Electoral Reform committee  In the current circumstances, it's acceptable, but we could do better.

Electoral Reform committee  To be clear, your hypothesis is that it is a unanimous committee?

Electoral Reform committee  If you have that, then I think you can win a referendum—

Electoral Reform committee  —at the next election.

Electoral Reform committee  It is absolutely central. As a matter of fact you just summarized the last sentence of the the book, When Citizens Decide, which reads: “So, even when citizen assemblies prove to be an instance of intense participatory, deliberative, and epistemic democracy, the setting in which

Electoral Reform committee  Absolutely. That absolutely killed it in Ontario.

Electoral Reform committee  It depends on how well you do.

Electoral Reform committee  If the committee does not like the time period, you should ask for an extension.

Electoral Reform committee  In my opinion, yes, any significant change in the electoral system should be subject to validation by the public in a referendum.

Electoral Reform committee  I think you can absolutely take to the bank the proposition that the more consensus this committee can achieve, the better chance you have at making change.

Electoral Reform committee  If you decide to have a referendum, you won't lose. You hand the problem to the people. You say, here's the best we can do, or here's the best a committee of Parliament can do, now you tell us. You can't lose on that one. You can lose if you say this is what we—our political par

Electoral Reform committee  First of all, there is of course much merit in what you say about planning ahead. Second, I don't agree that just because three parties promised electoral reform and 61% of the people voted for them, they voted for that issue, because there were a lot of issues being voted for. T

Electoral Reform committee  As Mr. Thériault says, you don't have to set the bar at 60%, where British Columbia did. You can set the bar at 50% plus one, or anywhere else you like.

Electoral Reform committee  You know, we're in a curious place. Why are we here? In British Columbia, it was because we had two perverse elections. The first election saw a government elected with less than the most votes, and the second one saw a government elected with 77 out of 79 seats with only 59% o

Electoral Reform committee  When Citizens Decide, from Oxford University Press, is probably the definitive book on citizens' assemblies. They're quite rare, and they tend to come about for non-partisan reasons, or when some political party gets the idea—as Dalton McGuinty did, or Gordon Campbell did, or a g