 I will say thank you for having me, and this is about my fifth or sixth opportunity to talk about this, and I enjoy these sessions quite a lot. It's a lot of curiosity, I think, a lot of interest, some confusion about how things are going, so I really appreciate the opportunity to try to clarify it a little bit. I'll say a couple things right up front. I'm not an advocate for one system or another, either as a status quo or for some of the proposed changes. I mean, I will vote. I don't have strong feelings one way or the other. In fact, I'm kind of indifferent in ways that it's not necessarily true. A lot of people who will talk to you about this, so I'm an equal opportunity offender in that case. If you like one of them, you're going to find something, I say, probably offensive because I am critical of all the systems, largely because I don't think there's any one perfect system and some a little bit skeptical about anybody who would claim other ones. Let me start, though, by inviting you to ask questions along the way because I understand that these aren't necessarily the clearest things and hopefully I'm giving you some clarity as we go through. Just let me say a little bit about how we've got to this point in British Columbia right now. This isn't the first time, we'll see nodding heads if I say this, that we tried changing our electoral system in BC. People remember in this audience, you all had the chance to vote, I'm sure, in 2005 and in 2009 when we considered electoral reform the last time. And that process in 2005, really that was the key part of it, was initiated by the BC Liberals with some design, I guess, credit to Gordon Gibson, the former leader of that party, who had proposed that the way to change our electoral system in British Columbia would be to be very citizen driven. So he devised something called the Citizens' Assembly. That was a randomized sample of two people from every one of the 79 at that time constituencies in the province who were chosen at public meetings a little bit like this. People would come and if they let their names stand, they could be drawn. One man and one woman from each of the 79 constituencies across the province. After they were chosen, they gathered here in the Lower Mainlands on a few occasions in a sort of learning phase where they learned about all the different electoral systems in the world, a deliberation phase where they thought about, well what would we want to be in that sort of ideal electoral system from their perspective, and a decision phase where they actually came up with a proposal that was then put to referendum in 2005. So they came up with a proposal called the BCSTV, or single transferable vote, which was a fully designed system for the province of British Columbia going forward. That was then voted on by regular voters in the 2005, alongside the 2005 election. It was a ballot essentially that went at the same time as that provincial election. The threshold there was 60%. So 60% of British Columbians had to agree on the proposal. And in addition to that, it's sort of double majority, as we would call it. They had to get a majority. All 79 constituencies in the province had to agree with it as well, given that we have sort of quite varying nature of the constituencies in the province that sort of affect rural writings, maybe a little bit differently than others. The outcome in 2005 was 57% in favor. So it didn't meet the 60% threshold. The 77 constituencies did have a majority. But that extraordinary high threshold meant that it didn't pass that time. So we had a second opportunity in 2009 with the same option on the ballot, and that actually didn't do nearly as well. There was a more organized no campaign against it, and a lot of the enthusiasm that maybe had been there in 2005 had sort of dissipated by then. And so we sort of forgot about it. 2018, 2017 election, we had a very tight result, as you recall. A short-lived liberal government following the election, and then essentially a coalition of now the NDP and Greens. And part of the negotiations between them was to consider electoral reform because one of the primary beneficiaries of a more proportional electoral system in our province, at least based on present vote share, would be the Green Party. They got almost 17% of the popular vote in the last election and got three of the seats in the 87-person assembly in Victoria. You don't need a math degree to figure out that three is not 17% of 87, right? So the present system discriminates pretty strongly against the Green Party, so they've been advocates of this more proportional system for some time. So the present government, the NDP government, did engage in a consultative phase. This was basically an open consultation. People were invited to submit comments on the internet or fill out questionnaires on the internet on how we vote consultation. There's about seven volumes of 200-plus comments from the public, and then there was a more elite-based kind of consultation as well, where they engaged some groups that had opinions about electoral reform. The 200 is generous. There were comments, like I looked through them all. There's, like, a one-line email that's dumb. That counted as a comment or consultation. Then there was a 40-page proposal by somebody who was an electoral systems hobbyist who decided to invent something and proposed it to them. So it was a quite varying quality of consultation. Ultimately, the Attorney General's office, David Evey's office, staff there wrote a report on how we vote report which proposed three models and the models that we see now on the referendum ballot that you have probably sitting on your kitchen table, because I assume everyone who's here wants to know what to do and hasn't already made up their mind and said to do it. The referendum questions were approved by Elections BC as being fair questions. By the standard of referendum questions globally and even in Canada, it is a fairly clear, straightforward one. The options themselves might not be especially clear to people, but the question itself is relatively straightforward. Those of you who recall, the two referendums on sovereignty in Quebec might think back or even go back and look at the questions that were asked in those two referendums. The outcome would have been fairly clear, but the question itself is a tangled knot that made it a little bit hard to understand exactly what people were voting for at the time and sort of seen as intentionally complicated in some ways or vague. The threshold this time is 50% plus one and the process is the mail-in ballot, which is familiar now to British Columbians who participated in a similar form for HST referendum a couple of years ago. We've had this mail-in form before, but it's not contiguous with a provincial election because the goal is that if we're going to make this change that it would be able to be something that could be in place for the 2021 election here in British Columbia. That is quite a significant difference in process. I have some opinions about that, but we'll save some of that discussion for a little bit later. Let me try to just give you a real clear sense of what you're being asked to do as voters in this referendum. So there's a two-part question, essentially, on your ballot. The first question is, should we reform the system? Yes to some form of proportional representation or no to keep the status quo. I've used my preferred term for it, single-member plurality, SMC, but we've probably been hearing first-pass-the-post FTP. I don't know, I have a six-year-old son, and TP sounds too much like toilet paper, and he would laugh at that, and I just don't say it, because if I even say the letter P, he laughs. So SMP, he'd probably laugh at that too, but single-member plurality is essentially what we're talking about. A single member for a given electoral district elected on the basis of having the plurality of votes at election time, so whether it's a majority or less, just more than anybody else, right, that they're the first pass-the-posts as the saying goes. So if you vote no on that first question, that's signaling of preference for the status quo. If you vote yes, you're saying you would like to endorse some form of proportional representation. And this is a good time as any to note that proportional representation is not a form of electoral system, it's a family of electoral systems, right, that all proportional representation systems are systems that try to make the results in a legislature more proportional to the overall popular vote. So all PR systems, all proportional representation systems are trying to find a device or a mechanism to take, you know, the public's preferences is expressed especially through their support for political parties and replicate that in the legislature. That's not really what first pass-the-post does particularly well, right. At first pass-the-post gives you a good idea of who is the most popular in any one of the writings in the province, but it tends to to pervert the overall provincial results. The Green Party is a good example. It's popular in Oak Bay. It means it elects its leader there. But, you know, that 17% in the rest of the province doesn't get them very far, right. So likewise, if you can get 55% or if you recall Gordon Campbell in 2001 had something like 67% of the popular vote, he can get almost all the seats in the legislature, right, because it tends to magnify that result. So if you recall that first Gordon Campbell government had had the ferocious opposition of two people, one of whom is very short, Jordan McPhail, and they surrounded her apparently with the biggest medius men in the BC Liberal Caucus to make her feel even smaller. They played hardball back in those days, but apparently, you know, that's the kind of result we can get. That might have been the motivation for the 2005 choice. All right, so let's talk a bit about these options for PR that we have. On the second question on the ballot, you're asked to rank one through three, or one and two, or just one if you want. So you have a lot of freedom in this part of the ballot. Three proposed methods of achieving a more proportional system in British Columbia. I don't think these are in the order that they put them on the ballot, but these are the order I'm going to present them to you. And so, the dual member system, the multi-member system, or the rural-urban proportional system. And I want to take some time just to go through each of those three, because I'm sure people would like a little bit more explanation about that. And if you look at the back side of your handout, that's what the proposed ballots would look like. So it's sort of... I thought you were looking at the side of the ballots. And I'll put those up here as well, but I thought it might be handy for people to use their hand. Yes? Do you know why STV was not included as an option? Well, there is an STV option in here, but they didn't want to go with the former, the BC STV option. But one of these three methods does include an STV element. So it is one of the ones... It informs the options. Like, I'm a teacher, I have to talk about this stuff all day. I just want to sort of tell you a little bit about what I could say is true of all three of the options that are available to you. So if you are a PR person, you like this idea of a more proportional system, then you really can't go wrong with the options. All three are going to be more proportional than the present first pass, the post system. I mean, that should be a given, but they all are going to be more proportional. And all do try, all three proposed methods, do try to give us some compensation for, I don't want to say absolutely unique, but the relatively unique nature of the province of British Columbia. You know, a big portion obviously of the people who live here live in this tiny little corner down in the bottom southwest and on the island. And then we have all this space that's like, you know, bigger than many European countries and so on that has a lot fewer people. But, you know, all systems, electoral systems try to, you know, we're electing a representative legislature here, right? So we want representatives from all those places, but it is quite challenging to represent, you know, the northernmost quarter of the province, right? It's not easy to get around between the communities that are up there. They're quite, you know, sparsely populated, but they are part of the province, right? And so all the systems that are being proposed try to compensate a little bit for that to make it not so hard to represent people in the less dense parts of the province and to make sure that they get some kind of regional representation because their goals, their needs can be quite, often quite different than, you know, the ones up below our mainland. You know, that, you know, transportation is a different question in the north than it is down here and all the kinds of other things you can think of. But, you know, things that cost money either way, we don't want to just sort of exclude those people from the system. So all three systems do try to provide, try to compensate for that a little bit. All do seek what we would call proportionality, try to get the system more proportional. And all three do focus on this phenomenon that is often criticized of first-past-the-post of the so-called wasted boats. Now, sometimes when I say this to people, they get all mad, and then others don't, so we'll see, we'll judge the room as we talk about it. But the argument goes, critics of first-past-the-posts, is that any vote that isn't for the winner is essentially wasted, right? So if you voted green here in West Vancouver, Ralph Sultan is popular enough in West Vancouver that your green vote didn't make much of a difference to, you know, the outcome in this riot. It added to that 17% that the party got across the province, but that's just to sort of kick in the gut to the greens who only get, you know, three of the seats in the legislature but know that they have more popularity out there. So people categorize that as wasted votes. In some of the sort of more dynastic provinces in Canada, this is even more of a problem. I grew up in, you know, Alberta in the 70s and 80s when the Conservative Party, the Conservative Party was very dominant in that province and essentially if you didn't vote for the PCs through decades in that period you were wasting your vote according to the critics of first-past-the-post because very few times were anyone elected other than late 80s into the 90s the Liberals and others started to do some things but certainly through the Peter Lockheed years it was, you know, it was Conservatives essentially the owner. All of the systems proposed try to keep local representation but there's no question that all of the models would have bigger writings, bigger constituencies than we have now. So right now the province is divided into these 87 pieces. All of the proposed models would probably add a few seats here and there but all of the constituencies themselves would be larger because all the different, you know, all the different mechanisms for proportionality would need the space that people are representing to be larger. The only exception would be the writings that are already quite large. So the sparsely-populated writings in British Columbia's north would probably say pretty much the same because they're about as big as you can make it and still have one person represent. They're just so spread out and so difficult to actually represent otherwise that we wouldn't dream of kind of putting them together. To not speak to that first point. All three systems proposed would give parties or what we could call professional politicians a bit more of a role in making decisions about who ultimately will be in the legislature. So right now most of that is controlled by local constituency associations. They're the ones that choose their nominee and they're the ones who are going to get other stand for election but all three of the proposed systems would have some role for people other than those constituency associations to make choices about who some of the representatives might be. That's probably going to mean a central party, so the leader and staff around the leader are going to have a bit more of a role in making those decisions. Now that's not to say in the present system we don't have a little bit of that going on already. There are parachuted in star candidates and all kinds of writings across the province. But this would be very likely in any of the three systems that we're looking at. Those are the things that are similar to them. Let me try to explain the differences between them. So the dual member system is a proposal that came from a Canadian math student at the University of Alberta. Essentially invented this proposed it to the people in the Attorney General's office. It's been out there as a model and they saw some value in it and decided that this was good enough to be one of the options on the system. What would happen under the present system the change that we would have if we chose dual member is that most existing districts in the province would pair up. So probably the ones next to each other there would be a boundaries commission that would have to make this decision just as it draws the lines already between the writings. So I've talked about this on the North Shore before I think when I talked in the district of North Van we figured that the city of North Van and the district one would be put together with West Van it's probably West Van and then whatever is next along the Sea of Sky corridor those would be the sort of natural ones that would be put together. But you can kind of try to figure it out just by looking at a map for most parts of the province the two that would make sense to put together. And so if you look at this picture which is included in the elections BC material that you've got about a week before your ballot arrives this is how they kind of see it in these denser urban areas these two would come together and you'd have two representatives these were suburban dense but not fully rural writings they would be bigger and then we again as I said would keep those really big ones like in the far north of the province essentially as is. So in the dual member system the ballot then I think I've titled it as the dual number one is that the one in the middle or no it's one on the right asked you to choose one party and the parties themselves list two candidates and the parties would make the decision about the primary candidate and the secondary candidate there's also an opportunity in that ballot as you see at the bottom for independent candidates so an independent could still run in this system and essentially the ballots are counted the same way we count first pass the post right now the person with the most votes in that ballot would get the first seat in the dual member of seat so it's a sign on a plurality basis if you get a big majority that's great but you just have to have more than any of the other parties on that list if a party wins the ballot in that writing then they get that first seat of the two dual members that would be representing that right so you can see the ballot there in front of you but let's hear party A party B party C and B party C only ran one candidate the other three ran two this is just wholly hypothetical as you might guess and then you had an independent candidate but party A wins we assume that got lots of votes because they accessed it and they sent it to everybody in the province so if they go party A and 1 they would get that first seat so the most votes in the writing wins the first seat and then the second seat is the really complicated part of this system the second seat is distributed to make the overall provincial results more proportionate and so essentially what we do is we're running a first pass the post's election with half as many seats so the first half would be elected on the basis of who wins because we have half as many districts now or a little bit more than half as many districts now and then we have to redistribute preferences essentially for the remainder to get them to that popular vote share that the party's going because you look at that but now you're really voting for a party if your preference is the secondary candidate for your party it's not a guarantee that they're going to get that spot the most likely person to win any writing is going to be the primary candidate for the listed parties and even then of course they're not necessarily the one who's going to get it if their party doesn't do well so it really brings parties into this even more than we do now parties matter to the way we think about voting now but essentially they're asking you to vote for a party and the candidate element is kind of secondary to it so in effect you're not voting for person A right so you're really not having that option you're voting for a party but you're not voting for a party the reality for parties as they see it strategically I would think is that they want to make sure they have a primary candidate in their writing so they think they can win so a lot of the incumbents right now they would likely be primary candidates in the next election because they've already won and showed that they could win in at least half of the writing that now is going to exist so I hesitate to guess about Mr. Sultan he's getting into his 80s I think now but it's only a couple of years away and he still wants to run again if he did now you would see him and his colleague up to the seat of sky probably be primary and secondary listed on that ballot and that would mean if the liberals have strong support in this writing like I imagine they do then he'll get elected the question of whether the secondary candidate would get elected is harder and so you're not going to necessarily if your preference is for the secondary candidate all you can really express is the preference for the party that just so the person in your district or whatever your constituency if you get the second most votes in theory could be bumped by someone you do personal representation of percentages based throughout the province yeah and there'll be one of the people on this list no it won't be parachuted in the person who comes in will be I hesitate to try to explain this part of it because it is sort of a math problem maybe the person who got the fourth most vote for example in that area no it's likely to be a party that came in second in the area if the party on its proportionality is entitled to another seat because the person the way they'll distribute them is they'll give the first ones to the places where the party did next so let's say Sultan or the liberals get 50% of the popular vote in this writing the B party gets 40% of the popular vote in this writing based on what I told you this is the person who's going to get the first seat but when they go to do the math for the province coming in with 40% is really strong so you're likely to get that primary candidate from that way if somebody got 80% of the popular vote and the party gets 80% they're likely to elect both of these people because that's going to really strengthen their hand when the counting comes along so I think Abbotsford probably does this the species level support is really strong out in the valley they sometimes have 78% of the popular vote in some of those writings so that would be one of those cases it would be rare that both representatives for any writing would be from the same party but it could happen and it's more likely to be the most popular and the second most popular party in the writing would be the ones that would be represented as independent candidates well, independent candidates don't get any proportionality but if independent candidates win the first pass the post-element to this ballot they're automatically elected so that's actually where we would have an indeterminate number of seats in the legislature it would be at least 87 but it might be more, it might be less depending on how many independents run as a prognosticator one thing I see is parties sort of manipulating us a little bit that, oh, well this is an independent but he'll vote with us and it'll be okay because it might help them get two seats out of a dual-member writing but that's something to sort of sort out a deadline in a sense will parties conform to that kind of behavior or will they see that as a little bit of a risky strategy this may be going this is going back a step at this point before going through for it the writings that are going to be decided by the independent commission at some point after the vote it concerns me that for such an important decision on behalf of people in British Columbia why are the writings not already been determined that goes back to my process question as well is that we're not seeing nearly the same level of detail about what the proposals are I would be confident in the process being independent for drawing the boundaries because in Canada in general we have a superior process for boundary drawing to pretty much anywhere else in North America certainly would say in comparison to the United States I've had lots of colleagues who have served on independent boundary commissions and one of my favorite remarks was one of my colleagues who did it in New Brunswick he said I'm a tenured full professor the other two guys on the commission were federal judges he said if there's anybody I can think of in the country who gives less of a crap what some politician tries to tell me to do I can't think of anyone who's actually insulated from any kind of political pressure that way so that process is pretty bulletproof but it doesn't make it clear to people exactly what their representation is going to look like in the future and I find that problematic I do I agree that they didn't go any farther to say even hypothetically you know the government hasn't said that sea to sky and Westphand would go together I'm presuming that and I think it's a pretty strong presumption you know that's the kind of thing that is left on set for sure so I agree with you but it's problematic I think it was one last coming back to your question I think it's been answered so the second seat is distributed to essentially make it more proportional it is a complicated process it's the most math centered of it all hence the math student coming up with it but it would be more proportional one of my former graduate students has done some blogging about electoral form at this time around and in his simulations which he ran with some computer simulations he thinks this would be the most proportional system of the ones that are proposed this would get us closest to you know like 13% of them about 13% of the seats that sort of thing you know obviously with 87 seats or 87 to 95 seats you can't have a perfect correlation you know you're going to be a percentage point or so off in some cases but all of these systems as I said are going to be much more closer to proportional than the present systems is this good news anywhere no so this is a Canadian invention that is yet to be tested again one of the criticisms of this process right that we've kind of embarked on three options two of which are untested although they they're basically forms of systems that are out there but different for sure because of the amount of people that are in Vancouver greater Vancouver would they just be one constituent or would they link up with something else so I mean if you think about like for example Kerasdale where the leader of the WC Liberals is now Colchana I guess is called that would probably fit together with Chrissy Clark's old riding David E. is riding like you know they would almost in all cases pair up most of the ridings in the province are relatively similar in population size you know plus or minus about 10% plus or minus maybe 20% in a couple of the northern ridings they're over represented because they're hard to represent but you know Vancouver you know the west end one would match up with the most adjacent one that sort of thing because the numbers already I mean the most densely populated ones are the smallest so the west end is actually a riding you know you can walk around in like 10 minutes whereas up north you have to get a plane so we already are kind of confident because right now we represent population right so you represent those person sizes so the mixed member system is the one that we have some experience elsewhere to draw on it's used in a number of European countries so the way this would work is essentially we'd have two categories of MLAs rather than two representatives from each riding what we're going to have is 60% of the seats so about 60% of the present 87 would be drawn as single member ridings like we have now so bigger ridings right because there's less of them but they would be essentially the same and they'd be one on the same basis so you would vote in that riding that's the one in the middle right you would have a vote for your riding that's going to choose one representative and you also have a party vote which is separate from that and what would happen is we would have these ridings to see they're a bit bigger the northern ones are pretty much the same with a single representative but this green circle is we would break the province into five or six regions and those regions would be adjusted to make them more proportional so if there's regional support for different parties that's where they're going to get some of the top-up that they would need to make them more proportional in their result so your ballot has two choices one for a candidate one for a party on the basis of the candidate we just choose that plurality and then on that party basis there's some distribution of seats to get to proportionality so you can make two different choices and here you can be kind of complex in your preferences you like Jim because his kids played Little League with yours and he seems like a good guy you're going to vote for him but your heart is really with this party you can express that complicated set of preferences this time or you can say I want to split it because I don't like anybody to have too much power you could even go in that kind of thinking if you want to but you can have a complex preference in ways that our present system certainly doesn't give you that option a lot of people have complex preference but they have to make a simple choice in our ballot so the remaining 40% of the seats would be filled by those regional lists and that would match the province-wide popular vote on that second part of the ballot the list and this is true of list style PR systems is likely to be made by the party and you just have a kind of prioritized list from one to 40 or something and as parties entitlements for extra seats go down the list they just check off the names of those people who are going to be outside the green ring there these are extras they're going to be representatives for the whole region but they're not going to have this kind of community-based constituency-based representational role they're more party representatives than they are constituency-based representatives when you have a member ballot do you get a representative for less than? yeah so like I said the writing would be bigger the writing would be bigger but it would be a representative who would then have a constituency office but on that list would it be candidate yeah it's your district vote so that would be the first one yeah this is the person who's going to say they're the MLA for West Van Coover seat of sky country or something I would think that just kind of very loosely doing the math it would probably look more like our federal constituencies for the province because that's about the ratio actually of population size right now West Van Coover seat of sky is a federal district and the provincial ones are half that size so it would be something closer to that but you would have a representative who would have all the kind of traditional constituency responsibilities that would go along with that where the regions are and so on is a little undetermined same as the dual member man and who would be his second member so it's not a dual member system the others are going to be these regional MLA's so they would call them I don't know what they're going to call the regions but they'd probably say lower mainland Fraser Valley or they'd probably say Fraser Valley would probably be a region the island would be a region and they would have these extra compensatory members and so they would be kind of free-floating they wouldn't necessarily have to think of representing one small community but overall this kind of regional block for the province would it be independent or would it be associated with a party? they'll all be party MLA's because they're elected on the basis of what the party needs so there's no room for an independent independence could be in this mixed member system because they can be they wouldn't have to have a party label here because you can just have candidates that are independent because you're voting for but they'd have to win out of this system and the reality of independence as you probably all know is very poor opportunities for independence in our system now that's not going to change in fact parties are given more priority than most of these PR systems see that's the question you'd end up with a the district could be an NDP person and the local person would be maybe a liberal and there's consequences of how those two guys work together that's all my problem I think in a mixed member system you're essentially looking to your district member the person who's representing the rotting that you live in as your kind of constituency MP or MLA and the others are more about the functioning of the legislature than they are about being your person in the dual member system you would have the same thing but you would have two parties some people think that that would make them more competitive to be the best constituency representatives help their constituents the most with problems with the provincial government that's a possibility for sure that could happen but they certainly wouldn't necessarily coordinate unless they were very cooperative that's my whole point it would be sort of like the Senate and the Congress it might be but the way that parties will be in the legislature will be much more about the way they behave in the legislature which is already about which party you belong to the two different roles we're looking for from our MLA's is serving their constituency and then being part of the lawmaking process in Victoria it's already parties that dominate there and they're going to continue to dominate in Victoria for sure question back there I don't really understand how you're choosing your regional MLA I know you're picking a party but then who's the person who's going to be able to participate so the regional MLA comes from these lists that are created by the party so the parties could pass this process over to something local to say give us the six people for the list because there's six possible seats here so they don't want to give away that much power either and there might be people, activists, people within the party that they want to give some of that opportunity to so you can see people who they might have a hard time getting elected as a constituency MLA but they could get in as a regional list MLA because they're a bit crusty, they're not very good with retail politics but they want them in the legislature so these would be the true professional politicians that people might not think and this is an unsavory, potentially part of this proposed model the people tend not to like this part the BC Citizens Assembly hated this kind of option so they purposely chose something that wouldn't give this kind of role to political parties to be subscribed and then an idea for your region expressing that party preference and that's just going to get them closer to their proportional share the only proportionality we're matching is that vote in that first column on the ballot that I showed you so what happens in that district vote isn't counted in this so it doesn't matter what share of the vote they get in what parties get in that side so just if I hear what you're saying correctly these individuals who are on the party list may not necessarily have been on any they did not run as a candidate so they're chosen separately by the party but I mean we picked the parties so that the party decides who's going to represent so we've said that if the public's expression of support for party X is that they should get the end of the seats in the legislature party X will deliver candidates who can take up some of the space those candidates, those people's names will not be known before the election? they might be known they might make that list available it's likely, I mean it's a practice in probably most PR systems that those are available I mean the name recognition of those people won't be super high anyway if I told you that on the BC Liberal Party list which you know, he's Christie Clark's best friend he's the former chief of staff insiders would know some of those names but you know it would be unlikely that who would they represent? no, they're part of the region and then the party they're part of that bigger region bringing circle can somebody be both on the district candidate and on the party list hopefully they get two chances to get in that's a good question it's not super clear I mean I would think that that would be one of the things that they have to decide and that they probably would decide against but might not decide against so that you could give somebody two chances in that regard you're talking about leaders who tend to sometimes lose their constituency that would be the easiest way to make sure the leader I mean I don't know if anyone's had an experience of having a leader of the political party as their MLA it might be a better way to actually have leaders in the assembly because they're not often the strongest constituency MLA because they're often dancing all around the province and unless their constituency is in Victoria you know they're likely to not spend a lot of time there and so on I mean they could be popular in their writings but not necessarily very present in their writing because of their responsibilities even more true in the prime minister's writings nope I mean you have to they have to win that vote right so if you get candidate Y she's got to win the writing she's got to get that plurality in the writing and this actually this vote at least as they framed it here the ballot might be a little bit different than this but in this form expressing support for party C isn't counted in this part of it right it's where you express it here so I mean people we would guess that a majority of people would say I like candidate Y for party C and I like party C but you could be more complicated if you're like a really subtle person you know candidate Y is part of party C but party C doesn't win does that count that they still become oh so if you're saying you voted for this person and so yeah unlike the dual member system you know if you're the runner up in the district vote you're unlikely to get in the legislature right if you're the runner up in the dual member vote you have a good chance if you're party is doing well and you're one of the compensatory seats but if you come in second here you're not going to be part of that the list seats unless the question is would you have a spot on the list as a sort of second chance so my point is what if they do come in first candidate Y wins but their party doesn't win no but if candidate Y wins in this this seat is candidate Y's if you win in that district they're in even though your party doesn't win well I mean it's still a district by district you know contest right so I mean it doesn't mean you won the election it means that you won the seat but you need a majority of the seats to win the election right so that's the question I think you know I'm still lucky you can vote for a candidate in one party and then you want to vote for another party and that other party gets in does your candidate still win because these two things are counted separately this is counted whoever gets the plurality here wins the writing and the knees are imported into the overall provincial or regional popular vote and a decision is made about how many seats each party should get so that means my candidate in the end my candidate here may not indeed be part of the ruling party at the end of the election at the end of the election we just know who has seats based on the two contests so party B wins the district so with the candidate X who is party B are they the person that goes in for party B so I mean they're going as a representative of party B the list seats are going to be on that separate list so there's this extra list and if you look at this the ratio is about 6 to 4 so 6 constituency MLAs 4 list MLAs it's a 60-40 split across the province so if we're talking about roughly 100 seats there's going to be 10 of these 6 and 4 regions if we're going to have less or we're going to have bigger regions maybe it would be a little bit different but these are the people who won that district vote and then it looks relatively similar now when you say these are the people that is going down that side the candidate on the right side so these are the right side people these are the left side people of your ballot in that system for me? these are the district MLAs these are the districts you choose those the party vote is equal to regional the party vote helps to decide who those are going to be so party vote is a region yes on the left hand side I have a question about the party vote is it like a game of poker where you don't see the cards until the game is over it's not set it could be that it could be that or it could be like I said before it might also be we could have a list and we wouldn't recognize it then we have the election and then we say I lied here's my hand it is possible to do that that's probably why I would think that the choice would be to have an open list so it's up to us but I don't think the parties would draw a list in ways that would be especially informative to people other than they would be a promise there would be people who you could say oh look at number one the person that the BC level has put first is the disgraced former cabinet minister or something that could hurt them in the election so they wouldn't probably put a disgraced former cabinet minister at the top because that would hurt them that somebody who couldn't get elected is writing but they might put people on there who the average voter hasn't heard of us and isn't going to be out actively campaigning because it's more about how the party does than about how they do in terms of their role they might be workhorses of the party they'll be workhorses of the party but they'll be real back room types for the most part they're less likely to be people who have put themselves out there you can see advantages to that too, that these are people who are committed policy people not great at communicating with people in coffee shops but smart as a button and all that sort of stuff there's advantages and disadvantages for sure we've got lots of questions I want to move on to the last one before we go but I'll take that one back I was just thinking if a district vote would it be fairer to say that you've got a candidate W, X, Y and Z that may or may not be part of the party but you're looking at it so that they are essentially independent candidates who just happen to be a member of the liberals or the MVP or whatever and then when you get to the party vote you're saying okay, I'm voting for the party not for an individual yeah, I think that's what I tried to be fair to buy in terms of when you're looking at this ballot as a kind of complicated guy that I look like you are is that you, you know I like, like I said, I like this candidate because I know them and their family they're a good person, I can't stand the party can't believe he's running for that party but I'm happy if that person is our district MLA and then you say, but my real party preference is the other party and this ballot would allow you to express that kind of complicated preference that you could say I like one candidate but I like the other party better as I said, most voters are probably just going to go X, X match up their candidate and party preference but this isn't even clear that this would be the form of the ballot we get in the mixed member system, we can have a different style for that as well I could have one just where it's based on this and they share the party vote based on what happens in this district election or generous presumption I see lots of hands but I want to be sure we get through all of them and we're running out of time so I'll answer any other questions you have but I want to say something about rural urban as well and I want to leave at least a minute to talk about for the first time so the rural urban system is really a kind of strange hybrid and again not a particularly practice system in other places so what it would be is a mixed member which I just described to you for the bigger parts of the province so the sparsely populated ridings that I've talked about a few times so single member seats just like in the mixed member system with some compensatory seats assigned by PR and then for the more urban and what they call semi-urban areas or suburban areas we have another system in the category of proportional systems so here's what ridings would essentially look like with the exception of the large ones we have a big multi-member riding for each part of the province so this is more of a kind of your question earlier Vancouver would have a like 8 person riding because it's a big riding the North Shore would probably have a big 3 or 4 person riding so they would vary in size but they would be multiple members representing them rather than single members or even dual members representing people in this and for the especially complicated preference people here you have a lot of opportunity to express complex preferences because your ballot is going to look like this one it's going to be a long list Vancouver might have 70 just like it had for all in the municipal election and you can rank them as many spaces as that constituency would have so the parties are going to run multiple candidates this one looks like a 4 person riding and so like a candidate party C is run 3 people here if you're like really loyal to that party you'll go 1, 2, 3 but if you want to spread it around that's perfectly allowed if you've done that in this sample ballot you can give preferences to all 4 parties the counting system for this is kind of get a majority then your preferences are redistributed to others it's probably it's not as complicated as the dual member counting system but it is a little bit complicated but it's essentially a kind of instant runoff so if you don't get 50% the poorest the poorest person the performance person is dropped and preferences are redistributed based on who gets 2nd place 3rd place votes and the rest do 2 votes beat at 1 vote you can only give 1, 2, 3, 4 you can't give 1, 2, 3, 4 1 guy gets 1 vote and the other guy gets 2 votes and 2nd place is easy the first thing that's counted is number 1 preferences if somebody gets 50% of the number 1 preferences that's the first thing that's counted and so then and then you go to the next highest level of number 1 preferences except the lowest performing person's preferences are redistributed so there are 2 becomes a 1 to add to others but 2 twos never beat so like 40% of twos doesn't beat 50% of 1 number 1 gets 40% of the votes and the twos get 44% of the votes so let's get half but it is more like the leadership balance we've seen Canadian political parties use where sometimes the candidate ends up doing the best because they have more 2nd place preferences than the frontrunners so first pass the post is a system that rewards the person who has general popularity but in a lot of cases I mean given we have 2 parties of the center left and 1 party of the center right in British Columbia often the NDP the the federal level but often you have 2 parties that are on one side of the spectrum and 1 party on the other that the 2nd and 3rd place might actually be more popular with people so that could happen Stephens he only won the federal liberal leadership that way that he was the 2nd place preference of a lot of people but he was a smart political scientist and that's why he did it in that direction it would be right to say under the rural urban belt because you have you're looking at multiple candidates to vote for and it certainly I think is harder on the voting public to try and keep track of who's a good person or a good party I mean a good example is and that's super clear there's not strong parties here in West Dan right but there is sort of some kind of sense of slates is that correct and Vancouver was more complicated because the parties weren't running full slates and all that sort of stuff so in Vancouver they had 71 candidates for 10 council seats and then a whole bunch of them were independents others were with 1 party and then not with parties and so the information but the reason this was preferred by the BCSTV by the citizens assembly is because it kind of neutered parties a little bit it made these candidates a bit more independent of their parties there's certainly no list in this system parties candidates could push back against their parties a little bit and say you know I'm a popular MLA it's not because of your party that I we might see a different dynamic in the legislature but this would only be for around 80% of the profits right the other 20% would have that other system so it's essentially two systems in what we got a question in the back of that one would you still be working against the first like it in various ways yeah so I mean since I've been in British Columbia I've done about a dozen election nights in the radio and I love doing it it's my favorite thing I get to do apart from teaching but we're always like and it's like you know at 9 o'clock and then we have to say it 10 o'clock and decided that all that drama will be gone because it's going to take like a couple of days to count a lot of them because they have to go through and redistribute preferences and so on so there will be it might split me out of the job as an election night analyst and it will hate them forever because it'll be in there because you know it's always when you watch them they're like well earlier results, early results and I'm saying early results because it does take longer to count them right and I assume at some point there'll be quite a gap between the talk and the people who are in their eyes it doesn't matter if person B gets you know the second person number two gets more votes than number one because the girl is going to get a seat right but I think they would you know who the first who won on first preferences perhaps like somebody who's most popular and second, third and fourth they would kind of rank them that way as the first seats that are filled in the multi-member district so you would have a sense of the popularity and you know I think that would be relevant to information for politicians too so the STV does and MMP do but never the two together right so this is this is a weird hybrid remember my first point on the first slide we got a weird province and that's what it's compensating for right you know so many countries where PR is in use are relatively small I mean they're comparatively small I mean many of the countries are smaller than the province of BC and have higher populations in the province of BC so they're denser and so this problem is not like Israel has a single constituency right it's just one constituency with a single list and you work down the list that brings in all kinds of other dynamics that people don't like but it works because it's a densely populated quite small place right Norway uses a former PR but they have equally uninhabited parts of the country but not even close to it as inhabited as ours are it's the Arctic so they don't have so population is in urban areas and it works but this is coping with that I think I have to do it back there I see the logic of redistributing the votes of the candidate who falls off the ballot but what's the rationale for redistributing the extra votes of the candidate who gets more than 50 percent so I think it's partly about the way I may mis-describe it you have to get to four in this case so when you have the first preferences counted and then you do have to drop someone so you take the preferences of the dropped candidate in their second so that's how you do it I'm not actually sure if I suggested the winners but that's what it says in the booklet that they gave us if an inducted candidate has more votes than the program their extra votes are transferred to other candidates and I don't understand so you just have to meet a threshold which is the the percentage to there's a quotient right you have to meet the quotient and so your extra preferences it's in the category of making every vote count so that if somebody gets 90 percent of the preferences that there's still some information in these ballots that we can use to get a more proportional result I think that's the logic which votes are the extra votes so yeah that's a good question you take which percentage it's not entirely clear to me actually that's a good question I'm not an expert on STD so that's my defense but it is it's not super clear how you pick those scenes that's right on the ballot itself are the candidates to list it out for better or by party? you have different ways to do it the way they did it in Vancouver this last time would be an example is random so they drew names and that's where you end up on the ballot because there is political science research that suggests being the first few really helps so it wouldn't be alphabetical I mean I don't think it makes this big a difference in our typical first pass to post selection where you have four or five candidates because you can see the whole list but when you get to 60 and 70 even there seems like a lot and again that makes it challenging because I was encouraging a lot of people who were going to go vote in Vancouver there was a website tool you go on and look at all the candidates and I liked these four and they would actually give you a map as to where they were on that big ballot of 71 it was this big to save time in the polling place it was a good idea to do that bit of homework because otherwise you'd be like what was this last thing? I could imagine couples fighting and all the rest of it so you could take a cheat sheet if you wanted to do you have to pick four? no you can express like one single and then if you're worried about redistributing it you don't like twos you can just pick one and that's it and that's true also of this referendum ballot if you only like one of the PR systems rank it one and forget about the rest you don't have to put the others on you don't have to rank it any more than one I heard and I think it's in the information provided to us that at a later date after the next election there would be another referendum to allow us to decide if this is, or allow people to decide is this going to continue or not and then I read something that a commentator said that they felt that this was not defined in any legislation to guarantee that it would happen yeah so you're close so yeah so 2020 the present legislation is bringing in this referendum so it's a referendum the electoral reform referendum act whatever it's called has this provision that in the provincial election in 2029 which is two cycles from now we would revisit the question of whether to have this so it is in the legislation but what the commentators are saying is that if there's a change of governments they could repeal that legislation they could take it out or the same government could repeal the legislation it's a kind of basic constitutional fact that you can't stop the legislature from doing things changing the laws otherwise we'd still have all kinds of terrible laws that we've had forever you can't bind future legislatures the presumption is that that would be a pretty risky strategy on a government's part to say we promised that you'd get to revisit this but we don't like that idea anymore so I think that would it's probably still likely to happen but it would be in 2029 two elections after the next one you'd have the chance to sort of do we like this or do we want to go back to the old one which is actually process wise might be the nicest part of the process in terms of making a credible commitment to reviewing this down the line and it would be the same simple majority of this we've spent a lot of time tonight talking about mechanisms do you have any observations on the results the results of the force treaty that goes on, the policy compromises and Berkeley spent too much trying to form a government and things in Italy and you read about Scandinavia so it seems there's more chaos at the end of it all I will be able to answer that question if I say my little bit about first pass the post because so this is a system we have now we shouldn't go without talking about its strengths and weaknesses also its priority is definitely a local representation that's what you're familiar with it's partly the lens you're looking through these other systems through it just from the questions and the concerns you have what it tends to do and this gets to results is it encourages parties to seek something in the middle because you want to have the lowest common denominator that's not exactly the way you would say it but you're looking for an average voter to support and you need to have 40% you can't get away with smaller than that and it would be better if you could have more that also tends to limit the effective number of parties we've seen a lot of parties come and go here in British Columbia if you don't think the BC Liberals are conservative enough you're out of luck really they kind of flash and they go away if you want to vote green you can and the greens are doing better here than anywhere else in the country but the system doesn't really give them a real entree into power so districts tend to be volatile in this version because 41 42 go back and forth it can make a big change the outcome of that is that we tend to have governments that go in pretty different directions from one another they have a different tone they repeal some of the laws of the previous government and so on but once elected they're quite stable so when in place they have a lot of opportunity to do stuff over their four year term they don't face the checks and balances that even Donald Trump is going to face over the next two years because they have a strong set of majorities and they're able to pass a lot going on but the first pass the post is definitely has a lot of capacity for wasted votes green party so on and for false or inflated majorities so you know 43% of the vote can give you 60% of the seats in the legislature and as you will hear with opponents of first pass the post say 100% of the pounds because if you've got a majority in the legislature you're essentially making all the decisions because our parties are quite strongly disciplined in Canada so all proportional systems are going to lead to some undermining of both this party seeking the middle and limiting on the effective number of parties most proportional systems have a threshold of 5% or so to be recognized in the proportional system so the truly fringe don't usually have success like the jack fooded dugs or whatever that tends not to be you know more than 5% but more particular kinds of ideologies can thrive in the system and the parties that we're familiar with are likely to fragment a little bit right they're likely to be I mean right now the BC liberals do have kind of more conservative elements and a more sort of centrist element they're essentially line up on people who are old people who are federal liberals are together in this party right now that might not be able to hold in a PR type system because they can both see where they could have a leader and 20% of the popular vote right and they would go that way so the result in most PR legislatures is more coalitions more need for compromise some people see that as a benefit because you have to find ways to compromise over the long term that's certainly the way that they would characterize say the kind of PR style of Scandinavian countries and so on but we can't put down all of the democratic success of northern Europe to proportional representation these are relatively homogeneous wealthy places they are going to have pretty good democracy anyway it's not just because they have PR so we can't make that kind of error correlation and causation they're not like that but there certainly will be more trading it will be less clear on election night in part because it takes longer to count but even after you've counted it's not clear where things are going to fall we get that a little bit in our system right now because we have more than two parties so New Brunswick is the latest example after us here in BC they elected the two major old parties but there were three MLA's for a new New Brunswick only party and three MLA's for the Green Party and that's changing the government fell right last week so the previous government tried just like the BC Liberals did now it's not clear where that coalition is going to go and that sort of stuff is going to happen so that kind of stability and simpleness of result is definitely out the window with PR but people see that as potentially an advantage so before I stop for the last questions I gave you this handout with this other thing on it about electoral values so I just wanted you to think when you go back to think about what you like about different systems this is my proposal for the way you should think about it if you don't like wasted votes SMP is not going to be for you I'm just trying to walk you through a couple of examples all three of the systems are better at dealing with that so that's not going to be the only variable or value you think about if you like complex preferences PR and FTP is not very good for you either these all allow for a little bit more complexity in your expression a little bit more in there based on the way that they drew the ballot as well diverse parties all more likely under the systems that we're talking about because that need or that imperative to have a big tent as we sometimes describe it in our single member system is going to be less pressing there's going to be more opportunity to get elected representing a less kind of centrist point of view my favorite was always I grew up in Alberta as I said I moved to the big city I grew up in a small town I moved to Calgary and I lived in the downtown riding and I was shocked at my first election that there were like four different Communist parties in the downtown riding Calgary there's like the Marxist Leninists, the Communists the Leninists and the Trotskyists and I was like I can't believe those people who are going to get like and get together have one candidate but they have these ideological differences I'm not a Communist but I'm not a Leninist for crying out loud and you're not going to get elected but we introduced a little bit of that dynamic that people who had maybe compromise to be part of a big party would have less reason to do that because they could still see themselves easily getting 5% of the vote and constituency size is pretty straightforward from what I described to you diversity of candidates the different systems are probably going to give you more opportunity for that dual member systems for example it would be almost inconceivable that parties would run two male candidates on their list but the question of where they put their preference the primary and secondary would be a different one and almost all dual member systems parties would run one female one male in every constituency whether they get both seats would be a different question right now in our first pass the post system to have diversity of candidates is really up to the parties and they tend to mirror the diversity of the constituency itself the Indo-Canadian candidates that we see successful in the lower mainland are in south Vancouver and places where they have a larger presence in the population likewise Chinese candidates in Richmond and so on under parties recognize that and they run candidates that fit that but it's up to the parties in our SNP system right now party control probably likely higher in all three of the systems stable energetic government your question less likely in all three PR systems likely to get a bit more instability a little more chaos and the role of party professionals that's what pros means fewer pros in the SNP system possibly more likely more and so on if you're thinking about those so you can kind of think about what your preferences would be and do a little mini citizens assembly if you want with that and see where you line up and when you approach your ballot remember you can rank these three but you don't have to rank all three you can rank one or rank another but if you vote no if you say you don't want PR you're still allowed to rank these so what's December the first everybody's writing in the calendar first pass the polls people said we like we're done yet first pass the polls no we like PR we have to pick one of these do they actually have to make that they're going to use the rank problems so we're going to end up having one of those three how do you break a tie well it's a ranked out 27% of the population voted and this is your question before 15% of the population plus one so I told you I had some problems with the process I think it's a little bit flawed that's part of what I think is a little flawed I mean I mean the alternative is that we don't have a constitution in British Columbia that says the legislature couldn't just do this anyway right so this is more consultative than that 15% of the population of BC is still better than 87 MLAs but at the same time our standard could be higher we could expect more so it will be disappointing if 20% or 30% of eligible voters do it we don't have a lot to go on right now elections BC is saying what's happened so far not a lot have been churned in about 1% of the ballots have been returned but mine's still on my kitchen table I imagine yours is too but we've also seen I've seen lots of pictures on Twitter of apartment buildings with recycling bins full of clean as well so it's hard to know 50% plus 1 of ballots turned in right and no we have to have a certain turn out now is the one that they have to pick the one that gets 50 plus 1 well because it's ranked they'll restrain preferences so that's why I'm a political scientist I couldn't help but rank on 3 because I do have a preference but I want to make sure that my 3rd place preference isn't the 2nd it will because it'll be re-stributed so the one that comes in last just to clarify if you want to vote for first pass post you just mark it and that's it you don't have to do anything with it you don't have to do anything else but you can I've had people tell me that I'm also supposed to fill in you can or you don't have to and you can actually leave it's understandable you can leave the first part blank and just rank in the 2nd part if you want but I can't see why no one would do that so I mean I can see why you would you could vote no and still want to rank what happens if you know you can still have a part if we've got to have it I want this one but if you just if you want 1st pass post you just mark 1st pass and leave it you can leave it at that so do the rural areas are the same amount of states as the rural areas or is it based largely on the relative ratio now but they'd be using that MMP system in the rural areas and then the STD in the rural areas the reason why you don't have you can't just have an STD across the provinces the writings for the least dense parts of the province would have to be so big too so you're not getting replicating that STD option for the north and so they're trying to have a more proportional system there I mean the reality is that right now are less dense parts of the province are over represented I don't think they're they're critically over represented but they are over represented because it's challenging to over represent them so it's an accepted sort of value of Canadian democracy that's true across the country in every province and it's true in our federal system PEI has four seats you know the whole province of PEI is smaller than the west Vancouver city's country population in terms of eligible voters we've got four times as many does the four seats that the province of PEI have in the Parliament of Canada mean much it's not even one percent of seats right so it doesn't critically over represent them but it gives them a sense of belonging that's a little bit different what about recalls are we going to be able to recall people if we don't want to all the district ones I guess the present recall system would still be in place but it would be hard to see that for example in the MMP system to be able to recall a party list person because of the I mean that said we haven't recalled anybody we threatened to and scared a few of them including usually the first person to get a recall petition against them is the leader of the party that brings in recall which is true historically as well, William Aberhart brought in recall legislation in Alberta and the first recall petition was against William Aberhart didn't succeed but decided that it wasn't such a good idea because a theoretical question it's five percent that's a minimum of the multi-member where does that five percent come from and is it with ten percent the bachelor or the other? it's a good question I think some PR systems have a lower threshold three percent there's been some cases ten percent would seem a little bit high frankly in terms of if you're trying to make a more proportional system there's lots of parties that have been in that six to seven percent area and six to seven percent in our legislature would be four or five seats and that seems a reasonable number in terms of an expression of points of view in the province that would be worth having there's no scientific basis for picking five over three over ten but five does tend to limit the more extreme for sure it's probably a conservative like a cautious threshold to have if you had a two percent threshold you might see a little more extremism possible but five percent is sort of airing on the side of caution I think just increase the size of government it would increase the size of the legislature I think all three of the proposed systems would add possibly as much as ten percent to the size of the legislature right now because the math is kind of hard with 87 and so to make these proportionals and it would vary from election to election so we would have a minimum amount as what we have now at 87 and then compensatory seats of different systems would add where necessary so as many as 95 in most of the cases and the range is pretty much in that for all three of the proposed systems would it add ten percent to the cost of the legislature but we do that now if you recall from my first slide we had 79 MLAs in 2005 we have 87 now we add to keep the population ratio are roughly the same as it is now so on the basis of every ten-year census we redistribute seats and we try to keep but we usually add because we're growing right so trust me I lived in Nova Scotia in New Brunswick this is a problem we want to have we're growing you know when your population is not growing you don't have to add seats to the legislature there's usually other problems that go along with that so I'd be happy to take over stagnant growth in a province where they haven't changed the size of those for years yeah the system will add a few and it's likely that that would continue although you can see a size where they could get to where they wouldn't need to actually add as many as the next census because we have enough in the system I haven't heard really the back of it we talked a lot about how we how we exercise how we win at each of these models exercise our ability to vote and select people and it sounds like the dual-member model hasn't been tested yet I'm curious from a political scientist point of view which model do you think would be the most effective to govern because when I'm making my when I'm voting I'm not just voting for how I would exercise my right to vote I'm also wanting to think about the cost of my government the effectiveness of your government I mean the most straightforward answer is that one of the things that the first pass the post system does relatively well is if there's a basically a consensus in the country for the province it can be expressed if we don't like it we can switch it and they can go ahead and do a bunch of stuff too some people see that as a weakness others see it as a strength of our system we can make relatively stark choices and push them through the Scandinavian argument is you want to develop consensus over time so it really is about it's up to you how you want to see consensus done is that a kind of consensus over the long term we get to by pushing back and forth on each other or is it one that you can kind of keep stable over a longer period of time and the PR systems will get you more in that direction if you like a government that makes bold choices and that you can either reward or punish for first pass the post is still a pretty good one because it gives them a pretty good buffer to be able to go ahead and push things through what happens in more proportional systems is they tend to have to compromise more with other parties but if you think of the big policy changes in Canada that people historically point to is great Canadian government things they tend to come out of minority governments so we have Medicare because of minority government not because of a majority government having a majority in the legislature helps you keep it so it's hard to say for sure it's a good thing to think about the tyranny of the minority the tyranny of the minority the tyranny of the minority I mean that's what some people are concerned about I mean right now in part of the time we have a three member green caucus that is essentially propping up a minority and so there's a lot of power for those three and most PR systems would have you have a small party have at least some power to dictate over larger parties to keep their consent right and so that's certainly possible in PR systems I'm way overtone but thanks for all the support I hope we've got some of theirs the more night as you may know the two party leaders are debating this on television and so this will be it's interesting because one of the flaws in 2005 was that I mean flaws was that there wasn't really a strong sense of where parties lined up on support or lack of support for the system this time around the two parties the government parties have very strong positions so Andrew Wilkinson the PC liberal leader is very much keeping first pass the post and John Horgan is enthusiastic enough about PR he hasn't said I don't think what system he liked but they will be debating it on TV tomorrow night so for a half an hour so you have at seven o'clock what channel PC England