Electoral Reform committee  I have a solution which is that, instead of reconfiguring the ridings, you add a small top-up of 10% to 15% new seats. Then you can leave the rural ridings exactly the way they are. If you think that's politically viable, that's one way to move ahead with proportional representat

Electoral Reform committee  Can I speak to that? That is in fact the whole purpose of the rural/urban model. We haven't called it “rural/small urban/urban” model, because that just gets too complicated.

Electoral Reform committee  Small urban is included in the rural umbrella that we're talking about. The idea is to create a model that has enough flexibility that where there is felt to be a strong need to retain, more or less, the boundaries of a riding as exists currently, this would be possible. It would

Electoral Reform committee  I have truly been very impressed by the quality of the witnesses. In fact, I had the honour of summarizing nearly all the meetings for our organization. We also created a table showing how many witnesses supported proportional representation, how many were opposed to it, and so f

Electoral Reform committee  I can answer easily. How do you get away from that? In general, you cannot. Unfortunately, that is a fact. Scott Reid wrote an article about this in 2005. There have hardly been any countries that have moved from a system like ours to proportional representation, and it is precis

Electoral Reform committee  I'd like to add one thing on the other majoritarian system, the alternative vote. It worries me tremendously, because what that system does is create pressure towards a two-party system. As you move towards a two-party system, getting new reforms gets even harder, because the two

Electoral Reform committee  Yes.

Electoral Reform committee  Nine becomes eight. Okay.

Electoral Reform committee  Nine becomes eight, five becomes four, and five becomes four. That frees up three top-up seats, which is what you have in the other map. So you still have 19 and you've freed up three seats.

Electoral Reform committee  So this is the reconfiguration model of rural-urban.

Electoral Reform committee  I could give you the link. It's on our Google Drive. You can access all the maps there if you like, in colour.

Electoral Reform committee  We'll do that.

Electoral Reform committee  Yes, you're essentially right. There is a map for each of the members of the ERRE. Wilf is the one who did all of these maps. That is why I was frantically pointing to Wilf over here. You're supposed to have one map for MMP in each case, and one map for rural-urban in each case

Electoral Reform committee  That's right. This is an MMP-8; it's actually MMP-9, in this particular case. So the region is going to be—

Electoral Reform committee  It means that the top-up region would have an average of eight seats.