Electoral Reform committee  It's hard for me to imagine that a cabinet proposal would acquire the kind of legitimacy within that timeframe that you were talking about.

Electoral Reform committee  I would agree with Leslie. I think that some of the things Elections Canada has been doing over the years in this direction have been very helpful, including making voting easier, and establishing voting places on campus and things like that. I would also caution that the st

Electoral Reform committee  I would imagine there is a division of views within your party.

Electoral Reform committee  When we were writing that paper, we tried to explore that question a bit further and didn't get very far with it. I was stunned by the negativity of the press throughout the entire campaign. It started back with the citizens' assembly. During some of the sessions of the citizen

Electoral Reform committee  Yes.

Electoral Reform committee  I will go right to the heart of it. It reflects what's in that paper, but also the experience with electoral reform in other countries as well. Electoral reform proposals are generally put forward by parties when they are in opposition, but they can only act on them when they a

Electoral Reform committee  Yes. List PR has proven to be more favourable to women, but it's only a tool, because it depends on the parties. An example that Leslie Seidle gave earlier comparing Sweden and Hungary is telling, because they're both list PR systems. But in the Scandinavian countries they tend t

Electoral Reform committee  John Ibbitson did it just the other day—

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, that's precisely what it would probably do. One problem with all of these lines of argument is that you don't know exactly if voting behaviour is going to change with any change in rules. We tend to talk about all systems, including that one, as if voting stays constant, a

Electoral Reform committee  It's a very difficult question. I'll go back to the original point you made, which was about deliberation. We need to find a process to do this that is more deliberative. Polling doesn't generally do it, because you're asking a question that people often don't understand or in w

Electoral Reform committee  There is a mechanism called deliberative polling that I was going to mention. It hasn't been used all that much in Canada, but it's more feasible now with the increasing use of the Internet in polling. If you were to draw samples, the way you do for ordinary public opinion polls,

Electoral Reform committee  We have to come up with the definition of the word “local”, and that's very tricky. I think all list PR systems have districts, except for the small handful that have one single national constituency—and there are only a few of those. They're mostly smaller countries. The Netherl

Electoral Reform committee  Yes. I'll mention two things that come to mind that I think could be done. They may not be realistic, but we could at least talk about them. One is based on what I said earlier about Japan. If this committee could serve as a vehicle for developing any consensus proposal whereby

Electoral Reform committee  Either of those is workable.

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, in making the case for list PR, I tried to make the case in terms of principles and not in terms of any particular country. Because it is the most widely used electoral system in the world today, we know a lot about it. There is plenty of empirical evidence in different coun