Electoral Reform committee  Because you have to make trade-offs. Because you have to design an electoral system that optimizes a number of goods at once, not just one. Look, if your only concern is that we ought to have a balance between men and women in Parliament, there's an easy solution: pass a law th

Electoral Reform committee  I think it's a less radical change than PR, and on the issue of implementation, I think you should take the chief electoral officers at their word when they testify about the difficulty of implementing new electoral systems in short order.

Electoral Reform committee  Well, to be sure, what I was saying in my testimony was that having a more equal balance between men and women in our Parliament is an unqualified good, and it's one that we should pursue. That's the point I was making.

Electoral Reform committee  I know you do, and it's a wonderful one.

Electoral Reform committee  My own sense—and this is something on which I've changed my view over the years—is that the most desirable way would have been for you to draw up a citizens' assembly to come up with a recommendation and to even put the design decision in the hands of a disinterested group and th

Electoral Reform committee  I think there's a qualitative difference between shifting to an AV system or a ranked ballot system, however it gets operationalized, and shifting to a system in which we create different types of members of Parliament or we use a fundamentally different rule to convert votes int

Electoral Reform committee  I think the thing that's special about the decisions that the committee is making is that they have a direct impact on how you are elected, which is to say they have a direct impact on whether you'll remain in your roles and whether you will have better or worse chances after the

Electoral Reform committee  The written submission has all the data that backs up the claim I've made. It lists—

Electoral Reform committee  My written submission has all of that data.

Electoral Reform committee  Sorry, there's a 10-page written submission as well, in addition to the comments that I made, which I'm happy to forward to you.

Electoral Reform committee  Thank you very much for the opportunity. Let me make two points on that. One is that there was a furtive and, I think, ultimately unsuccessful attempt to stir up anti-Muslim sentiment in Canada in the last election. Ultimately it's difficult to sustain that when, as a party, you

Electoral Reform committee  I'll tell you my view more generally of this as a political scientist. I did a lot of cross-national studies. The estimates that are derived about the effects of PR, both negative and positive, are all very subject to case selection, to how we model things, to the exact estimator

Electoral Reform committee  It's not clear to me that there is a convention that there needs to be a referendum.

Electoral Reform committee  But I'm not an expert on the Constitution.

Electoral Reform committee  I think it's a troubled argument, and I think it's a troubled argument for a couple of reasons. On the facts of the case, I don't think we had an election that was fought over electoral reform. I think it was a long, long way down the list of issues on which votes turned and on