Electoral Reform committee  To be honest, I don't know. I assume it would be relatively easy, just because you won't change boundaries. Even in the case of the ballot, instead of making an X, you'd do 1, 2, 3, 4. There will be more entailed in the counting. I think it would be simple, in that sense. If at

Electoral Reform committee  I think you'd have more centrist parties. I don't think it would change the complexion a lot, other than I could take a chance on the Green Party, for example. That would be my first vote, then, if I was going to vote, knowing that my second vote.... I think it might help a littl

Electoral Reform committee  Well, it's an improvement. I guess that's the main thing. I'm saying that we've had chances before. People seem hesitant about this big change, and I'm just saying that the ranked ballot is easy to implement and it does make an improvement. There will be varying opinions as to th

Electoral Reform committee  I'll answer in English. This is all theoretical. Every exercise I've worked with has been theoretical. As for how it would play out in reality, it should work the same way, but to say that I've actually seen it in an election, I'm not sure. There are different ways that it's us

Electoral Reform committee  I don't think so. As far as I know, Australia is the only country that actually uses the ranked ballot, so this really would be a made-in-Canada system. As for the Borda count, I think they use it for things like the Academy Awards or for sports, maybe, but nothing bigger than th

Electoral Reform committee  I'm not saying that's the be-all and end-all. I'm presenting Borda count as a different way of counting. Personally, I kind of like what the law commission had proposed, although I don't like using first past the post with mixed member proportional. They use it in Germany, and I'

Electoral Reform committee  I disagree totally. There's lots of testimony, and they say lots of things.

Electoral Reform committee  I could see that. What I'm also saying, though, is that we've had chances for reform. Take B.C., for example; the voters got nothing out of that. The ranked ballot at least improves on what we have.

Electoral Reform committee  Well, you know what?

Electoral Reform committee  As I said, I'm fine with that, but don't lose the opportunity to make some improvement. If you have to sacrifice.... All the guests you've had have talked about trade-offs. Everything has been about trade-offs. You know, we lost that chance in B.C., and—

Electoral Reform committee  No. Remember when the professors from Ireland were talking? I think the example they used was five candidates, and they said approximately one-sixth are wasted. When you're calculating the quota in that, you're always adding one, so if it's four candidates and 10,000 votes, and

Electoral Reform committee  It doesn't, no. I know.

Electoral Reform committee  Well, they're actually sizeable. In an STV system, if you have three candidates, there would be, I think, one out of four votes wasted. It's always one more than the number of candidates. The way you calculate the threshold is that you're always going to be almost one candidate o

Electoral Reform committee  All right. Well, my stove at home is programmed to 10 minutes. It can set itself now. Thank you.

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, it can, and that's one of the things you will get. I have some charts and tables. I believe it's because when you drop something off, you don't know how it's relating to the second and third votes. You're looking at the first preference, so you drop the lowest one, but qui