Electoral Reform committee  Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I thank you for the opportunity to be here today to provide my input on the subject of electoral reform. My name is Leonid Elbert, and I am here as an individual and as an author of the proposal for a made-in-Canada proportional voting syst

Electoral Reform committee  The province of New Brunswick has 10 seats right now, and it would be six local constituencies and four regional seats. What would happen is the ballot would list, first of all, the candidates for the local region. Let's say we're in Fredericton, so here are the candidates for Fr

Electoral Reform committee  Or gal, obviously. That person is elected. Then there will be original counting, just as they do in STV. They determine how many votes one would need to get elected, and then figure out if there was anyone else who had as many. Then, if nobody has that many, the one with the lowe

Electoral Reform committee  If you looked at the brief, you would have obviously looked at the would-be result. The Green Party would be under-represented. It would not go anywhere outside of B.C. The reason is that, when you have, let's say, 14 MPs elected in a region, there is not much they can do with 2%

Electoral Reform committee  Unlike other systems, those votes would go to other parties, to the second-choice parties. That explains the extra seats for the Liberals and the NDP. You can see that they're slightly overrepresented there. Another challenge would be the number of candidates on the ballot. Let'

Electoral Reform committee  It is acceptable, yes. In Australia, they actually tried to force people to vote for all the people that were running locally for the house of commons and for at least nine out of 10 on the senate ballot. That created a very complex system where political parties.... They got p

Electoral Reform committee  My proposal addresses the concern in Ontario and P.E.I., where people were given an option where they would vote for a political party without being able to distinguish who exactly they were voting for. It would also address the concern in B.C., where people were concerned that t

Electoral Reform committee  Actually, my brief includes the argument for the referendum. No matter if it wins or loses, first of all, it's a de facto precedent that changes like that require a referendum. There is another situation. Let's say the government changes, and I don't care what party forms the go

Electoral Reform committee  To make it even easier, let me just call it STV, single transferable vote, with local designations. They have different candidates. Some of them are from your local area, and they are marked as such. There is a guarantee that at least one of them gets elected. That will make it m

Electoral Reform committee  Each candidate is listed only once on the ballot. The local candidates are marked as being local candidates. Actually, when I submitted the brief and also when I gave the speaking notes to the administration, it included a graphic presentation of how the ballot would look.

Electoral Reform committee  Well, the way it works is that all the candidates are listed on a ballot.

Electoral Reform committee  You can see that they are grouped by their party affiliations. The local ones are at the top in the highlighted area. You have a choice. You rank them by your order of preference. You rank them the way you want, but obviously some would choose a local one. Some would choose a reg

Electoral Reform committee  No. There will be no runoff election. But the way the preferential vote counts, it's practically an instant runoff.

Electoral Reform committee  The reason I ranked 18 was just to show how the ranking can go. You don't have to rank everybody from the same party. You don't have to go consecutively, one, two, three, four, five. You don't have to rank the local one as your first choice, and so forth.

Electoral Reform committee  There are a variety of descriptions. We'll have about a dozen different regions ranging from six seats all the way up north to as many as 14 or 15 seats in Toronto. Again, there will be, obviously, probably eight or nine local candidates in each such urban region. As I mentioned