Electoral Reform committee  Yes, MPs develop different kinds of what we call representational styles. Some are very policy focused; some are service focused. Some are focused on what we refer to as symbolism, going to local events, community events, trying to present themselves as one of their constituents,

Electoral Reform committee  Yes. The demands that are placed on MPs in dense urban ridings are a lot higher than those on MPs in other kinds of ridings. In rural ridings they have a medium number of demands, of service requests from constituents. The suburban ridings, where MPs tend to get an easier ride,

Electoral Reform committee  Electoral reform is all about those kinds of trade-offs. It's about competing values and having to make choices between them, so we hear about some of the strengths of SMP. Local representation is the big one that I emphasize, but proportionality with some of the good things atta

Electoral Reform committee  We got diversity on all of those things: in rural/urban ridings; in dense versus dispersed ridings; MPs who have been around for 20 years versus first-term MPs; MPs in safe party seats versus MPs in competitive seats. There were 11 in total, and we aimed to get diversity on all t

Electoral Reform committee  It would become my job to think about these things and to teach about them. Like a lot of people, I am concerned about Canadians' attitudes toward democracy, views towards democracy, and disenchantment with democracy. I can see some pathologies over the electoral system bear som

Electoral Reform committee  It's an undeniable strength of the current electoral system that it does lead to stability. The distortions we all criticize tend to lead to majority governments, and so we get majority governments that last for so many years. Some people see that as a strength. I'm not that conc

Electoral Reform committee  The alternative vote doesn't really affect what I was talking about with local representation. There would certainly be a local representative. That would be preserved, so it would be a real plus of the alternative vote as well. We would perhaps see that people feel like they ha

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, sure. It is certainly part of the political culture in Canada that you have a local MP. You know who your MP is. There is one of them. They are defined on the basis of geography. You have your storefront constituency office, and if you have problems, you can go to that MP an

Electoral Reform committee  Do you mean that turnout tends to be higher under a proportional system? Yes, I could find that.

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, definitely.

Electoral Reform committee  No, I'm not aware of any studies like that. It could be done. You could test people's satisfaction with democracy based on the size of the riding. I could look for those riding statistics, but I'm not familiar with them. It's also not just a single question, of course. There is

Electoral Reform committee  You've identified the central challenge of this. How do you get proportionality while maintaining local representation if you're not willing to add more members of Parliament? That's the unavoidable solution. I said, for example, to just add a bunch of list MPs, but don't take aw

Electoral Reform committee  I don't know about many more MPs. The more list MPs you have, the more proportional outcomes you'll get, but that's a choice that can be made. It doesn't have to be perfect proportionality. If you have a certain number of list MPs, you're going to get more proportional outcomes.

Electoral Reform committee  There are two ways you can address this question of turnout. First, you can compare a turnout between proportional systems with what we have with non-proportional systems. What you see is that turnout tends to be higher in proportional systems. That is there. That doesn't necessa

Electoral Reform committee  I didn't read your proposal, so I'm not totally sure about it, but I can respond in terms of MMP. The question is, how you would actually elect the list MPs. Is it by province or by region? I'm not sure. We do see situations where, if you have a region, you get a lot of candida