Electoral Reform committee  Thanks very much, Chair, I appreciate it.

Electoral Reform committee  I think it's a bit of an esoteric issue, and that it's an issue for people who are of interest and are primarily people who actively engage in politics. I knocked on thousands of doors last fall, and I'm not sure anyone brought up proportional representation. It's not a grassroot

Electoral Reform committee  I think the mixed system provides at least the opportunities for parties to achieve that.

Electoral Reform committee  Here are the difficulties I see. With the current system, I think all the main parties have district associations that have the autonomy to choose their candidates. As long as you have that, and they each have one seat, then how do you say that St. John's East has to have a woman

Electoral Reform committee  I doubt it. You might. There's still a pretty powerful...if you look at what information voters are exposed to in making a decision on how to vote, then I think that an awful lot still comes back to them seeing the party leaders on television every night. They see them on social

Electoral Reform committee  On single-issue ones, I think that's a risk. That is why I think some kind of a threshold is probably needed. One of the options, I suppose, may be to say that you have to get elected in a couple of ridings in order to get additional seats. I think you could have criteria that wo

Electoral Reform committee  I think the regional question is pretty important. It's a huge country geographically, and there are a lot of regional issues, identities, concerns, policies, and so on that need to be accurately reflected. I still think we have to have a made-in-Canada one, but in trying to arri

Electoral Reform committee  I think there may be some affirmative action opportunities in some kind of a mixed member system.

Electoral Reform committee  I think those are bad outcomes. When you have a party that gets 25% of the vote and gets one out of whatever number—and I forget what number Saskatchewan has now, but a considerable number of seats with 17 or something—the representation in no way reflects how people cast their b

Electoral Reform committee  My understanding is imperfect to say the least, but from what I gather with these mixed member proportional ones is that this is, essentially, how a number of them operate anyway. I think Germany and New Zealand would be a couple of places where you have x number of people who we

Electoral Reform committee  In any election there will be people who win, and there will be people who lose. That's politics. If somebody votes for a party, and they may be in a district where the party they support has never had much luck, then they may live a long time before they see someone from a party

Electoral Reform committee  There are probably an endless number of possible ways of designing it. The mixed member proportional has good features. It might be possible to design a made-in-Canada one that's not exactly the same as any of those, and not exactly the same as what anybody does in any other coun

Electoral Reform committee  It would depend on the issue, probably. There may be some issues where it would—

Electoral Reform committee  I'd have real doubts about what kind of turnout you'd get. I don't favour a matter that is fairly technical in nature being decided on a referendum basis. That's a personal view. It's not something our party has dealt with.

Electoral Reform committee  I don't think you retroactively change what happened in an election. They ended up with three parties, and, as I understand it, there might have been a fourth, with seats in the legislature. We are talking federally here, but if they had some kind of rep by pop in Alberta, there