural Saskatchewan? What's the motivation? If you're a Green Party supporter anywhere except for southern Vancouver Island, wha

Electoral Reform committee  The bigger question that we need to answer is why people aren't voting, why 30% don't show up at the polls, depending on the election. We can't measure it election by election. We need to look at it over time. Pollsters and some quantitative researchers have put forward the ide

Electoral Reform committee  Is your concern that if we moved to a form of proportional representation, rural ridings would become so large that it would become almost impossible for voters to access the polls or to know who their representatives are? Is that the question?

Electoral Reform committee  Across different countries that use different systems, these are issues. Certainly there are issues that need to be thought through. Not all forms of electoral systems would suggest that we have to move to super-ridings in the rural areas. Fair Vote Canada has put forward an inte