Electoral Reform committee  On day one in Political Science 1000, I teach my students that politics is about seeking support for common projects. It's building coalitions of support. Right now we do have coalition governments, but the coalitions happen within your political parties. The Liberal Party is the government, but the Liberal Party is actually a coalition.

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, we did see an increase in vote spoilage. In Edmonton, in 1952, 9.1% of the ballots were rejected. That's huge. The reason is that in Alberta they had a rule that if you only wanted to vote for one candidate and you put an X by their name, that was considered a spoiled ballot.

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, and I don't want to downplay the importance of region. It still is profoundly important.

Electoral Reform committee  But I would argue, and I think the debate over electoral reform has shifted away from that. We used to talk about it mostly in terms of regions—and region and language are so profoundly important to this country—but we are increasingly talking about it in terms of the complexity of identities that we have, many of which now transcend region.

Electoral Reform committee  No, I don't think so either, but you can achieve proportionality with probably about a third of the list.

Electoral Reform committee  To do it purely, you would do half and half. You'd have half districts. Realistically, I don't think doubling the size of the House of Commons is something you should recommend if you want to keep your jobs.

Electoral Reform committee  The reality is that people, and youth included, do a lot less politically online than you might expect. Our surveys have shown that very few people follow politicians on Facebook or on Twitter or engage with them online, and those people who do intend to be politically interested.

Electoral Reform committee  No, no.

Electoral Reform committee  I would probably add another one to the naked partisan self-interest comment.

Electoral Reform committee  Thinking on the spot about how I would quickly design an electoral system, I would go for an MMP system. I would have two ballots, where you vote for a local candidate and party. I would probably enlarge the size of the House of Commons. I realize that doing that would open up cheap political points for opponents of electoral reform.

Electoral Reform committee  In that research they also found that people who knew a lot about the STV system the citizens' assembly had proposed—people who were very well informed about it—were more likely to vote in favour of it. People who were less informed about it were more likely to be swayed by the fact that it was a citizens' assembly, so it was the idea that, I didn't have time to do the homework—and STV is a fairly complicated system to learn, all the ins and outs of—but a bunch citizens, people who I trust...I trust the process.

Electoral Reform committee  I'm thinking of how would you compose a citizens' assembly? In B.C. they had two people from each district, a man and a woman, and they had two aboriginal people to ensure that there was sufficient aboriginal representation. In Canada, how would you ensure...? Every province would need representation, and there are different parts of every province.

Electoral Reform committee  Not that I'm aware of, no.

Electoral Reform committee  Well, there's a technical side of it—and I'm not a computer scientist and there are other people better qualified to talk about that. The major issue is the lack of transparency in the process. Things disappear into cyberspace and nobody's entirely sure what happens and you can't recreate a paper trail the way you can with a paper ballot.

Electoral Reform committee  Yes.