 It's my pleasure to welcome you all here this evening. My name is Camille Cameron. I'm the dean of the law school here, and we're delighted to be able to have this evening as our guest Elizabeth May. Among other things, we're proud to thank her as a graduate of the law school. Now, before I introduce Elizabeth, I'm going to ask one of our students, Peter Lesterons, from our Environmental Law Students Association, to tell you just a little bit about a project he and we have been working on. Peter? Hi, everybody. Yeah, so as Dean Cameron said before tonight's lecture, I'd just like to introduce a project that the Environmental Law Student Society here at the Law School has been working on for the past two years, and to describe how faculty have been embraced and have hosted tonight's lecture. So the initiative is called the Carman Consultancy. And through it, we seek to provide partners inside and outside the Dalhousie community with the opportunity to participate in funding renewable energy projects here at the school through making contributions to those projects that reflect their own emissions. And the first project we hope to fund using this model is a solar panel installation for the Dalhousie legal aid clinic. And through the generous support of our partners, we've raised approximately $26,000 over $30,000 a target. So for tonight's lecture, the ELSS and the Law School have measured the emissions associated with our speaker's air travel, ground transportation, and the use of this room. And the school will make a contribution to the solar panel installation proposed for the legal aid clinic, which will effectively prevent the release of an equivalent amount of emissions. So through this initiative, we hope to ensure that the lectures our school organizes on issues of democratic reform, social sustainability, and political sustainability, also respect and advance values of environmental sustainability. Thank you. Thanks very much, Peter. And that's just an example of the many creative things that our students get up to, which are both creative and useful and interesting and productive. So thanks a lot. And now to the main feature, which is our guest, Elizabeth May. She's no stranger to anyone, and you can tell by the number of people who've been drawn to this lecture, just how interested people are in what she has to say. She's had a remarkable career, and there's no way I can highlight all of it. So I'm just going to give a few tidbits. I've already identified one of the most important things, she's a graduate of Fidel Law School, 1983. She is a published author, has published six or seven books. Eight. Eight? Oh, yeah. I can't believe her. I'm not sure where she found the time to do that. I know of the name, Elizabeth May, because I'm from Cape Breton, and many decades ago, some of you will know, she was an activist around the spruce bug worm issue among others, and later, the Sydney tarpons. She really was committed to Cape Breton, and I do remember the amount of time she and others working with her spent on that issue. It was truly remarkable, and you had so many volunteers working for you for such a long time on that issue. So it really set a fine example for the kind of activism that is needed well to change the world. And as Elizabeth has said, more than one occasion, yes, one person can do it, and she's been trying to do it her entire life. Elizabeth is a member of the Order of Canada. Of course, in 2011, she became the first Canadian Green Party candidate to be elected to the House of Commons, and she now represents the riding of sandwich gulf islands. Among her books are Environmental Law and Sustainability, and one that interested me, and I think is certainly connected with the topic of the day, Losing Confidence, Power Politics, and the Crisis in Canadian Democracy, 2009. That's the most interesting one. I mean, this is why I've been asked about it. It was... You might tell us about it. That's right. What else can I say about her? I certainly remember, as I say, the Cape Breton connections. I'm glad to hear she still has that connection. But since then, she's certainly distinguished herself as a politician, as an author, obviously, even more so than I understood. She's a model for environmental activism. She's a member of the Order of Canada, and she's won a number of international awards, recognizing her activism and her commitment to environmentalism and to sustainability. We picked a topic tonight, which is going to be very interesting to hear what she has to say, and it's very timely, Democratic Reform in Canada. And I think she'll begin by telling us a little bit about the current climate in Canada and the possibilities for democratic reform. And those of us who heard her speak on the topic, everything from electoral reform to the functioning of the House of Commons and question period and enterprise and enterprise will know that she has a lot of views on these issues. So it's a great topic to have her speaking on today, and I will now turn it over to our guest, Elizabeth May. Well, thank you, Dean Cameron, and I'm quite overwhelmed by how many of you are here, and I'm noticing how many of you are here without chairs. So the first thing I want to ask is, does anyone have an empty chair near them? And if they do, put their hand up. And I'm also gonna ask Kate and Heather, please take these empty chairs from here and put them in the front row here, where there's space. And those of you who have any claim to weak legs, you can come first, and okay, so we're just gonna rearrange a bit. I'm sorry, I could have started this earlier, but it just occurred to me that I could boss my daughter and her friend, Heather, around more easily than grabbing random strangers. And we'll put them back, we will put them back. There we go, that's going well, thank you, Heather. And I also want to start, before getting into the meat of the topic or giving my diet the tofu of the topic of electoral form, I want to start by thanking Peter and the Student Society for carbon credits and for thinking through the carbon footprint of events. The good news is that my trip here will have double carbon credits because the Green Party doesn't, actually it's the only party committed to trying to be zero carbon. After being at Dalhousie Law School, the only other educational experience I had was studying theology with the goal of potentially becoming an Anglican minister. So from that, I just want to comment that carbon credits, I think, are the climate equivalent of the indulgences against which Martin Luther nailed to papal bull to the door. I mean, it's really questionable that we can count on carbon credits. The reality is we have to use less carbon, but I'm glad of them. I get carbon credits for all our travel and oh, there's an empty chair now and there's another empty chair. So two more lucky winners and did someone fill the empty chair that you identified good? Okay, sorry about that, everybody. I do this a lot in my own riding. I don't like to start a meeting until I've made sure absolutely everyone who can be seated will be seated. Those who live in my riding know that my standard talk is two hours. So, no, it's not. I plan to talk for about a half an hour and then open the floor for questions. So electoral reform. And thanks again to the Dalhousie Law School for inviting me here and thank you for admitting me. I have to say that in 1980, when I was admitted, it was less than a sure thing. I did not have an undergraduate degree. I'd been waitressing and cooking in my family restaurant for the period of time when I normally would have been going to university. My family moved to Cape Breton and immediately suffered financial reverses. A friend of mine recently emailed me seeing the news that there was the Facebook page of an enterprise in Cape Breton journalist saying, if Trump is elected, you can all move to Cape Breton. A friend of mine wrote and said, you could run a workshop, how to open a small restaurant in Cape Breton, open a big one and wait. That was essentially my life experience was that I couldn't afford to go to university because of my family's business. So when I was told that there was such a thing as a mature students program and that I could apply to Dalhousie School of Law without an undergrad degree and that I would have a hope and hell of being admitted, I was dubious, but I was hugely grateful and given two things. One, I had, of course, you write an LSAT and do okay and then you come down for an interview, but I was known already in Nova Scotia as someone who was campaigning a lot and the bud room issue was the one for which I was known. Fighting the pulp companies over Agent Orange began when I was in between second and third year law school. Dean Innis Christie was the one who said, it's okay, made a huge exception to let me write my exams in the last week of law school so that I could attend the discovery of the expert witnesses that the forces of darkness otherwise known as the establishment law community in Halifax had insisted that we, sorry, insisted that we show up as the plaintiffs opposing Agent Orange to have our witnesses discovered in the cities around North America in which they lived, Boston, San Francisco, Washington, DC, Vancouver. And so the discovery examinations for our experts took place in the last week, took place in the time when I should normally have been writing my law exams. So at every turn, Dalhousie Law School took care of me, protected the ability of someone who wanted to be a lawyer to have a chance to be one, and then I was hugely grateful as well to be admitted to the Nova Scotia Bar to practice law here with the firm that was then Kitts, Matheson, Green and MacIsaac. It's gone through lots of transformations. I think it's just now Patterson Smith, but you could also say I practiced with Pink Larkin because they mentored me through a lot of early law. In any case, I'm very grateful and it needs to be said that there isn't a day that goes by that as a member of parliament working in the House of Commons that I'm not grateful for my law school education because there's always this notion that there are far too many lawyers in politics. These days, not so much. We could use some more lawyers in parliament, people who actually read the legislation, for example. So, going back to where I was going to start. We're now in a period of enormous promise in this country because we have a promise. It was in the liberal platform and it's now in the speech from the throne. This says 2011, rather, 2015 will be the last year in which Canadians vote by first past the post. So first it was in the liberal platform, now it's in the speech from the throne that 2015 is our last election held under first past the post. This is an extraordinarily important commitment, but it could be illusory if it's replaced with the wrong kind of voting by which I mean, if the principle here is the principle that was enunciated in the liberal platform that every vote should count, then the notion of preferential ballots or ranked ballots simply can't be on offer because every vote doesn't count equally in preferential ballots or ranked ballots. The only systems of voting that allow every vote to count equally are a variety of systems all under the rubric of proportional representation. So what I propose to do in the time we have is sketch out where we are now in terms of the mandate for change, what I know of the current government's plans to consult with Canadians, what we can make of it and what I hope will be a call to action that will engage all of you in doing whatever you can to ensure that Canada becomes a country with fair voting. And that's a wonderful possibility and it's real. So let me start with the mandate. The mandate and the mandate letters, I should just say that it's extraordinary that for the first time in Canadian history and for a lot of you who are younger, it may not seem like such a big deal, but it is a big deal. It's the first time that a prime minister has made the letters to each of his or her cabinet members. It's the first time that those letters have been made public. So a mandate letter has always gone to every minister but Canadians didn't know what they were told were their priorities. You could try to read through the tea leaves. I have to say under what I experienced in the last parliament of majority conservative government, it didn't matter what was in the mandate letters to ministers because they knew very little of what was going on in their departments. They knew very little of the decisions that were made about their departments. And increasingly, and this isn't just something that was under the previous prime minister, there was less by degrees over a long period of time power has been accumulated in the prime minister's office and ministers in the correct hand government were not as fully engaged in running their own department as they had been decades earlier, even in the Mulroney cabinet. Cabinet ministers were responsible for their departments but the power of the prime minister's office has been growing and when you talk about democratic reform, one of the first things is not just how we vote, but how we are governed and whether every member of parliament representing their constituents has access to making change and further whether the executive within a British Westminster parliamentary system of government such as we have, whether the executive is actually the privy council of every single cabinet minister making decisions, working with their department, deciding what to take to cabinet to pitch for a certain policy or decision. That's cabinet government. And I don't think very many political scientists would disagree with me that we haven't had real cabinet government since Lester B. Pearson. In other words, the first prime minister to start taking apart real cabinet government was the current prime minister's father. And this makes for an interesting dynamic. It's not quite as fascinating I suppose as Star Wars and Cairo and Darth Vader, but there are elements of intergenerational mythology in this stuff, and someday someone will write about it. If it turns out I'm right, and that Justin Trudeau is actually dismantling the unhealthy degree of power in the prime minister's office and restoring real cabinet government. And the first real test of that will be electoral reform. So in the mandate letters, and if you haven't looked them up, they're fascinating. If you're concerned about what's going to happen to Canada's fisheries, look up the mandate letter to Hunter Tutu and see what the minister of fisheries and oceans priorities are as listed in their letter. Every single mandate letter says the government's priorities must be to establish a new relationship with indigenous people on a nation to nation basis based on respect. Every mandate letter mentions the climate crisis. Every mandate letter mentions issues of equity and the middle class. Every mandate letter says you as minister will be responsible for your own actions, restoring the basic principle of ministerial accountability. You are expected to do these things and you're expected to do them well, and if you don't do them well, you may fall on your own sword, translating a bit loosely what the mandate letters all said. The other thing, the interesting thing as well about what hasn't happened since Lester B. Pearson that's happened again now, most prime ministers in Canadian history since 1867 have not seen being a prime minister of Canada as a full-time job. Most of them, right up to Lester B. Pearson, had some other portfolio assignments, often justice minister, often foreign affairs, sometimes president of Treasury Board. So Justin Trudeau is the first prime minister since Lester B. Pearson to have kept for himself two portfolios, minister of intergovernmental affairs and minister responsible for youth. So all of that is interesting in the general rubric of democratic reform. The mandate letter to Dominique LeBlanc is also worth reading. He's the minister, it's not really a ministerial position in the way we think of it, but he's the government house leader. So he deals with how the government runs things in the House of Commons. And his mandate letter, I'm sad I can't see you guys, I just think I want to shut this down a little bit. I think I can, but I'll probably break it. All right, I'll probably break. I can move chairs, but if I move this, I'll break. No, I didn't, I'm not breaking it. Sorry, that's so much better, sorry. The mandate letter of Dominique LeBlanc says, no more omnibus bills, no more fake, throw everything in, 400 page bills like C38 that change 70 laws. Also in Dominique LeBlanc's mandate letter, it says no inappropriate use of prerogation. These are good things. We'll see how long they last. And I have to say, I think we will require legislative changes to create more barriers to a future Prime Minister reassembling the degree of inappropriate powers that were being exercised in the previous government. Now to come to the mandate letter I want to discuss tonight is the mandate letter to our Minister of Democratic Institutions, the Honorable Mariam Montsef. She is, by the way, the youngest minister in cabinet. She's 30. I think probably you've heard her life story. She came to Canada as an Afghanistan refugee at age 11 with her widowed mother and siblings escaping the war in Afghanistan. What a Canadian story. And she's now the minister responsible for figuring out if we're gonna have fair voting. Think about fair voting in Afghanistan when the Taliban said if we catch you with a purple finger, you'll be killed. And here is Mariam Montsef in charge of figuring out if we'll have fair voting. Her mandate letter covers a couple of topics including Senate reform. She's already put that aside with the, and we can talk about whether this is adequate, but I'm not gonna dwell on Senate reform long. Basically what they've done is create a nonpartisan expert committee to consider applications for people who believe they can bring something to public policy and serve in the Senate. So not partisan appointments, looking for people of real skill and merit. But she has been asked to create a parliamentary committee quote to consult on electoral reform, preferential ballots, proportion representation, mandatory and online voting. That's one of her responsibilities. Another is to repeal all sections of the Elections Act that make it harder for people to vote and work to ensure independence of the commissioner of elections. She's also been asked, and this was a surprise to me although welcome, to create some rules and create the possibility and look at options for how to run leaders debates during federal election campaigns. Yeah, I was pleased to see that one. Didn't expect it, we'll see what happens with the options. Right now it's a free for all kind of zone. So the one that I wanna talk about is what does it mean to have fair voting and what does it mean to say that all votes will count? The committee that's in her mandate letter has not yet been struck. It will be a special committee of the House of Commons. And in my conversations with Minister Moncef I've encouraged her to consider reaching across Canada as much as possible to hold as many meetings and hearings and discussions as possible. Because my starting point in this is that I'm afraid that having said 2015 will be the last election held under first pass the post. You can see the reaction from a lot of our mainstream media to say, well there's nothing wrong with first pass the post. Why are we making this dramatic change? This is a terrible idea. Canadians must be given a chance to vote on whether they wanna keep first pass the post or not. These same cries for democracy come from the conservatives within the Canadian Senate. Who say that if a bill comes to them from the House of Commons for changing our voting system they will stop it from going through the Senate. Imagine that. Unless they say there's been a referendum for Canadians. So there's some issues in front of us that are pretty important to consider. Why should we get rid of first pass the post? I think that has to be the fundamental question on which all of us need to discuss and understand why does it matter? I don't think very many Canadians know that of modern democracies, very few still use the system of majoritarian voting called first pass the post. In fact of modern democracies it really is the US, the UK and Canada. And that's it. Every other country, every other modern democracy uses some form of proportional representation for their elections. Although some use preferential ballots such as Australia where you can see the results in the lower house in Australia are virtually the same as you would have under first pass the post because as I mentioned earlier both of them are systems of majoritarian voting and they don't meet the standard of every vote must count equally. But I don't think a lot of Canadians have ever pondered that the way we vote is unhealthy. We're all used to it. That's one of the big advantages that first pass the post has always had when we've had referenda on changing our voting system. We had two referenda in British Columbia. The first one by far the vast majority over 58% of British Columbians wanted to shift to a system of single transferable vote which is a form of proportional representation. But that single transferable vote approach in BC although it was over 58% of British Columbians wanted it the government had set a threshold of it had to be 60% to change our voting system. It came back for a second vote and this time around tons of money was spent on very creative advertising that would convince anyone that single transferable vote was a system which would make your vote disappear and you'd never know where it went. Not the case but it was effective and that time we didn't even get the 50% in support of single transferable vote. So getting rid of first pass the post although it's now a commitment of the government of the party in power in their platform. It's a commitment in the speech from the throne may face resistance and certainly is facing resistance from the establishment media. The Globe and Mail has written many editorials. Margaret Wante has been vocal on this. Yes, I heard a chuckle. The same papers that are very committed to attacking this particular aspect of the speech from the throne are the papers that endorsed the conservative party in the last election. Of course that's not hard to find because the concentration of media ownership in this country is so appalling that virtually now doesn't include the Chronicle Herald which is still family owned but 42 of the country's main national dailies are all owned by post media and the Globe and Mail is also rather integrated with other media outfits. But they've all pretty much stepped up to say we shouldn't get rid of first pass the post without a fight. So if they want to fight we better inform ourselves and exchange information with our friends and colleagues and neighbors as to why getting rid of the first pass the post is a good idea. I've said it's rare that any modern democracies still use it. It's single, well there's several flaws with it. I think it's single biggest flaws is the only voting system other than a preferential ballot where a minority of the voters can elect a majority government. We have had false majorities now. We've had quite a few of them. Stephen Harper's majority was a false majority and this is a term that was coined by Peter Russell, Professor Emeritus from Queens University or rather from University of Toronto, Peter Russell who in a very good slim volume called Two Cheers for Minority Government describes the flaws of first pass the post and specifically mentions under first pass the post you can have a true majority, a false majority, a true minority or a false minority. The biggest risk of course, particularly when concentration of power is in the hands of, oh I was looking at, I was looking, oh there's Dean Christie, sorry about that, wrong end of the wall. The concentration of power in the hands of a prime minister in a majority parliament can be very sweeping indeed. And if we have a system of voting other than first pass the post, if we have proportional representation we would not have that happen again unless the majority of the electorate had actually voted for the party that's represented by the majority in power. Other, and since I've only, I regarded this relatively recently that I've been in politics, although it's been, it's coming up on 10 years that I first announced I was running for leader of the Green Party and that was the first thing I'd ever done in partisan politics. But being involved in politics, which is not fun, one of the things that I think makes it particularly unpleasant and a toxic environment is that the first pass the post voting system creates disincentives towards cooperation. It creates an atmosphere in which if you're the leader of, well I won't have to speak hypothetically, as leader of the Green Party, if I say anything that suggests I think the NDP has a good idea or the Liberals have a good idea, the media's on you immediately to say well what's wrong? That's not what a political party leader's supposed to say because if you say that of course, you're creating the risk that in an election when there is a we must not re-elect this particular person kind of scenario, which happens a lot in BC, next election it will be strategic voting to get rid of Christie Clark. In the last election in Canada of course it was strategic voting to get rid of Stephen Harper. So if you've said anything favorable about other parties, because of first pass the post, you run the risk that people who normally would want to vote for your party will migrate away to vote for something to say well at least they're not that bad. So it creates an incentive for nonstop vitriolic attacks against all other parties but your own. And I think that's unhealthy. I think most Canadians can't really believe that any political party has all the right ideas that no one has any good ideas outside the party you tend to favor most of the time. So getting rid of first pass the post and moving to proportional representation has salutary effects beyond the number one principled position that every vote must count equally. That's a charter protected right if you want to take it to the limits of we're all equal as citizens. We all have a charter protected right to vote. Should we not also be able to ensure that if you are living in a so-called safe riding you know the riding so they always talk about you could run a goat in a red sweater and we've heard this for years. That's only because of first pass the post voting. If you have proportional representation people have an incentive to turn out and vote even though they know the majority won't support the party they favor or the platform they favor or even the candidate that they believe is the best representative of their riding. Another number of other good things happen and Dean Cameron mentioned my book in 2009 Losing Confidence. My last book by the way was called Who We Are and it came out fall of 2014 and it's kind of fun. But the book about losing confidence and I picked up on a lot of those themes actually and who we are I did a really a lot of research into what would happen under proportional representation as a system and there's no question voting turnout goes up. When you know that every vote counts you're more likely to vote. The effectiveness of a vote is the way that political scientists speak of it. Another thing that happens in proportional representation systems is that you get more people voting and more women elected. You also see more ethnic minorities elected. So when New Zealand which is the closest example to Canada of a recent change New Zealand's lower house changed in the mid 90s from election by first pass the post to election by mixed member proportional. They decided to go with the system that Germany uses and of course a lot of greens were elected but beyond that the number of women in parliament went up and for the first time a Japanese New Zealander was elected and the number of Maori representatives in parliament went up. So you see a lot of changes with proportional representation. Now in the brief amount of time I want to take on this before opening it to questions there are a couple of different forms of PR and I want to touch on those. The only kind of proportional representation that I will vehemently oppose is pure PR. I don't think anybody in Canada advancing proportional representation would want pure PR. This is the system used in Israel and in Italy. So those are always the examples thrown in your face when someone says oh you wouldn't want an unstable democracy like that. In Israel and Italy you vote solely for the party list. You do not vote, there's no connection between your representative and a local community or a riding district, electoral district. So every other system of proportional representation has some place of nexus between an MP and the place they represent. There's a couple of different ways of doing this and there are no closed doors on infinite variations. There are a lot of hybrids out there and my hunch is that we will see more hybrids put forward during the consultation on what should replace first pass the post. The two main groupings are mixed member proportional and single transferable vote. So I'll try to explain each as quickly as possible. Mixed member proportional means that your parliament is essentially mixed in the way those MPs are elected to sit there. The bulk of the MPs will be elected the same way that we use now with straight voting, first pass the post, but at the end of the election that wouldn't end the matter. You then look at the popular vote and say well wait a minute, if the Liberals only got 39% of the popular vote then they can't have 55% of the seats. So there's a reserved area usually of sort of at large MPs where you fill in to say well okay, the NDP didn't get their fair share of seats. The conservatives actually didn't get their fair share so we're gonna adjust. Greens also, Block had a few too many given where they were in the popular vote because all, you see the first pass the post another one of its downsides is that it rewards parties of regional splits. So reform in Alberta got off the mark more easily because it had a rallying cry of the West wants in. A truly national party like Greens has a much harder time because saying future generations want in doesn't really compel people to the same degree. So first pass the post rewards regional split parties. So you go back, you say all right, this is how the popular vote went, this is the way the cookie crumbled with first pass the post and these are the MPs we've got. So we'll have another group that sit based on filling out the gaps, redressing the imbalances. That's mixed member proportional. And we can get into detail of how those names are chosen that's a whole nother issue, but we can talk about that. The other method is single transferable vote. This is a system used in Ireland and actually in Tasmania very few places use it but it's quite popular. And it was the system that the citizen jury in British Columbia wanted to use, the people's assembly that came up with it. A single transferable vote means you go in and you vote but your writings essentially are clustered. So the Halifax region, you have a lot of MPs from Halifax, you can get clustered but the Haligonian writings and say everybody can go in if there's six MPs that we're going to elect everybody gets to vote for six out of the following probably 18 to 20 people who are running in all those writings. So you can say well I really, really want to make sure that I elect an MP that I've always liked who's NDP, want to make sure that person is elected but I also really want to see the Greens get in so my first pick is going to be. So you can go in and you can start picking in a group and no one is, usually there's a threshold of maybe 15% assuming someone has 15% in that cluster of writings because it's more voters than in the individual electoral district so once you have 15% of the whole constellation of clustered writings that's usually considered elected and they go on to collect the second tier votes and so on and then you have elected a group of MPs who are tied to a specific writing. Some people, writing, cluster of writings, some people also advance this system as a benefit because if you as a constituent go to one of the MPs who represents your general area and they don't get on your issue to help you fast enough you can go to another and if they're from different parties you create a certain amount of healthy competition to create better service for the constituent. Single transferable vote also has variance. John Pierre Kingsley our former chief electoral officer was speaking informally actually before a Senate committee the other day and he suggested you know for Canada his personal preference would be leave alone the really remote rural writings because you can't cluster the Yukon and Nunavut and Northwest Territories in a sensible way. Leave them alone but cluster where you can. Cluster all the writings that make sense as a cluster and then you don't expand the size of your parliament and every MP has a connection to a local place. So we will have a lot of conversations. Stephane Dion has a system that's not unlike the one John Pierre Kingsley advanced. The Liberal Caucus by the way and this is where this is a real test of whether Justin Trudeau is serious about this not being a government run by the PM. When Justin Trudeau was simply Justin Trudeau my benchmate MP for Papineau we had a lot of arguments about proportional representation because he's personally not for it. He personally prefers ranked or preferential ballots. But when in the last parliament the NDP put forward a motion for mixed member proportional it's non-binding it's what called it's called a supply day in the house and opposition parties get to put forward a debate and a motion. This one was for MMP for mixed member proportional and it was a free vote among liberals. So Justin Trudeau at that point leader of the Liberal Party did not insist that his members all vote the way he wanted them to and it revealed that the Liberal Caucus as it then was was split pretty much right down the middle between being okay with supporting mixed member proportional and being against it. And some very powerful voices within that caucus including of course Stephane Dion's now Minister of Foreign Affairs is a passionate advocate for getting rid of first pass the post but not for ranked ballots and not for preferential voting only for a system of proportional representation. So it'll be very interesting days. I think we can expect, I would think with about a year on the consultation side working backwards from the 2019 election. We'll need legislation in place I would think 18 months before voting day to make sure that elections Canada has enough time to know how to prepare the ballots and what changes would be made by whatever system we're moving to. It's an election promise and a speech from the throne promise that we will not have another election under speech from the throne. I think you can take, I mean rather under first pass the post, I think you can take that to the bank but will it be ranked ballots which could see the Liberal stay in power forever. It's clear it's to their advantage to go to a ranked ballot or preferential ballot. It's not to their advantage to go to the fairest possible system. So one might say in politics that the question answers itself. If it's not to their benefit they won't propose it. This is the real question. Will we have Mariam Montsef as minister for democratic institutions make up her own mind based on the evidence, make a recommendation to cabinet and bring forward legislation that reflects the fairest system that meets the principle that every vote must count equally. I invite you to join me in rejecting cynicism because it's not our friend and on climate change as well, it's not our friend. Reject cynicism, reject being sure you'll be the smartest person in the room by always betting on cynicism and try to actually take them at their word. We want a fair consultation. We want every vote to count equally. We want proportional representation and we will expect and demand the new government to deliver. Thank you. So by my clock we have about 50 minutes, better part of almost an hour to take questions and chat and there's, I'm not gonna be good at spotting every hand because of the way people are organized. So there's a hand up from the gentleman in the very back and then a hand up from the gentleman carrying the white binder. So why don't we go one, two, three and after these three gentlemen I'll find three women. So you go back. Please make, I don't understand politics a whole lot but I'm really grateful for the explanation of politics and perhaps the changes that will come to us to give us food with thought. But as I look at my amateur reading of what's happening in various parts of the world, I'm terribly worried that if we have a situation where we have proportionate representations, we can drift into those kinds of patterns that some countries have, that elect people who have a particular hatred or a particular like or dislike of one group that threatens them or they perceive to be threatening and then we have their influence turning the other elected individuals into becoming like a cabal of fascists and I'm so worried about what's continuing to happen and I hate to say that the risk of being seen like a bad guy of what's happening in Israel and I think that they are a country of proportionate representation and I'm frightened that we could reach a point where if we had enough diversity and enough people who would dislike some group or another group and influencing exerting too much influence, we'll find ourselves in a really miserable working and not miserable. Well, thank you and I did start by saying, not to comment on the way you've characterized Israel, but pure proportion representation is the system that tends to encourage smaller parties and more instability. So for instance, even in a pure PR system, if you don't have at least two to 3% of the vote, you're not gonna be electing any MPs. But in a system of mixed member proportional, your system, or single transferable vote, you're running candidates across the country and they are attached to a riding. That makes a big difference and the extremists that are elected, I would have to say that when you have a minister, a former minister running for reelection as we did just recently in Canada and actually I've talked to a lot of pollsters who say this was a tipping point. This is when the conservatives lost ground like a landslide was when they announced there was going to be a tip line for barbaric cultural practices under the Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act. So the kinds of extremism and hate filled campaigning that we've seen isn't always restricted to small parties. It does have a lot to do with wedge politics, which is also a child of first pass the post, so called dog whistle issues. Things that get people incensed enough to go out and vote because another sort of fellow traveler with first pass the post is voter suppression, the desire to keep the people who aren't going to vote for you home while you incite the people most likely to vote for you with inflamed rhetoric. So I don't think, I actually think that proportional representation as experienced around the world has and certainly in New Zealand or in Germany we are not seeing extremist parties aided by proportional representation as, but we do see more cooperation. We see, it's true we see more minority parliaments but they governed for longer in New Zealand and minorities. The minority parliaments were governing in Canada because they achieved balance through coalition governments. We will see more coalition governments if we move to proportional representation. And I do think overall, I mean there probably will be an exception that proves the rule somewhere but overall the empirical evidence is that governments are just as stable or more stable, promote more reasonable discourse and reduce the risk of wedge politics by having a system of voting where every vote counts and you can vote for what you want without fearing that you're going to elect the thing you least want. And so the second was the gentleman with the open binder and then the third will be down here and then I'll go to you, yeah. Yeah, I'm sorry to talk. I always really appreciate your clarity in articulating the thoughts that I know a lot of people are already having. My question has to do with clarity so a big problem that's come a little in the past reference has been branding of the alternative voting system. And so I wonder when we're advocating for an alternative voting system what do you think the best way is for us to maintain clarity so that we can compete against the other side or to those who are single or just need that? Well, this is one of the sensitive areas about what the Liberals are promoting and it's interesting that Nathan Cullen who is the Democratic Reform Critic for the New Democratic Party, we completely agree on this with the Liberals which is really unusual. We don't think we need a referendum to make this change. We've seen so many referendums, we've seen deep pockets and the problem of clarity is particularly difficult when you're voting on changing from what you know to something you haven't voted with before. And I agree with Nathan's proposal as well that after a couple of elections under a new voting system, which the NDP I think are being a little too rigid around it, it must be mixed member proportional is their position. I think it could be mixed member proportional, it could be SDV, it just can't be ranked or preferential ballots and it can't be pure PR. But Nathan Cullen's proposal is that after a couple of elections under a new system we would then have a referendum attached to one of our national voting exercises that we're having anyway. And so with a national election, do we like the way we're voting or do we wanna go back to the old way? That is probably the fairest thing. It's interesting describing single transferable vote or mixed member proportional is really difficult. Putting pen to paper and describing it is difficult. It's not hard to vote, right? So there are fewer spoiled ballots in Ireland with single transferable vote than there are spoiled ballots in Canada today under first pass the post. So that's good empirical evidence that the Irish and there's no solid evidence that the Irish are all way smarter than Canadians. I would assert the opposite, but I'm not allowed to. So there's certainly no evidence that they're way smarter. They're about as smart as we are and we're about as smart as they are. It's my guess. They have fewer spoiled ballots. So going in to vote isn't hard. Counting the ballots isn't hard. Taste sometimes, figuring out whose government after the election is hard. For that I referenced, if you haven't watched it, the Danish series Borgen, lots of fun. But in New Zealand, when they first left first past the post and moved to mixed member proportional, the day after the election, it wasn't clear who was going to form government. And initially a lot of New Zealanders said, well, wait a minute, we didn't want this. This is terrible. How long is it going to take us to know who's going to be government? And it sorted itself out and there was a coalition. But as I said, when New Zealanders had a chance to go back to first past the post, they didn't. The other piece about why it's, I think, legitimate not to hold a referendum on this issue before the next election, besides the cost issue, and if we have a national election and attach a referendum to it, we're obviously going ahead and voting under the old system before we change it. But if you take the percentage of votes cast in 2015 for parties that wanted to get rid of first past the post, you don't have the false majority of 39% that Trudeau actually got. You add up the NDP votes, which were a lot. The Green Party votes, not so many, but they add up. So you end up with 65% of Canadians voted for a candidate whose platform included getting rid of first past the post. That's the commonality. If you want to add it up to get to 65%, then Trudeau must accept proportional representation because that's those votes that take him from 39% to 65 are the NDP votes and the Green votes together that were for very specifically proportional representation. So I go to the gentleman here. Yeah, thank you for coming to talk. It's fantastic. I think that Democrat performs something especially that people are either really interested and want to learn more about it. So my question to you is democratic reform kind of is, you can't talk about it without talking about parliamentary reform. And retired Dalhousie Prof. Jennifer Smith even argued that changes to parliament have to be taken holistically. You can't change the electoral system without thinking about its implications on responsible government. So my question to you is, in light of democratic reform, do you think that there's room for parliamentary reform to see things like the introduction of the three-language system that Paul Martin, Jr. tried to bring in for the proper government, things like that? Absolutely. Well, first of all, I think we are also experiencing parliamentary reform right now. So that's the mandate letter to Dominique LeBlanc. We'll see whether or not committees can go back to being nonpartisan. It's really interesting because it's a bigger problem than I thought it would be. I'm older than I look. And I remember parliament in the Moroni years because I actually worked in the Moroni government with the Ministry of Environment even though I wasn't a conservative. So in those days, when legislation went to committee, it was a very nonpartisan study experience. MPs from all sides of the House would roll up their sleeves. The Canadian Environmental Protection Act, which some of you I'm sure have studied, in its first draft, first reading, did not include the Priority Substances List. That was an innovation proposed, actually proposed from the side by Kai Millard who was then with Pollution Probe and fed to an NDP member who said, what a good idea. And everybody agreed that's a really good idea. So the committee as a whole recommended that it should be done. And the Ministry of Environment said, it's a good idea. So the entire structure of that legislation was altered in a very nonpartisan way, seeking the best possible way to go forward. We have a problem now, and I've discussed it with some of the committee chairs, most current MPs don't remember when that was the case. Anyone who's been in parliament the last 10 years has experienced not just whipped votes in committee, but scripted questions. Some of the worst of them to Christopher Micah here who testified before the Environment Committee and was subjected to a sort of a Joseph R. McCarthy, have you now or at any time been a member of Greenpeace? Are you truly nonpartisan? What do you think you're doing here claiming to be an ecologist? I mean, it was horrific. There was a lot of that that went on in the last 10 years. It doesn't belong in parliamentary committees. So democratic reform is gonna take some time because institutional memory has been erased and a lot of people don't remember what it was like to have committees behave respectfully towards witnesses and to listen and to consider what's the best course here. So I do think in terms of whips, I think more free votes. I mean, the Green Party policy is no whipped votes, but I'm obviously not prime minister, so it's hard to enforce it. I'm by myself once again. So, but there are a lot of other reforms happening right now in parliament. And I'd like to see, for instance, legislated, I mean, obviously, as the previous prime minister repealed laws he didn't like, like the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act pulled us out of Kyoto and so on. So a prime minister with a majority can undo a lot of the things that might be put in place for reforms. But I do think we should pass a law that says a prime minister must not prorogue parliament without a vote of whatever percentage, a majority of MPs must agree, or two-thirds of MPs must agree that now's a good time for prorogation. We need to put in place some checks on abuse of power. The Canadian system, and this is something that a lot of us don't think about, we think about checks and balances. Media talk about checks and balances. You'd swear that we actually had checks and balances, but we don't, right? That's what they have south of the border where the US Constitution was written by a bunch of people who just finished being revolutionaries because they had a deep distrust of abuse of power by the monarchy and they were revolutionary. So as a result of that, the US Constitution has checks and balances. Our system of government, the only check on abuse of power is self-restraint by a prime minister with a majority. So we should pass some legislation to try to control some of these things in the broader piece of parliamentary reform. So before I go to you, I've got two people that I've recognized for next question. So you and then you. What's up? Again, I'm just like everyone else that's grateful for coming to speak. We're in a pet topic with mine, actually. I'm very political in the sense that I've joined parties to help my friends get nominations, et cetera. But it really wasn't that I'd beg for one party over another. And I'm interested in an interface between the current political system and the amount of technology that we have to actually solve many of these issues quite efficiently and simply by asking for the participation of every Canadian. And you could actually have real-time data on exactly what people think. And for that matter, math solves many problems including equality. So you could use factoring, for example, to give people who have traditionally underrepresented and extra groups get re-represented properly. And I'm just curious, this is just my own thing that I think about. And I'm curious if there is another group of people that are trying to use the current technology and the problems of that in order to effect more solutions more quickly because some people are more urgent than they need at that point. Yeah. Well, there is a consideration to be going into online voting in this current round of democratic reform that's clearly on Marion Montsef's plate to deal with it. My concern about online voting and technology can solve a lot of problems, but I'm worried about software that might incidentally preference one party over another and we certainly had reports of that from south of the border. As long as there is a paper record that always exists that's verifiable so that there's not a risk of electronics being hijacked for partisan ends, then I think online voting can really assist. I'm not sure how the factoring would work to help groups that have been traditionally disadvantaged. I'm interested in that. There's a lot of things we can do to make sure that happens. Again, as I said, under proportion representation, the evidence is that parliaments that use PR have much better representation of groups that are traditionally underrepresented. And so that I hope would at least deal with a lot of that concern by encouraging people to run. And also one of the reasons that I've, I'm always asked why women don't run more. We're now, I think we're a titch more as a percentage in parliament than we used to be. There's certainly more women, but the size of parliament is bigger. So there were 88 women elected to this 42nd parliament, but there are 338 MPs. So one of the reasons I think women aren't attracted to running is that in watching what politics is like, and particularly when it's unpleasant and aggressive and mean, and as Libby Davies said once, parliament, House of Commons is the only workplace where bullying is acceptable behavior. And there's no sanction for it. In fact, the media says, well, there's a strong leader. So it's to fix that, to get more women to run. I think that's one of the reasons that PR helps is that if you can turn down the nastiness of politics, you'll encourage more women to feel that's a place where I could see myself spending my time. Not to be, I don't wanna be making vast generalizations about genders because they're always wrong in some degree because there are a lot of very fine men who are also feminists who also don't wanna go into politics. And when I speak of the problem right now that there really are many fewer lawyers than there used to be in parliament, there are a lot of people who in the past would have been recruited to run because they were exemplary in their community and much admired. Now, if the party power, and that's the other thing, I've talked about PMO power being illegitimate, the extent of control and power by political party back rooms, they recruit people who are more or less cardboard cutouts of the leader with a tape recorder to the back of their neck to repeat what the leader has said. That's not good representative democracy. So if we possibly could, and I know this is idealistic, recover the notion that serving in parliament, and it is public service, is a respectable occupation and one to which good people might aspire. I think the salary of MPs should be reduced. That would help. They keep thinking that they have to keep increasing it because they won't attract good people who could make more in the private sector. We don't want you if that's your motivation. And anyway, I'm ranting a bit off topic. That you're next here, this young woman here, and then, okay. Okay, so this young woman and then back there, okay. If it's in on the starter, I have another one in the team. You mentioned a link between, and, exactly. Yeah. So I thought you were going to expand on that. Well, the link is, did everyone hear the question? I haven't been repeating questions. I should have repeated it before. I'm sorry. So the question is, what is the link between having a system of proportional representation and getting greater gender, racial, and ethnic diversity in parliaments? And the link is one that really, I don't know how many people have actually figured out why it is. I have one theory. We know it is, right? Empirically, it happens. That the proportional representation voting systems have the parliaments with the Scandinavian governments, have the, oh, the highest proportion of women in any parliament is actually in Rwanda. But the systems of voting where there is proportional representation elect more women, elect more racial and minority, visible minorities, and more indigenous peoples are elected under systems of PR. One theory is, and this is one of the downsides of part of the PR system, is where the party constructs a list. And the list is how you fill in and mix member proportional. Okay, we're short, remember I mentioned, we're short a few NDP, we're short some greens, we had a few too many liberals elected in the last election, so we're going to fix that. Where do you go to find the names of the people to fix it? They have, it's become a very hot topic that those lists represent what the party wants. And if you want to have a system as I do, where the control of political parties is reduced, how do you accommodate that? And in New Zealand, I was talking to my friend James Shaw, who's the co-leader of the New Zealand Greens, the other co-leader is a Maori woman, but James was the one who was in Paris at COP, and we have a Green Parliamentary Association, a Global Green Parliamentary Association, because there's 300 MPs around the world who are greens. So I can exchange good information with them about how PR has worked. In New Zealand, the greens have, he said it's a tougher competition to get on the list through all the green members, and you have a longer process to get on that list, and it's very open and very competitive. And he said it's much harder than actually winning the seat to get on the Green Party New Zealand list. Still, it's a party list. So my proposal would be, why don't we just say, who came in the closest to winning? Who were the closest second-placed finishes in the parties where you're short a couple? Then you've got people who've put themselves forward, they belong to a community, but in Parliament they might not be solely representing that community, they'd be at large, but they would have been people who received a lot of public support as a candidate in their writings. And that would, but that might have the effect, who knows, of reducing the number of women. I don't know, I think a lot more women run in systems where Parliament is less and politics is less, a blood sport. I don't think we should refer to any system of democracy by any sporting metaphors whatsoever, and I particularly don't like it involving sports with injuries. Scrabble Tournament Sport. Now we're gonna go to the young man in the back and then I'll come down to you, Andrew. I just wanna say I really appreciate your kind of optimism about the current political system. I think that anybody who follows politics can be cynical because we have so many reasons, and it's nice to know somebody who is there kind of telling us that things are going okay, so that's really nice to hear. But my big problem with proportional representation that I've always had a tough time reconciling, especially being produced close, is the idea of regional discreportionalism, like if you're from Toronto, we don't have proportional representation, you're gonna have a lot of seats from Toronto. Or if you take a regionally in your SPV's model, you're from Halifax. There's more people gonna be living in the downtown core than might be living in, let's say, elder community like St. Preston, who might have totally different views. So how do you reconcile that some people who actually live in a different regional area are going to be marginalized? And don't you think that that's a bigger issue too in Canada versus Europe because we have such a large basket and such different communities? These are excellent questions. Number one, I think that there won't be any under, well, depending on the system you choose, Toronto won't have more seats under PR than Toronto has now under First Pass the Post. So the parts, and that's another, by the way, that's another big reason that you can't open the Constitution, well, you have to open the Constitution to get rid of the Senate because the way our system was set up in our Constitution, it's the Senate that's the bulwark for regional representation no matter what. By population, where people have moved, there are more seats, and that's why I don't think they should have added 30 new seats. I was opposed to adding 30 seats, but nobody wants to bite the bullet and reduce the number of seats in those areas of the country that have a smaller population than they used to. It's politically unpalatable to say, well, gee, the four MPs from PEI, and PEI as a whole is about the same population as my riding was in 2011. It's not popular to suggest for a moment that you'd go to one MP for PEI, which is why they added 30 in the last parliament. I still think it was, if you keep adding, I think it's ineffective and costly, but meanwhile, there won't be more voices for Toronto in a PR system than there are now. Now, your other point is also a very good one. What happens when you cluster? Well, you can also argue that those people from some of the smaller communities have a greater voice in picking all the MPs who represent Halifax, because with equal votes and you're casting your ballot for the cluster of folks that you've got there, it gives you a chance for saying, I really, you know, I like, it also makes every MP in that cluster concerned about the issues of the smaller communities that they didn't used to represent. So it could cut both ways. The experience of single transferable vote where it's used has been favorable, people like it, people also like mixed member proportional where it's been used and the finding the right balance. I think that's one of the really exciting things about this period of electoral reform is that we can design a system, if we actually get together as Canadians and have this conversation in lots of classrooms and lots of town halls and lots of hearings, we'll probably come up with a system that no other country uses exactly the way we use it because Canada's gonna be different from New Zealand and different from Germany, but the fundamental principle that every vote must count equally isn't different. And that's where I think we'll have a really compelling and fun experience in designing our new voting system, I hope. So, and besides I'm an incurable optimist, 10 years of the Harper regime, and I still stand here as an incurable optimist. Anyway, Andrew was, sorry. So I have a question in the front row, I will repeat it if I don't think it got heard all the way around and I'm overdue for another question from a woman before I go to Neil, okay, we'll go to you and then Neil. Okay. I would like to hear your thoughts. Okay, mandatory voting, one of the specific things on Mariam Monceff's list, more countries than you would imagine, actually use mandatory voting with a fine if you don't vote. One of my favorite parliamentary friends for years was Charles Katcha, who was minister of environment under Trudeau. Every single year in parliament his private members bill would be for mandatory voting, but with an option of none of the above. I think that would have a salutary effect, it didn't get very far. I'm not against mandatory voting, I prefer that it not be the only thing we do because if you have mandatory voting and proportional representation, fine. If you have mandatory voting in first, well, they've said they won't have first pass votes, but mandatory voting and preferential ballot won't get us very far. In Australia where there's mandatory voting, if people really want a protest vote, they spoil their ballot, but they have to go and vote. And I think encouraging voter turnout by any and all means is great. I prefer that they not be coercive means, but I'm not really, I'm kind of neutral on mandatory voting, I think getting PR is more important. So yes to you in the checkered shirt, yeah. Can you speak up? So in the beginning of your talk, you mentioned a call to action. And I just want to know if you could touch on what some of those would be. And I also appreciate your comments that not every party has all the right answers because I myself am a huge wing right supporter who also has a huge amount of admiration and respect for Rebecca Leslie. And when she lost it was, you know, salt and old wounds, it was pretty crushing. And I was just wondering if, you know, to combat that cynicism, what your, maybe a thought to invite her to that call to action? Well, on electoral form, to stick to that, and did everyone hear the question about what the call to action would be around electoral form? I would mention in a nonpartisan sense that you can find an organization called Fair Vote Canada. I hope you've all heard of Fair Vote Canada. They have a ton of information on their website. It's very helpful. We also have a primer on proportional representation on the Green Party website, but going to Fair Vote Canada, join Fair Vote Canada. That's probably going to be the best way to find out day by day, town by town, who's organizing, who's mobilizing, how do we get some form of proportional representation? Another thing you can do is if you dive into this and you begin to think, I really want to see single transferable vote, or I really want to make sure people see this downside of first pass the post. An underused vehicle for us all is letters to the editor. We've seen an editorial stance from the Globe and Mail, editorial stance from the National Post. They should have a lot of Canadians challenging their editorial stance, saying that's just wrong. You're using arguments against changing our voting system without looking at these examples. So that means also becoming a bit more aware of mainstream media than you might be now. We tend to go to those news sources, particularly online, where we know we can find reliable and interesting information, like checking the Guardian website or checking out what's on rabble. But if we only go to those places where we find people with whom we agree, we can't convince most people. And we have to convince the people who are reading the Globe and Mail, who are reading the National Post, who are reading the Chronicle Herald. So letters to the editor really matter. And opinion columns, an 800 word opinion column. And in your own, I mean, some of you won't be from Halifax all your lives, you've come from somewhere else to come to law school. Think about writing home to the local community paper about what you think is important. And as a young law student, what you hope the people in your community will also be thinking about. So an 800 word piece to a community newspaper that comes out once a week, you'd be amazed how easy it is to have a desperate editor looking for interesting content fall into their lap. They might ask you to become a columnist. What are you thinking of? Seriously, educate. We have to be our own indie media. Media in this country is in big trouble. So see if you can take that on board as well. And Megan's doing fine. She's got a really fun job at World Wildlife Fund. It's cool. I'm hoping that we can take apart the Sable Island National Parks Act, which is the only national parks act in Canada which approves industrial activity inside the park, allows the Canada Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board to do seismic testing inside the park and only tell Parks Canada about it later, do directional drilling under the park. That must be taken apart. And we also need to stop the current process because of Bill C-38, that the Canada Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board and the Canada Newfoundland Offshore Petroleum Board get to do environmental assessments of drilling in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, but unlike the NEB, which strangely, Stephen Harper changed in Bill C-38, to insist that cabinet have the final say. Surprisingly, ironically, allowing a Liberal cabinet to say no to pipelines, I hope. Meanwhile, there's nothing like that to stop the Canada Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board and the Canada Newfoundland Offshore Petroleum Board approving things like old Harry, deep water, oil drilling, approving seismic testing, all these things that I'm hoping we can get changed to protect Atlantic Canada's ecosystems. And we said, who did you say next, Dean? Oh, yes. Oh, I forgot, Neil. Neil, I'll come to you next. Okay. Actually, that we just moved host of comments to 338 MPs. Can you speak more loudly? Yeah, you had just mentioned that we had grown host of comments to 338 MPs and that you hoped that we, maybe there's not a whole lot of room to grow too much beyond that. Just curious under an MMT situation, do you see the number of MPs right now that are tied to the constituency decreasing and then adding some of the members to the list? Or do you see the 338 staying the same and then adding additional members per the proportional representation aspect? Yeah, I would hope the 338 stays the same. That's a lot of MPs. Although, I mean, the British Parliament has over 600 MPs and my friend Carol and Lucas, who became the first elected green in the UK the year before I became the first elected green in Canada and like me had to go back by herself. But she is, I mean, so she's been re-elected now, representing Brighton Pavilion, but she has to go into a House of Commons with over 600. I kind of, I like my odds better. I only have to do basic education for 338 other, 337 other people. So there's a couple of different ways of going at it. I mentioned Jean-Pierre Kingsley's proposal, which is novel. He only made it last week in a Senate meeting and he said, why don't we do it this way? Leave the Rural and Rote Riding's the same. Cluster the Riding's where you can cluster. That would actually have the advantage of not changing the number of seats that you need to have in the House of Commons. On the other hand, if you did want to keep the same number of seats and create a set of seats for at large, you could go back to the riding boundaries that we had in 2011 and take those 30 new seats and say those are the at large seats. But you know, there's ways to play around with it because it's not, that's another thing I really want to say. Some of the, I thought it might come into question. Some opponents to getting rid of first pass the post are trying to pretend there's a constitutional issue. Our voting system is not in any way protected in our constitution. It's not mentioned in our constitution. In fact, our constitution explicitly says that the system that they put in in the British North America Act would quote, would be only until the Parliament of Canada otherwise provides. So we know for certainty that if people who are raising the constitutional issue simply don't want voting reform and they're hiding behind the constitution. It's a bogus argument. So now I'll go to, we've got 15 minutes till I promise we'd stop. So that seems to me we've got time for three or four more questions, particularly if I give shorter answers. But all the hands up are from men. Sorry, it's 2016, so I have to look around. So okay, I'll go to Neil first and then the gentleman in the front's been very patient. And then there's the, yes, perfect. Okay. You mentioned reeducation of members of Parliament. I wonder if you could just say a little bit about watching the former prime minister if you can see him from where you sit. This guy sitting around and watching a lot of the work that he did get demolished. Well, so do I see Stephen Harper very often is what you're saying? Well, from where I sit, I can't see where he sits. But, and he's not in the House very often and I don't blame him because it's very unusual for any former defeated prime minister to stick around very long in a Parliament. He has shown up for some votes. And you know, as strange as it may sound, given what I've said about his policies and politics, I don't dislike him personally. I'd be happy to try to find a chance to see him and chat and see how he's doing. No, seriously, it's not easy for, I mean, at a very human level, I have empathy and sympathy. I'm really glad he's no longer prime minister. I mean, I'm overjoyed. He's no longer prime minister. Doesn't mean that I can't feel a sense of concern for what will he do next with his life. It's an interesting, yeah. But, and unfortunately, I'm not seeing what he did demolished fast enough. So let me share with you and I think I need some help from law school people here. Bill C38, the omnibus budget bill, was the single most destructive piece of legislation in Harper's regime. Well, C51, hard to beat that. But in terms of destroying existing laws, there were two omnibus budget bills in 2012. The spring omnibus budget bill C38 that changed 70 different laws. And the fall omnibus budget bill C45 that removed over 98% of our internal navigable waters from the Navigal Waters Protection Act. I am pushing very hard right now for the following solution because it's in the mandate letters for Jim Carr, Minister of Natural Resources, and the mandate letter to Kath McKenna, Minister for Environment Climate Change to fix the things that were changed and to Hunter Tutu as well, to look at the Fisheries Act and see how to fix it. For me, the solution is obvious. We should repeal Bill C38, C45, but we can't. In parliamentary terms, they are omnibus bills. They are not repealable. You have to take them apart each different piece and figure out how you repeal them. So what I'm advocating is that they bring back the Fisheries Act, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, and the Navigal Waters Protection Act as they were, wholus bolus, to 2006 levels. Because there were a couple of previous omnibus bills where Harper changed things than Navigal Waters and Environmental Assessment. Bring them back as they were in 2006, wholus bolus. I'm sure at least the NDP would agree that we could suspend the normal study and bring these back as fast as possible to close the door on any new projects going in the front end of an NEB review or environmental assessment review at the NEB, or an environmental assessment before any of the offshore petroleum boards or the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. That would stop more projects being bogged down in a bad process. And simultaneously announced, we will take the next year and a half for a comprehensive review, multi-stakeholder, to modernize the Environmental Assessment Act, the Fisheries Act, and the Navigal Waters Protection Act to the extent they need change. So without studying them, bring back the laws that were there before they were wrecked in C38 and C45. In this so far, and I haven't mentioned this publicly yet, I'm having a hard time convincing the large national environmental groups that this is a good idea. So I would really appreciate some help on this because I don't see any other way that we can shut the door on more projects being stuck in an unwieldy system so that when Catherine McKenna as Minister of Environment and Jim Carr as Minister for Natural Resources announced, these are our five additional conditions for dealing with the pipeline reviews that are before the NEB now in processes that don't work. At least they were dealing with things that went in the front door under the previous government. The longer C38 and C45 are in place, particularly C38, the more projects are gonna go in the front end of a broken process and the more entrenched C38 and bogus environmental reviews will become. So I'd love some help on that if people feel like it. So yes, okay, thank you. Specifically what can you do? I would love to see, believe it or not, I'm asking you to write environmental groups to suggest that it would be really good to bring back the laws as they once were. I think it would be good to write all the MPs. Anybody from the Atlantic region has a liberal MP. So pressure them to say, what can you do to get rid of C38 now? There must be a clamor, get rid of C38, get rid of C45. What are you doing? And the attention, I realized this when I was watching the press conference, I attended the press conference where Catherine McKenna and Jim Carr were trying to explain that they were insisting on full engagement of indigenous people, a climate test to be included in the pipeline reviews that have already started. The media jumped all over them. What do you mean a climate test? Well, what would have happened before C38, C38 got missed from the explanation. If the focus is on we have to get rid of the omnibus budget bill that destroyed environmental law, I think even reporters who don't pay much attention to the environment will understand it. But when the focus is on gerry-rigging and trying to fix with kind of bailing wire and scotch tape, a system that doesn't work, it's very hard to explain. We only have to bring in these additional conditions to try to fix the Kinder Morgan process and Energy East because everything's stuck in a process that doesn't work. So what we can do is a clamor writing to groups like Environment Defense or Nature Canada or College Action Center or Sierra Club is on board with this, but it would be very helpful and to MPs and letters to the editor to say, when are we getting rid of C38? We've got, and I'm very happy to see it, legislation to get rid of the anti-union laws that were brought in by the previous government. They're being removed, they're just being repealed. When are we gonna get rid of C38? Anything in the media, anything in social media, anything to MPs would be very much appreciated. And I've gone a little longer than I meant to with that, but I thank you for following up on it. And the next question was going to go to the lady with the turquoise scarf and then over here. And then you've been very, very patient. So we'll try to do these last three as quickly as I can. And just for fun, to bring it back to the Senate. I just, so you mentioned at the beginning how the Senate has threatened that they would block even if they make it through the House with a change to the voting system. I give them the limbo as no longer have senators. What is the, if everything goes according to plan or we can get this pushed through, what is the solution to their threats? I give them the current Senate situation. Well it's quite extraordinary. The question is what's the solution if the Senate follows through on their threats that conservatives in the Senate will block legislation for electoral reform? I think it'd be so stunning given how discredited the current Senate is. And the Senate has never, the only time the Senate has defeated a bill passed by the House of Commons without study and without amendments was Bruce Hire's Bill C311, the Climate Accountability Act, where the conservative senators had been told by Harper's PMO to kill it as fast as possible. They never, that's so appalling because although the Senate has the power to do that, the Senate over our entire history has always felt constrained. As I mentioned earlier, our checks and balances are self-restraint. The Senate knows that lacks legitimacy. It's appointed. It's not supposed to interfere with decisions made by a democratically elected House of Commons and block bills. Now the depending on how well this new nonpartisan Senate advisory process goes, there are currently I think 23 Senate vacancies. And one could hope that some of the conservative senators who are free minded and independent minded don't go along with the flow. People, you know, so perhaps there's, we can push back on it. But again, Canadian censure of conservatives writing to Ronna Ambrose or when they emerge, whoever's gonna run for conservative leadership to say you really can't expect me to ever vote conservative again if you're going to block something passed by the Democratic House of Commons. So it's at all levels raising how. So, yes, you and then you, okay. You've referred to the single-term vote in Ireland. But I didn't hear you say that in that connection they have multi-member constituencies. Is it the multi-member constituencies? Is that the same thing, is your notion of cluster? Yes, yes, it's funny. Back in 1867, when the British North America Act referred to the system of voting of the British Parliament, the British Parliament then also had multi-member writings. This would, single transferable vote and clusters would create multi-member writings in that sense. Yes. Yeah, thank you, Elizabeth. I just wanted to go back to the, I think you spoke a couple of times about the consultation process. Lee, who was just wondering what he suggested in terms of the process for that. Because I think he said, it hasn't been clarified what that process would be. So do you think there's value in all party committee approach and a broad travel consultation across the country as a way to go into the other subparts that have added this? And we learn from what's happened in the provincial that it would be C, B, D, I, and the representative. So what can we do in the short term to help make sure it is a broad open process? Thank you. And also in Ontario. In Ontario and BC, the process of, did the question carry, by the way, do I, should it be? Okay, yes? Oh, okay, so experience with consultation. What kind of consultation do I prefer? What am I recommending? All party committee, how are we going to get the views of Canadians across the country? And what can we learn from referenda where they were held in BC, Ontario, and PEI? So I think what I learned from the BC and Ontario experience, and I should have studied the PEI one more, was that although intuitively the idea of a people's assembly sounds very democratic and it sounds as if it reaches everyone, in fact what it does is it takes a group of people, almost like a jury system, and puts them in isolation and says, you go study this. So when they emerge and say, we have the answer, the public at large is left saying, well, what was the question? So it would be better to have now the New Zealand example, they had a rural commission and a retired judge who chaired it, and the travel across the country, the fact of meetings and hearings and taking evidence and listening to witnesses was covered by the media, was open, it allowed more people to learn through that process. So I actually would suggest to Mariam Monsef, which I have actually, first they're gonna have an all party committee. Will it include the so-called unrecognized parties, the block and the greens? Well, I certainly hope so. We do not have any right to sit on committees when they are standing committees of parliament, but a special committee of parliament is different. Nathan Cullen, again, democratic reform critic for the NDP has suggested that it must include the greens and the block, and that should be allowed to take away the liberal majority on committee. So interesting proposal. I think that it needs to be more than a select committee, a special committee of parliament traveling the country. For one thing is MPs, and I hope to be on that committee, I wanna be doing my work in Ottawa. You can't be on the road all the time. I think it would make a lot of sense at the same time as we have an all party special committee of parliament, create some kind of expert advisory group that crosses the country and takes information, maybe with eminent supporters of proportional representation. I mean, if Ed Broadbent would agree to do it, if you had an Ed Broadbent and Joe Clark, or God, I don't know if we get that kind of group, but if you could get a group of eminent persons from the political sphere who would go out and hold hearings to make sure that there was no part of Canada that didn't have a high level point of entry for people to come and say what they wanted. I think that would be great. As a last question to the general on the aisle. It's good to be in a room with you again because I met you years ago at the North Branch Library back in your spruce buzzword days. I've seen that down in the Elizabeth Valley. And I think it shows here, good, obviously law school came back, you seem to have all your arguments on your basis. My simple question, I'm going to chat a little bit, but my simple question is, even with first pass, the post, is simple, go in, mark your ballot. People don't do that, that's difficult enough. How are you going to make, how does proportional representation voting going to be as easy or easier than the way voting is done in that way? Well, it's a good question. The question is, how are we going to get people to vote? How is, well, ranking can be complicated, but I think it'll also be fun. I think publishing ballots and newspapers ahead of time so people can say well ahead of time what they're going to be looking at. And thinking through, oh, okay, these are my options. I can vote for that Green Party candidate I always thought was great, but I didn't want to risk carpet getting in. So now I can actually think about, or that I always like that NDP candidate. I don't have to give up what I want because I'm afraid of something. So I think the more public education in advance. And also when voting, when people feel they can actually accomplish thing with their vote, voting turnout goes up. I was thrilled in 2011 when my riding of Saanich Gulf Islands had the second highest voter turnout in Canada. It was a riding in PEI had higher, but we were just about our voter turnout in Saanich Gulf Islands in 2011 was just under 75%. And I was thrilled. This time around we had the sixth highest voter turnout in Canada. We were just under 80%. So that means a whole bunch of other ridings began to get excited about voting too. And I think a lot of what happened in 2015 was young people voting. I think ironically making it harder for young people to vote under the so-called Fair Elections Act had the effect, I hope, of a lot of people thinking don't take my vote away from me. I'm gonna have to work harder to make sure I can vote. Anything that encourages voter turnout. And I think we should be voting at the same level of voting as Scandinavian countries who they tend to vote over 80%, 90%. Grease votes at very high levels. Encouraging people to vote because you know you're gonna make a difference. I mean, that's the essence of it. When you feel your vote won't count. I mean, Rachel Notley was elected in Alberta with the highest voter turnout in how many years? A couple decades? And it was only 58%. When people feel that it's a rigged game, when people feel that's why Bernie Sanders is getting people out. People are saying, wait a minute. I can actually make a difference with my vote. I can turn out and change things because the sort of approach to politics, which is the approach of strategic voting, is this notion of it's a zero sum game. The same percentage of people are always gonna turn out to vote and those votes belong to certain parties. So a party like Green's should really not run anywhere because we have no business having the temerity of thinking that we can take somebody else's vote. We're saying, no, we wanna get people who are staying home to turn out to vote. So raising voter turnout everywhere is something that I think PR will do and I don't think it'll, as I said, I don't think it's that complicated. Once people see a ballot and realize this is gonna be cool, look at my choices. Whether it's, I mean, if it's a mixed member proportional system, the ballot is exactly the same. If it's a single transferable vote system, then it's different. But we'll see what Canadians decide. As I said, I think Canadians are at least as smart as the people in any of the countries that have proportional representation and they all figure out how to vote. The question is not just the intelligence of the voters but let's insist on more from the people for whom we're voting. Thank you very much. Thank you.