Electoral Reform committee  It's not only the easiest, it is the best. Yes, absolutely.

Electoral Reform committee  May I respond?

Electoral Reform committee  Very briefly, it's not that you're going to get 0.8% of an office. Everything stays exactly the same. The only thing that changes is the weight of the member when she or he votes in the House. That is the only thing that changes.

Electoral Reform committee  Yes. It takes you back a bit to the 1960s when we decided that we would go and demolish a whole lot of houses and have highways because it was efficient, and we'd get on with it. In retrospect, that was a mistake. The mistake is not recognizing one's heritage. We have a heritage here in Canada—indeed in the United States and England as well—from England of 400 years of the first past the post concept, and it's worked pretty well for that time.

Electoral Reform committee  Are you married? No? Okay. So you've not yet learned the real idea of compromise.

Electoral Reform committee  When you vote as a member of the public for a candidate, the candidate has at least two components: his own individual morality, etc., and his affiliation to a party. You don't vote for just an independent, because they're not effective. They're much more effective when they're part of a party.

Electoral Reform committee  You'll get over it.

Electoral Reform committee  I'll take the two for one because I don't want to cut you in half. Having extra MPs in Elizabeth's camp keeps her having a single vote, but we have these extra votes lying around. They haven't been elected; they are costly—you have to pay their pensions—and it doesn't serve any other purpose besides the same idea of giving Elizabeth the double vote.

Electoral Reform committee  You look at the party and you see how many seats they got. Let's say they got 40% of the seats. You look at the party and you see how much of the vote they got. Let's say they got 50% of the vote. You divide the 50 by 40, and you get a weight of 1.2.

Electoral Reform committee  It's good to see students who have done well.

Electoral Reform committee  We can have any criteria we like. We could have used the weighted system to allow for the disparities in size between ridings, such that if you come from a riding twice the size of mine, you get a vote of two and I get a vote of one to balance the fact that the ridings have different population sizes.

Electoral Reform committee  The reason why this is so interesting to me is that it actually asks the Canadian voters to accept the system that they are very happy using. In that sense, I don't think we're going to get a lot of argument from them in terms of changing the system. Change is always disruptive, and this one doesn't involve any change as far as the electorate is concerned.

Electoral Reform committee  It's a good question.

Electoral Reform committee  Since the system I'm recommending is exactly the same as the current system, with the exception that in the House each MP has a weighted vote instead of the unitary vote, the real drawback of my system is that I'm asking MPs to accept a weighted vote—no longer one man, one vote, but one having a weighting of 0.6 or 0.7 or 1.2, as the case may be.

Electoral Reform committee  Yes. The European Union, the Parliament of Europe, has weighted votes where each member has a weight that's proportional to the size of his country in the same way we do with our agglomeration council here in Quebec. The idea of having different weights in a parliamentary system certainly exists.