Electoral Reform committee  If you are making a change you've got to make the case for change very strongly.

Electoral Reform committee  It was the coalition agreement with the Liberal Democrats. I think, as part of the agreement to form a coalition, the Conservatives agreed to have a referendum on this preferred system. That was the price of a coalition. There are prices to be paid in forming coalition government

Electoral Reform committee  On your comment, Ms. Sahota, about “made in Canada” or a different system, etc., I would encourage you, encourage anybody in this business, because it is what animated us and drove us, to consider that the more it looks like a system that Canadians are familiar with, the easier i

Electoral Reform committee  I'm in favour of the default position of letting voters decide because that works for us. At the end of the day that typically works for the system. One of the reasons is that we accept the results. We have good winners and good losers. Good losers around the table, if you will

Electoral Reform committee  It's a great question, and I would concur heartily with a “made in Canada” system. You'd be informed by electoral systems elsewhere, but we have different realities. It's language, of course, and other things, but geography is perhaps the biggest defining thing. In New Brunswick

Electoral Reform committee  It goes from there. It's not to be pejorative or anything.

Electoral Reform committee  The way it worked is that we thought the parties were legitimate actors. They had the right to incent and choose the folks they wanted to represent them, but we wanted to create an incentive and a public pressure on them to do so. Let's go back to how you operate. You operate in

Electoral Reform committee  No. We knew that this was a possibility, absolutely, parties being parties and leadership being leadership of parties. We encourage a primary process as well and as a way to do that. That's why I mentioned we had companion recommendations and improvements for greater party democr

Electoral Reform committee  Let me start. I'll let my colleagues reflect a bit more. Force them into some trade-offs. You have to do it. Find out what they value most. Come up with your series of principles, explain how they can work in comparison to others. I suspect that local representation will be very

Electoral Reform committee  Again, the closed list is a mechanical process or step to get to the electoral outcome. You would have a closed list. The reasons I gave are what were populating our minds at the time, and it can seem there's a lack of transparency, it's unaccountable, etc., but it was the outcom

Electoral Reform committee  One of the ways that we tried to get at that issue in the New Brunswick commission...again, we had a broader mandate...but I do want to refer you to our section where we talked about making the system work. We did look at improving or enhancing the role of MLAs as individual legi

Electoral Reform committee  Absolutely. They are the ones who administer the election and they're responsible for its proper administration at the end. So yes, they've got to get going.

Electoral Reform committee  You've absolutely hit the issue on the head and we wrestled with it. It was one of the final pieces of the puzzle that we actually worked through, and then we came to a choice on it. It was a unanimous report, so we understood it, but we had a companion piece, because of our larg

Electoral Reform committee  Yes. I would very much encourage that, and for a number of reasons. One is that this is the only way, in my view, for this file to progress within at least a shot at your time frames. I'd try to be respectful of that. Second is that I think it would show Parliament working. I thi

Electoral Reform committee  Yes. Again, I think it's system-agnostic, so I think you would have to show it, and you would have to show how it would work. You would start with principles, but people also want to know how it would work. I go back to the outcomes. In a way, you're doing a long game in a very