Electoral Reform committee  Professor Thomas and I agree on this issue completely. I don't think it's our electoral system that is necessarily meaning that we have fewer women in office. I do think it's the opportunity to vote for women that matters, and hearing from people like yourself who have made it al

Electoral Reform committee  I have not. It is not yet fully accepted for publication. It's in the second stage of things. It's out there in working paper form.

Electoral Reform committee  Oh, yes, certainly.

Electoral Reform committee  We certainly could have a made-in-Canada system, by all means. The distinction to remember is that any single-member district system will necessarily be a first past the post system, so it would not be proportional. You could have single-member districts as well as multi-member d

Electoral Reform committee  What I was referring to there was the research we did with an experimental study. It hasn't been tested in the real world, but we have a lot of faith in those results nonetheless. What my colleagues and I—I have several co-authors on the piece—think occurred is, literally, that t

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, I would assume so.

Electoral Reform committee  I have never really thought about it that way. It is an interesting point. Where my comments came from, or where my conclusions would have come from, is that when electoral systems are more permissive, which usually means that more parties will get seats, you tend to see more pa

Electoral Reform committee  That is exactly the point there. When we are talking about protest voting currently, we are talking about these small players, but perhaps there would be groups within our existing parties that would splinter off to create more specialized, let's say, interest parties, more direc

Electoral Reform committee  It is my job to study this stuff, so from my point of view there are lots of people engaged. My Twitter feed says that lots of people are engaged. On the other hand, when I speak my family, I have to explain what the heck I'm doing. I would agree with you that this is not a pres

Electoral Reform committee  For example, in the Atlantic provinces, we know that Prince Edward Island is going to have another plebiscite coming up. The impetus behind looking at changing the system again, because it failed the first time, is that they have very unequal results. We know our parliamentary s

Electoral Reform committee  I agree that women do want to be involved in politics, but I think there are still some systemic barriers to becoming candidates that need to be considered. I agree that it's not that the public doesn't want to elect women; we don't find any evidence of that. However, there are

Electoral Reform committee  Certainly. In a closed list system, the parties have full control over the names that are put forward. In such a case, it's very important that parties are cognizant of how many seats they're likely to win, and then to put a good, equal representation of various types of candid

Electoral Reform committee  Professor Lijphart's book was one of those that I learned about in graduate school, so it's certainly influential. We haven't come to firm conclusions in our projects. Some of the most interesting work we've done has actually been in Ontario. We ran a very interesting experimen

Electoral Reform committee  Some contacts can occur, certainly. It wouldn't be the type of contact we know now, where there is a single person, but if you think of it in terms of wanting to do constituency service, you have five people trying to serve the constituency, right? From the voter's point of view,

Electoral Reform committee  Yes.