Electoral Reform committee  That's correct. All I can say is that there's a clear interplay between the nomination processes and the electoral processes. Once people are in front of the electors, the electors will choose the people who they feel are best suited to represent them. You're clearly the one who

Electoral Reform committee  That's correct. I think it's come up in a couple of the conversations. The question is what is the right number: three, four, five members? There's a trade-off there for sure. Practically, in STV systems where we have district sizes averaging about four, we find 90% to 95% o

Electoral Reform committee  No, not necessarily. If a party is running multiple candidates, their first choice candidate may not have been elected, but they likely would have transferred to another candidate from the same party. That happens a lot.

Electoral Reform committee  I think the fundamental mechanism for addressing the question of how to increase representation of currently under-represented groups is encouraging multi-member nominations from individual parties. That is clearly what has worked in many countries. On the particular question of

Electoral Reform committee  Thank you again for that. I absolutely agree that the 50% who did not vote for you are not represented legislatively. I think it's important for us to understand that historically, the constituency responsiveness and responsibilities of MPs really emerged in about the 1960s. Fo

Electoral Reform committee  For the first 100-odd years of our Confederation, we did not have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms in its current form. Two important rights in there are section 3, the right to vote, and section 15, the right to equality. The first cases evaluating the effect of those new char

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, I'm sorry about adding that.

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, absolutely. You can go to our website, fairvotingbc.com, and take a look at that under the PR model. We have some maps there of what it looks like. I would say it's an extremely flexible model. It gives you a lot of choices. This was designed in a cross-country collaboratio

Electoral Reform committee  No, fair enough.

Electoral Reform committee  That's a good set of questions. First of all, I would slightly object to the original characterization of making seats match votes on a party basis. That's not really what we're talking about. I'm reminded of that joke about gravity: it's not just a good idea, it's the law. This

Electoral Reform committee  I think that's exactly right.

Electoral Reform committee  Certainly. Thank you for the question. Byron and I have worked very closely on these models, so we've had a lot of input back and forth on these. You are right that if there is a boundary redistribution process, there is time required for that. That would be required for every m

Electoral Reform committee  Understood. STV is the only model, with the exception of dual member proportional, which is being considered in Prince Edward Island, or a 50:50 MMP model where you are simply grouping together adjacent ridings.... The 60:40 MMP model would require a redistribution process.

Electoral Reform committee  The rural-urban model would likewise require defining new electoral boundaries. The rural-urban model does have potential, because the number of top-up seats is relatively limited, about 15% or 12%, if you use more multi-member ridings. You could, in fact, do essentially an STV g

Electoral Reform committee  Absolutely. Again, I think it all fundamentally comes back to the same issue of a lack of representation. As I am sure you've heard from many other people, with the way we do nominations in this country, we end up putting one person forward from each party. On average, that is bi