Electoral Reform committee  No, I don't think preferential ballots would turn our system into something that more readily produces minority or coalition governments. The question might be, again, how the party system changes. I think we'd see less drastic change. I don't want to say that nothing would fun

Electoral Reform committee  If we talk about the power of the executive, it's in the context of its relationship to Parliament, but even within Parliament and beyond there are definitely constraints. I think that's the counter-thesis to a lot of Donald Savoie's excellent work on concentration of power.

Electoral Reform committee  I would be a little concerned—and again this is a personal view, a normative view—about the implications for the party system itself, and to what extent we might see a proliferation of fairly narrow single-issue parties. Quite frankly, if we move to a PR system, one or two of t

Electoral Reform committee  You know, we could reach an agreement to change the system to one of preferential balloting, and that would not be a complicated change. That would simply change how votes are counted. However, some of the proportional systems may require changes to constituency boundaries, so co

Electoral Reform committee  If I could just add quickly, it is entirely possible to run a bad referendum. I think I would have faith in Elections Canada to do a good information campaign and I would have no problem with people strongly advocating during a referendum campaign, but it's entirely possible. At

Electoral Reform committee  I think it's a question of how we can confront obvious problems with the current system. One of those is a high degree of party discipline. In Canada we have a degree of party discipline that exceeds other Westminster systems, let alone other countries. One option is to agree t

Electoral Reform committee  Some reforms would result in entire changes in the party system itself. Regardless of the reform, parties will adapt their behaviour to reflect the system and the outcomes they think they want to pursue. It's not simply the question, “if the 2015 had been held under system X, wha

Electoral Reform committee  I don't think Canadians are interested in a sweeping seminar on all of the alternatives. There's some work to be done in at least narrowing down what the realistic choices are at this point and then debating those. Even within PR systems, there are different thresholds and formu

Electoral Reform committee  I think there's a clear mandate to pursue reform.

Electoral Reform committee  I think in some systems it wouldn't change all that much. Preferential balloting wouldn't change that dynamic; a mixed member proportional system wouldn't necessarily change that dynamic. You would still have ridings across the country; there would just be a set of seats set asid

Electoral Reform committee  I think all-party consensus would alleviate some of those concerns. We could lock you all in a room and not let you out until you reached a compromise, which might be fun. How happy would you be if the Liberals and the Conservatives got together, agreed on preferential ballotin

Electoral Reform committee  I don't feel at all tongue-tied. It's just a matter of how diplomatic I am in regard to some of my responses.

Electoral Reform committee  I really do not buy this idea that a well-run referendum would not lead to an informed vote. I think if we are at the stage where we believe that.... You could say many of those same things about general elections, and no one is suggesting we stop having those. The Brexit example

Electoral Reform committee  Unlike most technical pieces of legislation, this is something that will actually affect all legislation, because it will change the composition of the House of Commons. The fact that elections serve as the primary link between society and government makes it exceptional. Given t

Electoral Reform committee  I think it's a bit of mental exercise of ensuring that we talk separately about what each system does in practice—the empirical aspect—and then about our normative arguments about each system. The normative arguments about each system are the criticisms one might make about the e