Electoral Reform committee  More free votes and performance-based government: you actually measure outcomes. Rather than just guessing, ideologically, “I think this is good”, well, count: “This is actually reducing crime” or “This is actually increasing crime.” I always give the example of the Republican r

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, I certainly agree with the idea that simplicity and understandability are important criteria. Voters have to understand how the system works, and they shouldn't have to wait until the computer is finished two days later to find out who won. In terms of experimentation, I'm

Electoral Reform committee  I wrote an article in the Manitoba Law Journal, which did a run of what would have happened in Manitoba if we'd had PR light all along. There were some majority governments and some minority governments, so I thought it actually worked pretty well. PR light means you keep the cu

Electoral Reform committee  Yes. Of course, there's a continuum: how much is consensus; how much is the ability of a government to take strong and decisive steps and pursue a program over the course of four years? Everybody, whether it's a question of how you elect them or how they behave once they're there

Electoral Reform committee  First, I find it ironic that anyone would say that they don't like the first-past-the-post system. It produces an artificial majority, and the Liberal government won under the first-past-the-post system, and therefore it's legitimate without a national consensus to change the vot

Electoral Reform committee  It's not a good idea to try to think of voting systems in terms of resolving politics as though we won't have ongoing disagreements, which is not a good thing. You can address a lot of problems within the system through the open government initiative. If there's an issue with, fo

Electoral Reform committee  In Still Thinking I argued for PR light. My current position is not definitively settled until I see the different arguments and see what's happening at the provincial level. With electronic voting, I'm not against it; it's just that I meant literally what I said. I think initia

Electoral Reform committee  [Technical difficulty—Editor] adapt, voters have adapted as well as parties. Parties are responding to the way people vote. When right of centre parties got together to form the Saskatchewan Party, eventually they won. The voters of Canada decided it was a good idea for the right

Electoral Reform committee  I won't comment specifically on P.E.I., because I'd have to study it soberly before I would form an opinion. There are many different forms of multiple preference ballots. There are forms in which you can do that with proportional representation, PR light or the full PR, or a si

Electoral Reform committee  If all the parties agreed, we could say okay, everybody agrees; it's good. My answer is no, because the political class as a whole may have interests that are different from those of the people of Canada as a whole. If everybody votes to keep expanding Parliament and so on and so

Electoral Reform committee  First past the post's single biggest weakness is that most votes are wasted. That's a pretty big negative—

Electoral Reform committee  —but there are a great many positives, and you have to keep comparing with the alternative.

Electoral Reform committee  If I think this is a system in which I lost this time, but my guy's getting in next time—and I mean “guy” in a gender-inclusive form—

Electoral Reform committee  —well, then I have hope: okay, we didn't win this time, but we went from 25% to 35% and maybe we'll get in next time. One of the weaknesses of first past the post is potentially mitigated if people believe, “Yes, I didn't win this time, but my voice.... Next time, my team wins.”

Electoral Reform committee  The mistake that people make is they say, “Well, Italy was really bad because they changed prime ministers every two weeks.” But do you know what? It was too stable. It was always the same coalition that it was picking a prime minister from, so they didn't have a genuine alternat