Electoral Reform committee  I would like to add that I wouldn't want to be the person proposing to Prince Edward Island that we would lose a seat or gain a seat.

Electoral Reform committee  Collaboration would be number one, the fact that parties will and have to collaborate and in that collaboration a variety of voices have to be brought to the table that are not there now. If you have proportional representation, in fact you have more voices there than just those

Electoral Reform committee  The first part of the ballot, of course, is first past the post.

Electoral Reform committee  Sure. It's not the system. It's really important to keep the difference between the system and how voting is done. How voting is done is one thing. The system is something else. The system has to be the whole package. No, it works fine in that area, because we have a second vote,

Electoral Reform committee  I have no idea how you'd have to work that out. You're going to have to work on it.

Electoral Reform committee  That was part of what I meant when I talked about parties. A well-functioning system that is proportional is going to make more demands on parties than anything else you've ever had. Parties will have to change their model of how they represent people, who they represent, and how

Electoral Reform committee  Online voting is going to encourage a whole other sector of society to get involved in voting, but we have to also see that there are people who don't have access. In P.E.I. we have people who don't have access to the Internet, and I'm sure that's the case in a lot of parts of Ca

Electoral Reform committee  We haven't heard that discussed that much.

Electoral Reform committee  I would also.

Electoral Reform committee  I already expressed the concern that we have about preferential voting appearing anywhere as an electoral system. It's a handy mechanism. It's a tool. It's an instrument. It's a way of marking your ballot and it's a way of counting the ballots, but it's not an electoral system. I

Electoral Reform committee  Right.

Electoral Reform committee  It's very obvious to us that in Prince Edward Island, everything that has to do with the political system belongs to two parties in the minds of people. What we're seeing is that the capacity of the two major parties to deliberately influence how people make choices in the commun

Electoral Reform committee  One of the concerns I have about people having access to voting is that P.E.I. has to be the centre of patronage. It's really hard to explain to people how difficult it is for an Islander to actually be free to vote because there is a lot of political party control over people's

Electoral Reform committee  First of all, thank you for the invitation to Cooper Institute to come and present this afternoon. It's wonderful to be able to make this presentation on behalf of Cooper Institute. I'd like to thank you especially for taking the lid off Leonard Russell. We haven't heard Leonard