Electoral Reform committee  It's a very good question you asked. No system is perfect. If we could find a perfect system, every country in the world would be using it right now. All systems have their pluses and their minuses, and the big challenge that's facing you is to try to figure out a system where

Electoral Reform committee  No, I suggested a 356-seat Parliament with 210 constituencies and 140 proportional seats. That's a two-thirds ratio, and that would certainly increase the size of the constituencies, but it wouldn't be as bad as if you had to cut them in half. I sympathize with representatives

Electoral Reform committee  Thank you for recognizing my academic credentials, but I'm not a political scientist, just a regular citizen. For a long time I've been concerned that the FPTP system is unfair. It produces distorted government representation. I sat down one day and I started thinking about how

Electoral Reform committee  Just to say it's important that whatever government represents the people, the policies they bring in should be supported by the majority of the people, and that doesn't happen. You have 40% of the vote and government with 100% of the power, so they can do whatever they want. Th

Electoral Reform committee  Yes.

Electoral Reform committee  Okay. We want all votes to be equal in value, but in mixed member systems they aren't, because the losing votes don't have as much weight as the winning votes. In MMP, the vote weight ratio tends to be about 3:1. In my system, it is lower. It can be made 2:1 or even better. The

Electoral Reform committee  I would like to explain it to you more.

Electoral Reform committee  On the question of open and closed lists, I personally favour closed lists, because if the parties get to choose who is going to be representing the proportional seats, they can make sure they're balanced ethnically, gender-wise, and even according to other criteria like professi

Electoral Reform committee  No, I've never seen it. I'm no expert, but I've never seen it in anything that I've read. I think my interpretation in this regard is quite unique. In regard to what the superfluous votes are and what the instrumental votes are, it's quite a fascinating question. I explained my s

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, if you change the size of the ridings, you would have to decrease the number of ridings so that they would increase in size. Obviously, that would make representing the wishes of your constituencies more difficult. However, don't forget that the proportional seats in my mode

Electoral Reform committee  They probably wouldn't. How do I know what the Liberals are thinking? Clearly, there is a problem. You know, I am a former professor, and I have talked to a few people in the faculty of education here who know a lot more about politics than I do. I favour PR in some form, my fo

Electoral Reform committee  I welcome this question. Why don't people vote? There are two reasons. One is that their votes are going to be wasted losing votes because they reside in constituencies where their candidates can't win, and so their votes are going to be wasted losing votes, and two, they live in

Electoral Reform committee  This is exactly the problem, and this is exactly the problem that EVC solves because it eliminates the fact that losing votes and superfluous votes don't count. They all count in my system, and that's why I invented it.

Electoral Reform committee  Oh, absolutely it would have been more proportionate. Isn't there a disadvantage to that, though? The Liberals won 39.5% of the vote in the last election. If you had run it by some kind of an MMP system and that was the percentage of votes that they would have deserved, then th

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, they would. One of the knocks I have on MMP, and I personally like the MMP system—I think EVC is better, but the MMP system is good.... I think if we had it in Canada, you would never get a majority government because you're not going to get any party, at least in the prese