 Welcome, everyone. If you are here for the Fight for Proportional Representation, a conversation with Fair Boat Canada, you are in the right place. If you are not, that's okay. We still welcome you and hope that you will enjoy us. My name is Kirsten Elliott. I'm the director of philanthropy for the Center for Election Science, and I will be serving as your moderator for the evening. This is not like some of our other Zoom calls that you may have been on where this is like an interview style. This is going to be more of a presentation. So just so you know what to expect here. If you are not familiar with the Center for Election Science, we are a non-partisan nonprofit dedicated to empowering you to improve your community by changing the way that you vote. In particular, we work on emphasizing a method called approval voting because it solves many of the problems with our current choose one voting with no fancy new software or hardware and at no cost to communities if they really wanted to adopt it, they could today. But tonight's topic is a bit different. We focus, like I said, on approval voting and we have been working on that in single winner elections, but that's not the only fish that there are to fry as Raelle was just pointing out. There's also a huge need to improve multi-winner elections. And tonight I am really honored to be joined by Raelle Laverne from Fair Boat Canada to talk about the fight for proportional representation there. Before we begin, I wanna share just a few housekeeping items. If you have questions, you can put them in the chat or you can use the raise hand feature that is available by clicking on the participants button at the bottom. If you raise your hand, we'll let you ask a question live at the end. If you put it in the chat, I'll read it off for you. We will limit this to one question per person at first so that everyone has an opportunity to interact and have their questions answered. So just so you know that. We also know that if you're here tonight, you are probably as passionate, if not more passionate than we are about voting reform. And that's fantastic. We also know that sometimes that passion can cause us to get really excited. And sometimes that can cause us to say things a little faster and maybe hurt people's feelings. So we're just gonna ask that everybody be really respectful with your questions or when you're interacting in the chat and that'll be great. Another quick point is just that I know that we have people who are joining us from all sorts of places in the voting reform movement. We're gonna ask that tonight that we really limit the questions though to proportional representation and multi-winner methods and Fair Boat Canada's work. So if you have questions about other things, feel free to send me a message privately but that'll help keep us on topic. We do post these on YouTube afterward and wanna make sure that viewers are able to understand what's happening. Finally, if you enjoy this or you're excited about voting reform, I hope that you will consider supporting our work at the Center for Elections Science at electionscience.org donate. And I also know that Fair Boat Canada is doing some fantastic work and would probably appreciate your support as well. All right, that's my housekeeping. Now, the part that you're all actually here for, I am pleased to be joined tonight by Raelle Laverne, president of Fair Boat Canada. He has been engaged in the movement for election reform since 2013. As a former civil servant, he's now retired but working hard as ever as a volunteer for Fair Boat Canada. He comes to the issue as a citizen who cares about the health of our democracy while bringing his professional experience to the job. He has a PhD in political economy from the University of Toronto and has acquired a great deal of experience on the subject of electoral systems since joining Fair Boat Canada. He's here to talk to us about the reasons we badly need to reform our electoral system and the prospects for achieving that goal. Raelle, thank you so much for joining us, the floor is yours. I'm happy to be here. Yeah, it's definitely been a learning on the job for me, yeah, over the last few years but I do have that political economy background so it was a fast learning, I think, by and large. Fair Boat Canada itself is about 20 years old. It was founded in 2000 and we have online about 85,000 signatories of support. We have this thing called the Declaration of Voters Rights. So that's one measure of how much reach we've got we're from C to C but some of the provinces have their own organizations that are very, very close to ours. Quebec has Movements, Democracy Nouvelle, BC has Fair Voting, BC, PEI has its group as well. So that's one way that the movement is decentralized but any campaign in any province is going to involve Fair Boat Canada in one way or another even if in some cases it's financial support but in BC we were very, very active. That was the biggest ground campaign that we ever ran. This was the BC referendum in 2017, 2018 which wasn't nearly as close as we thought it was going to be in the end we lost that one. So that gives you a little bit of background on Fair Boat Canada. We advocate only for proportional representation. We're a very focused civil society organization and I'm gonna talk a little bit about the reasons for that. As I pointed out, it has something to do with I think some of the differences between Canada and the states. There's the storyline. So I'm gonna talk about why we focus on PR some of the problems with First Pass the Post from a PR perspective which is a little bit different than when you just talk about let's say the problems of plurality voting in single member districts. So that's a little different. The different kinds of models that we're looking at for Canada and then prospects and strategy for getting there. So first of all, why PR? That's my first slide. Certainly plurality voting is an issue for us as well. If you have a large number of parties running which in Canada we do. We have five parties that currently have seats in the house right now in Parliament and in Quebec, all five of those parties. In fact, we had a sixth in Quebec that had a chance to win seats but all five of those parties were vying for seats in Quebec in the last election which means that some seats were won with 30% in a few cases less than 30% of the vote. So that's an obvious problem with plurality voting for sure. We've got more serious problems perhaps because we have five parties vying for power with strategic voting, vote splitting, all of those things. We have very few single position elections in Canada and I think that's probably a pretty big difference with the States. If I knew more about the States, I could speak to it with more confidence but there are places in the States that elect judges, elect sheriffs. Obviously every state elects a governor. You also have president. We don't have any of those elections. The only thing we really have is legislative elections and they're organized more or less the same way. At the municipal level, we do elect mayors separately. So in a sense that's a presidential kind of system but everywhere else you're focusing, the focus of the election is on the legislature and it's how the legislators are elected that determines who is going to be the government. The government is formed by people who have been elected. Everybody in cabinet, unlike in the United States, everybody in cabinet was elected as an MP first and then becomes a cabinet minister. Now what this means as systems go and as it has evolved in Canada, it's worse in Canada than it is in the UK. There's a tremendous concentration of power in what's called the prime minister's office, the leadership of the winning party. And for that reason, for the next four years basically after an election, when the tendency is normally to get a majority government, you basically have one party and one prime minister's office that runs the show. It's Elizabeth May, the leader of our Green Party has called it an elected dictatorship and it can be pretty close to that. Of course, we've got independent media and all those things that makes it more democratic and Canada actually rates quite well on the democracy scale but it is a tremendous amount of power. And what happens then is that if the party that ends up forming government is elected with only 39% of the vote, you've got two thirds of the population that didn't vote for that party and yet they have no power basically for the next four years. We currently have in Ontario, we have the Doug Ford government, which is conservative and when the conservatives, when you kind of think it's mainly the progressives that split the votes. So in that case, you've got about 60% of the population that voted against that government, government can do whatever it wants. So you get that federally, provincially and municipally and therefore it's a serious problem. And that is a problem that is due to the use of single member rights. I have a little story that follows showing how that translates into seats. You probably already know that pretty well but it's those distortions that are really the big problem for us in terms of the quality of our democracy because of the way that it concentrates power and concentrates power in the hands of a party that may not have gotten even a majority of the votes. So basically in Canada, electoral reform is the name of the game. Proportional representation is used just about everywhere. You probably know that 80% of OECD countries use some form of proportional representation. Some of them are more proportional than others but by and large, if you're looking at Europe, you look at all Scandinavian countries, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, all those countries have highly proportional systems. You can see from the map here what it looks like in terms of the part of the world that still uses first pass the post. You've got Canada in the US, of course, you've got the UK, then you've got India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Those are the really, really big ones. And then you've got a whack of smaller countries which is why if you look at the share of countries that have first pass the post, it's actually quite as much as proportional but a lot of them are very small countries. The countries in red in Africa are all basically former Commonwealth countries. And then if you look right above South America there, there's a whole bunch of little islands that also have first pass the post in terms of population, it's very high because India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are really big countries as is the US. But in terms of the mature democracies in the world, 80% of them use proportional representation. I've added a link here. I don't know, Kirsten, if you put the link to this presentation in the chat box, if you did and if anybody's interested, you can get this document, look at the evidence or you can get it on our website. It's basically a literature review of what happens of a comparison between first pass the post and majoritarian countries. Majoritarian doesn't include just first pass the post and it also includes France which uses a two round system. It includes Australia which uses preferential ballots but so single member writing systems versus proportional systems, that kind of literature. They have found on almost every indicator that you can find that there are significant and often very important differences in the quality of democracy. If you look at just to give one example that's important to us today, particularly important to us today on the environmental score, long-term environmental policies, countries with proportional representation do significantly better than countries with first pass the post. And why? Well, it's because the Greens managed to win seats and once they get a voice and they can sometimes be part of the government, obviously there's gonna be a lot more pressure to do something about it. So I just wanted to introduce this. I obviously can't talk to this in any kind of detail but basically any indicator of the quality of democracy and performance including things such as more conservative issues like accountability, fiscal management, countries with proportional representation ballots their budgets better than countries that have first pass the post because they take a longer perspective on things. The environment for business tends to be better. So it's not just those very, very liberal issues is the term that you like to use in the States, whereas liberals are conservatives here in Canada. It's not just social democracies that do well with proportional representation. It's across the board. As you know, Germany with Angela Merkel has a relatively conservative government has had for a very long time. Keep pushing the button the wrong way. So I already talked to you about Farewell Canada in terms of our democracy, Canada rates, I think number nine in the democracy index worldwide. And that kind of makes our job a little more difficult in some ways but also makes it easier in other ways. We're already a pretty good democracy. For instance, we don't have a problem with gerrymandering. We have very strict controls on election financing. Of course the franchise, that's something that you've had as well but you know women first nations, the franchise in Canada is very wide. We don't have a lot of problems with voter suppression which I've also heard is an issue in the States. So we have a pretty good democracy but that gap between first pass the post and what we could be with proportional representation is large, it is significant and it's definitely worth fighting for. I just wanna point out we have had proportional representation before in Canada in the cities of Alberta and Manitoba where I'm from. We had it for about 30 years but only in the cities. And then in the countryside they had AV, the preferential ballot. And in those days the rural areas had more seats than cities. So a majority of the seats were not proportional and eventually political interests was such that it got reversed. And that's very unfortunate because it was a very good system. It would have been much better if they'd extended to the rest of the province. It's been on the radar for about a hundred years. Mackenzie King in 1919 had it in his campaign. And for a hundred years, the same thing has happened over and over and over again. When Mackenzie King was in opposition, he clamored for proportional representation. Then his party won a false majority, stopped talking about it. That has happened in Quebec at least three times. It's happened in BC, it happened in PEI and it's happened federally. So we're gonna talk about that a little bit. So multiple failures, we've gotta figure out how to get this thing to move one way or another, but the political constraints are really, really significant. Here's a little story and I was talking about hidden gems here. This little story works really well. I had another story also about asking people what they want in a democracy. And that also is very interesting, but I just don't have time to do that. But I wanted to go through the pizza analogy, which works really, really well in terms of helping people to understand that if you only elect one type of pizza, you're gonna have a lot of dissatisfied people. So in this case, you've got a pizza party and they're voting and four people vote for pepperoni, three vote for mushrooms and olive and three vote for double cheese. So the vote goes to pepperoni, you end up ordering pepperoni for everybody. Those people who voted double cheese are gonna feel that they were cheated. Their vote didn't count for anything. And the solution obviously is really easy. Solution is you simply buy four portions of pepperoni, three portions of mushroom and all of three portions of double cheese. And that is what multi-member writings are. You're basically satisfying different tastes by electing different people at the same time in grouped writing. So that's kind of like the basic concept. Now the question then is, oh, how do these pepperoni, these pizza parties translate into seats? Well, basically every seat is a pizza party. And if every seat were to vote pepperoni, which if preferences were more or less homogeneous across the country, you could end up electing 330 pepperonis in Canada. That would look like 338 liberals because that's the most popular party historically. Now that doesn't really happen because the preferences are not homogeneous across the country. So what do we do instead? Well, we elect all pepperonis in the Maritimes. We elect in the last election, right? All pepperonis in the Atlantic provinces, all pepperonis in Montreal, well, not Montreal, mostly in Montreal, in Toronto, the Toronto, Greater Toronto area, elected almost all pepperonis. And then we had a whack of double meats in, because it's this cattle country, in Saskatchewan and Alberta. And to some extent in Manitoba, it's all conservative basically. One seat went NDP in those two provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta. And then Ontario, then you had so pepperonis in the urban area. And then in the countryside, you elected almost conservatives. So these huge geographical distortions as well as the overall distortion, right? So what happened in the overall distortion in that federal election is that the conservatives won 34% of the votes, the liberals won 33%, and guess who won the election? The liberals with 33, that's called the wrong winner election. Doesn't happen very often, but it does happen. We have it in New Brunswick right now as well. And so the liberals with 33% of the seats have formed government. And because there's no one single party that holds the balance power, they're ruling as a minority government and doing so just nicely, thank you. They can do almost what they want. As long as they can find one party that supports them on any particular bill, they're good to go. So that's how it works. So systematically what you get out of this, and this is what you really need to know about First Pass the Post and how this all translates into seats, systematically the big parties, the conservatives and the liberals will get a seat bonus. And in 2019, both of those parties got a bonus. It's just that the bonus was way bigger for the liberals than it was for the conservatives. And what that means is that the smaller parties may win seats because of the geographical distribution of seats. So the Greens got seats on Vancouver Island and the NDP got a bunch of seats in BC, much less elsewhere. Systematically, the smaller parties are disadvantaged, except for the Bloc Québécois as a special arrangement. But the NDP and the Greens, which is one of the reasons our environmental policy isn't as good as it could be, the NDP and the Greens get severely punished by the system. In the last election, they got 24% of the votes, they got 8% of the seats. So from 24 to 8%. That is a serious distortion. And anybody who voted for those parties is royally pissed off at our electoral system as you can well imagine. So I've talked about some of the disadvantages of this system. First of all, it's not representative. False majorities, I mentioned that. Regional strongholds, I mentioned that. So, if you've got a whole region like Saskatchewan and Alberta that has no liberals, that means they have nobody in government to speak for them. And that can be a really serious problem. You get a pretty rigid two-party system and alternates of power. So it's either conservatives, liberals go back and forth. Because of that, you end up with what we call policy lurch. Trudeau gets elected, he undoes some of the things that Harper did. Harper gets elected, he undoes some of the things that Martin had done before. Doug Ford gets elected in Ontario, he undoes a whack of stuff that the liberals had done. So you get, this is policy lurch. Hyper partisanship, why? Well, because if you go from 34% of the votes to 37 or 38% of the vote, you've got a majority. You've got absolute power for four years. And all you need for it is four points. So you got to go after those swing voters and you go after them using contentious issues, right? I'm missing my word right now, so I'm just going to go ahead. And of course, voters that elect know what. Now, a lot of people don't understand about their vote not counting. I voted, it was counted, I lost. Well, wait a minute, why do voters have to lose? Voters don't have to lose. If you look at the pizza party, if you'd had those three types of pizzas, no single person in that room would have lost. But with the pepperoni election, 60% of them lost, right? So the only way that to really understand the issue of votes not counting is to understand proportional representation. As soon as you start thinking, okay, well, if I vote green, I'm going to help elect a green. Well, you're never going to think again that your vote didn't count. Of course it counts. Of course it takes a lot of votes to elect one representative, but every vote serves to elect a green or an NDP or a conservative or whatever it is. So that's the difference, that's the big difference. And those are the problems. So what makes for non-proportional systems? There's a lot of different kinds is single member writings. And that's what that pepperoni, that pizza party example shows really clearly. What that does is you have winners and you have losers. And most of the time you're going to end up with a majority government, which is why they call this system majoritarian. It's just kind of odd because you've got a government which was formed by only 39% of the vote, we call it majoritarian. It's called majoritarian because it creates, it artificially creates majorities, okay? So how do you get proportional representation then? There are two ways. One is multi-member writings. So that's the example that I used in the pizza party. So you have one pizza party, but you have 10 seats within that 10 times pizza or 10 portions of pizza that are up for election, not just one. But the other approach, which I think we need to pay more attention to is the top-up seats. So basically what you do then is whatever your system is, if it's not performing in terms of proportionality the way you want, you have what are called adjustment seats or top-up seats. And the purpose of those is to compensate for any deficiencies in terms of proportionality at the primary level. And you can do that in any number of ways. You know, we tend to think of mixed-member proportional. I'm sure a lot of people know what that is. That's what they use in New Zealand and in Germany. But you can use top-in in Sweden. They use what's called adjustment seats and list PR. And in Canada, we are advocating something called rural urban PR. And most of us who were involved in designing that system are thinking single transferable votes. So we're thinking multi-member writings, multi-member districts with preferential ballots and IRV in terms of method for counting the results. But if you want those regions to be smaller, so instead of having regions of 10 seats, which makes for a pretty big list with SDV, well, let's have them five or four the way they do in Ireland. And then in order to ensure greater proportionality, let's tack on a certain number of top-up seats. So you can see how it can work with different kinds of systems. And that's why I've broken it down to these two features that, these are the two approaches that you need in order to get proportional representation. Now, PR models for Canada. Canada in a way is similar to the US in that we have wide open spaces and also some highly densely populated urban areas. We're not, sorry, I'm gonna have to. So for that reason, and we've got huge geographical distinctions. So just like in the US, New York is not California, is not Georgia, right? The cultural differences are huge from one area to the other. And it's the same thing in Canada. Quebec and Alberta are not at all similar to each other. I wish you'd learned that, I'm not answering my phone. So for that reason in Canada, we're looking only at regionally based systems. And we also have of course the federal government, just like in the United States, we have provinces, there are some constitutional requirements. If you do it regionally, well, each province would be its own region. And then in order to keep all the regions about the same size, we're looking at 15 or 20 ridings per region, then the big provinces like Ontario, Alberta, BC and Quebec, they would have several regions. So all of the regions across the country would be approximately the same. So that's the only thing we're really looking at. We're looking at different ways that you can combine the multi-member dimension with the top-up approach. And an interesting feature that comes out of that is you can have smaller regions. So if people really feel that, you know, combining a city in rural areas isn't so cool because the cities are gonna dominate or whatever people are worried about, you can say, well, okay, let's have smaller regions, but we'll top them up. So we still get the proportionality. So that's one of the things we're looking at. When you have top-ups, it's worth the points really important because people don't always realize that. We're not necessarily talking about additional seats, new seats, but I do have a suggestion to make that some new seats might be a really good thing. But no, you can redistrict so that the total still stays the same, but you have to redistrict in order to do that. And yeah, if you want, you could still have single-member ridings. We've got ridings in Canada. There's one riding, Nathan Coven's old riding in BC. He used to brag that it was bigger than Poland. One riding. So obviously, making that even bigger would be a bit of a challenge for a riding like that. And so you just keep those as single-member ridings. There's not a problem. And if you have that top-up feature, in order to make sure that you get good proportionality overall. So those are the models we're looking at. What I've done here has made three slides. We're not gonna stop and spend a lot of time on this, but I can answer questions if you like on three of the models that have been discussed the most in Canada. These are the three models that Fairbord Canada has endorsed. The first one is the single transferable vote. Those of you who are from BC, I know there's a couple here tonight, they'll know that the single transferable vote was what the BC referendums in 2005 and 2009 ran on. This is an example of a real single transferable vote ballot. It's for one of the regions in Tasmania. Notice it's only five members. So they do keep it relatively small in terms of the region. And that's what makes this ballot manageable. No, otherwise you get ballots that are like two meters long. We don't want that. So you can see here it's sorted by party and people then they just one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, whatever they want. They sort their preferences. They can go across party lines if they want. Independence have a chance as they do in Ireland. You get a lot of independence being elected in Ireland. So it's a really cool system in terms of giving voters a lot of choice. It may not be as proportional, but then that's where those adjustment seats could come in the top-up seats. You could top it up if you like. And then the system that's been most highly recommended in Canada, most often recommended, is one that people take to really easily. It's mixed member. Mixed member uses single member writings as the base. And then a lot of top-ups. So the top-ups should be ideally no more, no less than 40%. Ideally, 50-50 is a nice break. You have to have a lot of top-ups to make sure that the system actually is proportional, particularly when the geographical concentration of the vote is really strong in some places. You can get people winning more than their share of the seat in those regions. So it's harder to get proportional results overall. So in this case, you're voting first for the party, sorry, for your local candidate because you still have local candidates. And then you vote for either the party or the candidate of your choice for the top-up mechanism, which works at the regional level. And the regions here, we're looking at regions no less than, no smaller than 10, probably no smaller than 12. 12 gives you pretty good proportionality. And ideally in the 16-15 to 16 seats of size. So that's what I was talking about. So this is the one that's been recommended the most in Canada, starting with the Law Commission of Canada 2004, which recommended this model. It gets talked about the most. The more you know about it, the more you think, oh, and there's a lot of problems with the system to be honest, but that's my view. I'm not allowed to say that efficiently, but I'll say it personally. So other options are interesting to look at, including this one, which is the rural urban. We tried to rename it in the VC referendum to flexible district PR because we didn't want people to feel there was this antagonism between rural urban areas. It's not about antagonism, it's that they need different sizes of districts. And you can see here in the little graphic what this might look like. So this is a 20 seat region that I've got here. And in the red line, in the red circle, that's your basic system. And in the basic system, in this case, and you could do it, this could be using ranked balance, let's say, right? So in this case, you've got two STV, three STV regions. You got a three-some, a four-some and a five-some. The five-some is gonna be more proportional, the others are gonna be a little less proportional. And notice in this case, they've actually put in this example, we've got five singles. So this is not a terribly proportional system. But if you tack on three top-up seats, you're gonna wrap up, you know, you're gonna solve most of the major problems. And so that's the idea here. You don't have to use STV for the basic system, but people who were responsible for designing this system were people who were concerned about some of the challenges of the STV system. And they were thinking, if we did this, we could have STV in Canada and it would be politically saleable. So really, I think what we have in terms of options for Canada, it's not really STV, MMP or rural urban. It's really MMP or rural urban. And this, with STV, I think that's what, you know, if we're gonna get STV at all in Canada, that's how we would do it. Yeah, I think I forgot to say about MMP, which I would like to say is, the reason I think it's so popular is because it retains the single member rights. But you end up then with two systems at the same time and it leads to some technical issues or so. But I think politically, it's most likely the way that we will end up going. So we need to treat it seriously for sure. Here I've got, you know, I'm just talking about some of the issues that you would address with proportional representation, but I think I've addressed that enough. I don't need to talk about that. So I only have two slides left for those of you who are tired of listening to me already. The first one talks about prospects. And I've talked about this already. We have been burned so many times in Canada, including times where it really, really looked good. Federally, in going into the 2015 election, we had three parties, three federal parties that had committed to electoral reform, the NDP, the Greens and the Liberal Party. And the Liberal Party promise was really strong. The promise was that 2015 would be the last first past post-election in Canada. It doesn't get any clearer than that. And then what happened? It was to cry over. The Liberals won a false majority. 39% of the seats, they won 54% of the seats. 39% of the vote, they won 54% of the seats. And that means that the NDP and the Greens weren't able to hold them to that promise. And they eventually just abandoned it. And then you have another story like that very recently in Quebec, with the CAC, Coalition Avenue of Quebec. This was a party that had had a lot of trouble under first pass the vote for a long time. In its origins, it was having a great deal of trouble winning seats, but now it was gathering some momentum. The Parti Québécois had also had its ups and downs they had advocated proportional representation before and back down on their promise twice. You had Québec Salidaire, which is the equivalent of the NDP in Quebec, which gets hurt all the time with first pass the post. You had the Green Party, you had the Conservative Party, Conservative Party of Quebec, which never wins any seats. The Green Party has never won any seats. And all of those parties signed an agreement that 2018 would be the last first pass the post election in Quebec. It wasn't written like that, but it was more specific than that. It wasn't one of these stories of preferential ballots and or proportional representation. It was, we will bring in MMP and a story. And it was supposed to be legislated and implemented by the next election. Well, what happened? The cat got elected with 37% of the vote. They got 60% of the seats. Well, how enthused do you think they were now about proportional representation? It wasn't just that the leadership got cold feet. I would say the leader is still relatively favorable. He actually named a minister that is very supportive of proportional representation. But what about the caucus? A leader needs the support of his or her caucus. I did the calculations. If you had brought proportional representation to Quebec in the last election with the same vote, 37% of those elected representatives would not be reelected. And those 37% happen to have friends who are also elected from the same party. They talk, they share ideas, they share empathy towards each other's problems. And what happened is the cat lost their caucus. So what do they do? They coined up a proportional system that wasn't nearly as proportional as it should be. And they said, well, what we'll do is we'll have to put this to a referendum because you can't just bring in proportional representation just like that. You have to have a referendum. And conveniently, why don't we have it with the next election? So that makes sure that every MLA, MNA, they call them there, that has been elected will, gets a chance to run again under the old system. The problem is that you now have a lousy system being legislated. If they go ahead with that, even people who are supportive of proportional representation will vote against it. If that system went up and I was asked to vote in Quebec, I would vote no. So the chances of winning are slim. And referendums are conveniently used in Canada as a mechanism for stalling change or preventing change. Let's not make any bones about that. This is not a democratic tool. It's not there to make the whole thing more democratic. It's there to avoid reform, which itself is democratic and gives everybody equal rights, rights to an equal power of voting. So it's a problem. I got a little slide here. My last bullet here says odds against us. And I'm gonna show you this. This is a picture of on the left, all of the major media outlets in Canada. And for 2006 to 2015, which party they endorsed? Got a lot of blue there in the US. I guess it would be red, right? Republicans is red. Well, so look how many you've got that are supportive of the new Democrats. You got four little orange bars there, none at all in 2015. So basically the two major parties, the two that play Tweedledum and Tweedledee on election night to see which one gets to have the trophy this time around are the only parties that are supported by the media. What do you think happens when there's a referendum with the media? The media are opposed to proportional representation. That's what happened in BC. It's one of the things that happened in BC. A little rinky-dink civil society organization like Farewell Canada, we can do everything we want. But the media have full page ads before they, while they still had the right to do that, but of course that was paid for, that's another story. But, you know, op ads and opponents of PR would have meanings and media would simply reproduce all the arguments. We couldn't get equal air time and winning a referendum under those conditions is virtually impossible. So it's a big issue. So what are we gonna do? I mean, we've been fighting this for a long time. It's been going for a hundred years. We still haven't managed to get proportional representation. I got three strategic elements here that require a lot of attention. And eventually we are gonna win something. And once we do, we're hoping that it'll be like a sort of a domino effect as people see how well this actually works. So we're working on multiple fronts. Federally, of course, we continue to work federally. Provincially, the big campaigns, I've got, there's five there. Quebec is not dead. It's struggling, but it's not dead. PEI lost a second referendum with the election in 2017, I think it was. That one's not dead either, because it's very, very close. Ontario, a lot of people dissatisfied with Doug Ford, who's unfortunately riding a wave of COVID-19 support right now, but we're working with both the Liberals in this case and the NDP and the Greens to try to get something on the agenda. Yukon, they're working to get something on the agenda. New Brunswick actually has a false winner government right now. So you'd think the opposition would be very strong to get to proportional representation there. And there's a few places where municipally, we might be able to make some progress. I won't go into that. We're also fighting in the courts, not we, because we're not actually involved in this charter challenge, but it's the second charter challenge based on the electoral system. This one is being led by an organization called Springtide and another organization called Fair Voting BC. So those are some of the different fronts that we're working on. Secondly, we have to change our messaging, I think, to some extent, and our general approach. The general approach has to be about reclaiming democratic power for citizens, not waiting until the NDP gets elected and forms a majority government to bring in proportional representation. It isn't gonna happen. If the NDP gets its own false majority, they're probably not gonna do it. So we really have to change the rhetoric. And I've been meeting with MPs. I always say the same thing. Listen, you have to acknowledge, we have to start by acknowledging that politicians are in a conflict of interest when it comes to electoral reform. You've gotta give voice back to citizens and referendums are not the way to do that. You know that as well as I do. What we need is a citizen's assembly. And I can talk about that. I'm not going to, because I've been talking long enough, but if you wanna ask me a question about, I can talk to you about what it is. But basically a citizen's assembly very briefly is a representative group of ordinary citizens. It is a structured random sample. For something like this, it would probably be a minimum of 200 people that would meet a minimum of seven or eight weekends in order to make its recommendations on electoral reform. There are modalities that you can use to involve way more than 200 citizens. You know, we have a federal country. We can do a federalized approach to a citizen's assembly. More people you involve, the more legitimacy it will have and the more it will be hard for politicians to resist the recommendations that they put forward. Finally, and this is really, really touchy and we have a heck of a difficulty getting traction even within Faribault Canada. We're probably gonna have to try some sort of incrementalist approach. And what I've written here, the first item is skipping one election. That's what the cat's doing. They're skipping one election. They're saying, well, we'll have a referendum. And then after that, the next election after that, well, you can have proportional representation if the referendum wins. And they're using that particular approach because they couldn't think of anything else. And that was just seemed like a really good gambit. Well, you know, we'll just say we have to have a referendum. The media is screaming for a referendum. The liberals are calling for a referendum. You know, all the opponents always call for a referendum. That's where the recalls always come from. But really what they were after was at least skipping an election. They skip an election. All the MNAs get their pensions consolidated. We get a chance to get elected again. And you know, after that, it's pretty far down the line. You can get the change. Well, it's very interesting. There was a liberal MP that I was talking to. She said, you know, if you look at how the female vote was gotten in some countries, that's how they did it. Because it was virtually every elected representative, I think it was called Brazil and Argentina or something like that. What they did is they simply offered to skip an election. And that made it much more palatable to get the change. So that's one possibility. And maybe the citizens of December would recommend skipping one election. But what I would prefer to hear from the citizens of December, I don't get to tell them what to say. Unfortunately, because I know what I'd tell them to say it. But hopefully they'll call me as a witness. What I would like to see, yeah, let's skip an election. But you know what, before skipping an election, can we do one simple move? Can we add 10% additional seats? So we'd go from 338 to about 378 to be 80. There's room in the assembly for that. It's not that much. It's not gonna cost us too much. We have to increase seats over time anyway, due to demographic pressures that throw things out of kilter. So that's one of the ideas we're putting forward is even without skipping an election, let's start with 40, 45 additional seats and award those in top-up fashion. So that means the seats would basically go region by region. It would be different to the parties that were underrepresented. So the liberals got no seats in Alberta. Here you are. You've got two seats in Alberta. You've got no seats in Saskatchewan. There you are. Two seats in Saskatchewan. The conservatives didn't get any seats in the Atlantic provinces. Here you are. You've got seven seats in the Atlantic provinces. And of course, the NDP and the Greens would pick up more seats right across the country. So those 40 seats would go a long way. They would make it very difficult to get another false majority government. It would be much more difficult. And if you don't have a false majority government, then the other parties can hold the party that won to account in terms of getting proportional representation. So those are two of these incrementalist approaches that I think we need to look at. We need to keep playing the political game, of course, to the extent that we can. We need to try to keep electing more pro PR MPs. There's a group of us, which I'm apart, but it's not terrible. Canada is a separate group that's working hard to try to get the NDP and the Greens to actually work together. And together to bring in, if they get a large number of more seats to bring in proportional representation, more robust climate action, and more social justice action than would ever be possible with a small number of seats that they're getting now. So that's it. By conclusion, in Canada, PR is where it's at. It would be a major improvement for us. I talked to you about the models that we've got. I talked about how the system is stacked against us and what we're trying to do to get past those vested interests and try to make a breakthrough. I don't know where it's going to be. It could be Quebec. It could be Prince Edward Island. It could be in Guelph, Ontario, municipally. We've got to make a breakthrough somewhere. And then after that, I think things will start working for us a lot better. And I'm just hoping it happens before I die. There you go. Try not to get COVID. That is a great thing to be avoiding for all of us, Real. Thank you so much for this presentation. This has been really interesting. I know we've got a lot of questions in the chat. So just as a reminder, the way that we are going to do the Q&A portion of this is you can either drop your question in the chat or you can raise your hand and you can ask it audibly. And we're only going to do one question per person until everybody has a chance to have their question heard. Also, if you didn't ask the question, but you just dropped in a comment in the chat, I'm not going to read all of those out because I'm not really sure if they were meant to like spark discussion with Real. So if you can just format them in the form of questions. So I know what's meant to be read and is not just discussion between all of you, then that would be really great. All right, let's see what our first question was. So our first question comes from Marco Rossi. And he has two questions. I'm going to go with the first one. Marco asks, which system that gets high proportional representation do you prefer? And I'm assuming he's asking you personally since you went over some of the endorsed methods by Fairfax Canada. My personal preference is rural urban because I think it's politically feasible. And I really like the amount of choice that it gives the voter. We have a system in Canada that is highly party centric, which is not necessarily a problem. I think there's a very important role for parties. But people need more choice, real choice. And STV gives them all that choice, including the choice of possible independence. It allows them a ballot where they can express themselves more fully because they can rank their ballot, not just give a single X. If you look at mixed member, we call for open list for the top up seats. But we also have dual candidacy. And what that means is if you put your X beside your favorite candidate on the regional list, the odds are that person's already gonna have been elected in which case your vote doesn't really count very much. So that's one of the things that with rural urban, your vote's more likely to count and be really important. So that's just my personal preference. The issue that I have with it is STV is just so much more different for Canadians that I don't think it'll sell. I mean, unless people really get hyped, by the possibility of ranking their ballots rather than just doing an X, I get hyped. People within our little bubble, they get really hyped about that, but ordinary citizens, I don't know if they care that much about that option. We have to ask them, and then it's quite possible that the citizens assembly, if we have one, might well call for rural urban. So for me, it's a political issue. I think rural urban is a better system no matter what, if you think about it, most people who've been in the business long enough, they start to lean towards this STV, rural urban modality, but people off hand, they think that mixed member proportional has more of a chance. Okay, great, thanks, Rell. I see that Keith has his hand up, but Keith had a question in the chat, which I think is really interesting. So he was asking, you were talking about these incremental approaches, and he asked, why not an incrementalist approach of going to approval voting? This would vastly increase PR and solve vote splitting as well as other issues. So what do you say, Rell? Well, approval voting with multi-member districts is really complicated. I think it's hard to understand, I know what you're saying, and you can use computers and all the rest of it, but I can't wrap my head around it in terms of how it actually works. The IRV, so our STV, is easier to wrap your head around in terms of what you're doing. You're eliminating people from the bottom and you're redistributing surplus votes. That's, as a concept, is an easy concept. But maybe that's not what your question is about. Maybe you're thinking of approval voting in single-member districts, but our problem is single-member districts. And it doesn't matter whether you have preferential ballots or approval voting or ex-voting, you're always gonna have that same problem that you're going to be favoring the larger parties. Now, you may argue that with approval voting, and that's not gonna happen so much. I don't know. Nobody talks about approval voting in Canada. It's a complete unknown, and we have enough challenges before we introduce another unknown. We've got all kinds of other pool systems. There's one called local PR, dual-member proportional, that's a very good one, I like that. It's a good system, but because it's so new, it's gotten voted down twice now in two referendums in both PEI and NBC. So, yeah, I wouldn't be favorable to introducing approval voting as a concept here. There are so many voting methods. You're totally right, Raelle, and everybody has their favorites, certainly. And I think it's really exciting all the innovation that's happening, but it can certainly make it a little bit challenging for all of us to keep up. I know a lot of- It's a hot bed of innovation in Canada. We keep coming up with new PR systems. There's more, I can give you more of your life. I feel the same in the States, certainly, with what we're working on. We get questions every week from people who have a new voting method they'd like us to look at, and it's certainly really interesting and exciting to see. All right, I see a message in the chat from William Wah, and I don't think I heard you answer this, but if you did, I apologize, Raelle. William wants to know, has anyone in Canada talked about weighted MPs? Weighed MPs? Yes, I was just gonna say that. That's another one of those systems. So the argument there is, just elect people the way they are now, no problem, but you'll just wait their vote in parliament by the share of votes that each party got, right? So Elizabeth May is the only green that gets elected, no problem, she still gets 5% of the vote. So she'll have a vote that's weighted like 20 or 30 times as much as a liberal vote. That would actually work except for Elizabeth May, would have to do all the work of the green party in Canada, and that's a lot of work. There's a lot of committees to sit on and so on. So being there in person does have some advantages and weighted vote doesn't satisfy that, unfortunately. So that's one thing. The other thing is, again, we're back to that idea of what are people gonna be able to wrap their heads around and this notion that one MP would have a vote that's 20 times or 30 times as much as anybody else's. I think if you're gonna think that's just wrong somehow. So I think it's a great idea, but I don't think it's gonna fly. And people keep coming back to me and people keep reinventing that all over Canada, and Anita Nickerson, who's our executive director, she just sends them up to me. I actually have a whole Google drive for that, which includes like email threads of all the discussion. I say, just read it. I don't wanna do it all over again every time somebody comes up with that suggestion. Perfect. So just a couple of clarifying things. I know there's some discussion in the chat about being able to get all the information. So I do have the link to this presentation. I will send it out in our follow-up email to everyone so you'll get a full recording of this as well as these slides. And if there is additional information, I know someone was asking about the rural urban scheme and I think Keith gave a link to that as well. We'll make sure that you have all the information you're looking for. And if you don't see it come out, please just email me and I'll make sure that you get that. And William, we don't publish the chat like in the YouTube or anything, but I can certainly download it and send it to you if that's something you'd like. And Paul's pointing out there's a way to save it. So all of the options are available to you all. Okay. Sarah had asked if she could clarify a question about urban rural. And I don't know if that was what you put in the chat or not Sarah. So I'm just going to unmute you so that you are able to ask that question. Sure. I remember I was in Canada for that election and my phone just ran off the hook for a month straight of my friends and people, friends of friends and friends of friends who know that I know about this stuff saying what are these systems? Each one is really complex in its own, right? And the feedback I heard in BC was that people liked the preference ballot. They wanted to be able to go to the preference order but the urban rural was like a hybrid, right? Of choose one only for some voters but STV for some voters. Can you explain that a little more? Or like why did people think a hybrid system to me and I think to a lot of voters it just made it more complex whereas just having the system itself would have been simpler or even a different preference system that eliminates- It is an additional complexity for sure because what people need to understand is the basics. First the basic core and then they need to understand the notion of top ups. How you actually manage those top ups that gets technically difficult that I would just tell people you don't need to worry too much about that. There's ways to do that. They did though in BC which I think really messed things up is they really did do a hybrid. What they said is well, what rural urban is gonna be is we'll have one system in the rural areas and another system in the cities. So they had regular MMP in rural areas which happens to include cities so I don't know how they were gonna do that and then in the cities they'd have STV and I don't know why they did that. They didn't follow our model at all. They could have very easily just had STV everywhere had single member writings wherever people prefer to have single member writings and they'd have preferential ballots there too. So preferential ballots everywhere and they could have just had a bunch of top ups, province wide, would have been easy. Just throw on 10 top ups at the end or something like that. It wouldn't have been hard to do. It didn't have to be complicated. They made it complicated. They messed up a lot of things in that referendum. Sarah did that. Jason's here, he could tell you. Sarah, did that answer your question? If it didn't, feel free to just raise your hand or send me a message in the chat. So I know. Sarah, you're muted. I am muted her. Thank you. So yeah, just the only feedback I was getting is that everyone understands, if your party wins a quarter of the vote, you win a quarter of the seats. And I think when people were explaining it, they people with PR tend to just say, this is why PR is great, it's simple in theory, but people actually did need to know the mechanics to be able to choose between the three systems. So I feel like the strategy of glossing over the details is a losing strategy. And I agree. I agree, although I would say that the details that really mattered weren't so much, how would the votes be counted? How would the top up seats be allocated? I think you can find a way to gloss over that. But what was missing that nobody really did really well including us is something that would point to what does each system have to offer that the others don't have, right? What's the strengths of each one? Why should I vote for one rather than another? And depending on your values, one person might prefer MNP and another person might prefer rural urban, might depend on where they live, but they need to understand why they should prefer one or the other. And that wasn't done. The government certainly didn't do it well. Public education was quite weak. It was very descriptive, right? As opposed to analytical, which is I think what people would need to understand in order to actually make a choice. Just having a description doesn't make you, empower you to make a proper choice. So, you know, and then they left, rather than having a well-funded public education campaign, public education in DC was, well, let's just have the pro side and the con side duke it out. Well, what happens when you do that is people get confused because they get contradictory information from one or the other. You get all the fear and wandering and people were not as informed as they could have been. And they actually said they were confused. And I don't blame them. Great, that's fantastic. I think that, so I'm going to take executive privilege and break my rule because Tony typed in a very long paragraph that seemed to be getting out of question and Sarah seems to be interested in the answer and I am too. So, Tony I think is getting at, he says if you're going to change the voting system it seems best to move from what we have now to the best available since it's so difficult to change because if you change to a system that has a glitch in it, people will snap back to the old system. So he gives the example of how Burlington, Vermont used IRB but because it split the vote they switched back to plurality. So what do you think about that, Raelle? Do in terms of the approach here? Well, yes, you want to move to a system that is easy to adjust or fix or improve upon. So if you had STV, you could start with relatively smaller districts that are easier to manage. Three or four or five like they do in Ireland but it would be easy enough to expand if that's what you wanted or easy enough to add adjustment seats if you wanted. So you have to envisage what your incrementalist approach would look like in terms of making the system better. If you don't go far enough, you might backtrack. So for example, what happened in Manitoba and Alberta when they brought STV to the cities and AV to the rural areas is that the political forces that this created were political forces against moving forward and for moving backwards. So you really have to be able to think ahead. What are the dangers of moving backwards? Cause you can move backwards at any time and what are the possibilities for moving forward? So that's where having that adjustment seat mechanism I think is very valuable. It allows you to get started and make it more likely that you'll keep going. By starting with the additional seats. So I don't know if I'm right or not about that being the approach to go but to me it makes sense. Great. Okay, so I put it in the chat but I wanna take just a quick second to remind everyone that I really wanna give everyone an opportunity to ask questions. So I know that Paul, Dan, Jason, Jeff you haven't been able to ask questions or you haven't yet. So I wanna give you just a moment to get those in the chat or raise your hand because I know that Keith Sand has been raised and I wanna circle back to him. I know Marco has put a lot of questions in the chat and these are all really great really enjoying the conversation but I wanna make sure that everyone has an opportunity to learn. Okay, Tony clarified that that was not a question but he was happy that it was reformatted into a question earlier. So glad we could do that for you, Tony. I think it was a good conversation. Okay, I am seeing the same folks who are asking questions. So I'm going to go and let Keith, Keith you put a question in the chat. You also have your hand raised. Do you wanna thumbs up if you wanna ask that? Okay, perfect. All right, Keith, I'm going to lower your hand and I am going to unmute you. You are not, why did it not unmute you? I am, okay, perfect. This is Tony though, I'm not gonna kill you. Hi, so I was one of the handful of people that submitted formal options for BC referendum and one of them was single member approval and it was polling around 80% and I'm just curious about how the systems were actually chosen. Like the three systems went forward. How did DMP get in? How did the other ones, how did that happen? Like what was the process? Did you have any insight to it? Cause nobody I've talked to and I was very involved, had any idea? No, I know how it happened. And Jason McLaren, who's on this call could offer more, I don't know where Jeff Jewel is from but I know he's on our list. I see his name there. So they were looking for either first pass the post cause that was part of the referendum or proportional systems. So they wouldn't have been looking at single member anything. DMP was a system that had already been tested in Prince Edward Island. It had been on the ballot there. It's a system that is extremely simple and I think that was the reason they picked that one. The picking was done by the Attorney General's office. The Attorney General in Canada is a more independent minister than others. And so they felt parking it there would be a more independent way to go. And they solicited the advice of a small number of academics as well. So I know that there was some advice. We ourselves, Fairbord Canada and many others made submissions of different systems. We weren't terribly unhappy with the choices that were made although we would have preferred that rural urban would have been that the regular rural urban rather than this hybrid that they put forward. And we would have preferred that there be fewer loose ends. One of the problems was there was a lot of loose ends and explaining these systems when there are loose ends was a lot more difficult than if you had, okay, here's a version of mixed member. Here's what we're proposing. Open list and all the rest of it. That would have been a lot easier to explain rather than one, well, we may or may not have open lists. We may have closed lists and that was not a happy thing. I don't know if that answers your question, Keith, but basically the decision was made by the government, by the Attorney General's office. Okay, great, hopefully that is an answer to the question that you have, Keith. If not, let us know in the chat. I am going to do, he gives a thumbs up, fantastic. I'm gonna do a last call on questions because we are about 10 minutes after the hour and I wanna be really respectful over all this time. So I know that Tony has his hand raised and Sarah has asked a question in the chat and I believe that Marco has one outstanding. So if I don't see another hand go up or another question in the chat in the next, let's say two minutes, I'm going to call it at that. So before we move on, so Marco had a question and I don't remember hearing anything being wrong with us, but Marco had asked what was wrong with referendums? And I don't remember you saying that we thought something was wrong with referendums, Rayal, but maybe I didn't hear that correctly. We actually have a formal statement on referendums. If you go to our website, just farevote.ca, there's a section called statements or positions or something like that. If you click down there, you'll get our statement on citizens assemblies and our statement on referendums. Now, both referendums and citizens assemblies achieve the same purpose. Both of them are meant to canvas what ordinary citizens think about what is really a very important issue. The difference is that with a, is much, much harder to manipulate a citizen's assembly because in a citizen's assembly, the citizens have to achieve a consensus by deliberation. So it's a deliberative process. It lasts for a long time. They get to call in the experts. They choose the experts they want to talk to and they're much less likely to be subject to a scaremongering. In referendums, you saw that slide I had about the media being against us. That is huge. Scaremongering is that it happens every single time. Sometimes it's worse than others. In PEI, they're just such nice people they couldn't bring themselves to be like they were in VC. In VC, it was ridiculous. I mean, they had Nazis marching in the street because you had proportional representation in one hat. I mean, it was just absolutely nuts. And it's very, very hard. That puts the reform advocates at a huge disadvantage because explaining how a new system is going to work is a lot harder than scaring people about change. So what's wrong with referendums is that they're so easy to manipulate. But I want to mention another reason why there's something wrong with referendums. And in a sense, this is more important. Would one have a referendum before extending the franchise to women? Would one have a referendum before extending the franchise to Native Americans? Blacks. Of course we wouldn't. Why? Because it's a human rights issue. You don't have referendums on human rights issue. You don't allow the majority to overrule the minority when rights are involved, do you? Well, what are we talking about here? We're talking about changing the electoral system so that every vote regardless of where you live, regardless of who you vote for has the same effective value. Talking about empowering voters equally. You can't put that to a referendum. You put it to the courts if you want. Is this consistent with our human rights? Yeah, that's why we have a charter challenge going. So, federal Canada is resolutely opposed to referendums but we need to have a way to consult citizens because this is an issue that belongs to citizens. And so we are putting something very concrete forward which is a citizen's assembly as a way to do it. And we're not talking about just any old citizen's assembly. We're talking about a really robust process. Spend the bucks, whatever it takes, it's still gonna be less expensive than a referendum but do a good job. Consult Canadians, anybody who wants to should have a word to say, no problem. But we want that deliberative assembly so that people sit down and they get the expertise and then they make the recommendation of what citizens want. All right, I did not see any additional questions come in. So I'm going to take Sarah's question that was written in and then Tony, I will go to you and unmute you. So Sarah asks my apologies. I have dogs at home and they are upset. So sorry for that, y'all. Okay, Sarah asks, are you worried about monotonicity for STD, 15% or so? That's a significant concern, especially since there are other options that give a similar user experience but without that issue. Yeah, I don't have the expertise to answer that question to be quite honest. What I find with a lot of these technical tests of systems, I know that IRV gets sometimes perverse results but if we're talking about 338 or 378 seats across the country, having a few errors here and there is small potatoes compared to what we have under first pass, the post. So having a system that people understand and that they feel comfortable with I think is far more important than some of these technical considerations that you see in the specialized political science literature. We don't have very many people amongst our farewell Canada people that actually master all this stuff. You'd have to talk to Ryan Campbell in BC, he would probably be able to answer that question. It can certainly get very technical and I know we have some folks on here who love technical things. So I think I shared earlier with Sarah, Raels email that is on the website. So if you need to be connected with someone to discuss that further, I'm sure he'd be happy to connect you with people but wanna talk about those things. Okay, so our last question of the night then is going to be Tony. Tony, I will unmute you. Hey, so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about you had said before that you like the party system and you thought that parties played an important role and I guess just the perspective that I'm asking you to try to move me from is that parties confuse me. Like I don't understand what a party is who gets to decide who's in the party, who gets to decide who votes, who gets to decide to be the leaders. And I know that the answer to this is like through some kind of big, through like a coalition process. But when I think of democracy and I think of voting for a party, it feels just strange to me like it's going to some body as opposed to like a person feels more concrete and what is this amorphous party thing? And so for me, a lot of voting reform that I see takes power away from parties. And so this other form of granting it to them makes me feel nervous. And I was wondering if you could tell me what are the virtues and the values that you see in that? Well, I share what you're saying. This is why I like STD more than I like mixed member. Mixed member is a very party-centric system. Proportionality is going to be party-centric in any case, but with STD, you break that link in a way that you don't with other PR systems. That's why I like it. Parties makes things a lot simpler for the voter. Not all voters actually go through the trouble of learning a lot of details about their candidates. In Canada, the way our ballots work now is that every candidate is listed by name. You vote for an individual candidate, but their party name is also listed. And about 80% or more, 90% of voters vote primarily for the party of their choice rather than the individual candidates. People rarely vote for a candidate that's from another party just because they love that person. Of course, it happens to some extent, but that party, that way of simplifying information for people is very important. I think there's another role that's really important, which is that, and particularly in a first pass to post system, if you want politicians to take a national perspective when they're making policy, as opposed to just advocating for the needs of their own constituency, the party structure enables that by creating other incentives and enticements than just satisfying your local constituency on whom you depend to be reelected. So I mean, I just, frankly, it's not something that I've studied in great, great detail, but I just wanna make one observation. I don't think there's any country in the world where parties don't play an important role. That says something. Obviously the need is felt everywhere. What I want is I want people to have more parties. Having a choice of one of two parties, that's ridiculous. In the US, it's incredibly divisive as you know. It's divisive in Canada as well, but people want real choice. And what happens even in Canada, if you don't happen to like the conservatives and you don't happen to like the liberals and they're the only two that have a chance in your writing? Where are your democratic rights, you have none. So with proportional representation, you can have more parties. And if you don't happen to like the way a party works, you can vote for a party that says, we're not gonna whip votes like the Green Party does, for example, or other parties might emerge and say, well, we're gonna run our party differently than other parties. And if people like that, they can vote for that party. So to me, that's the way to resolve it is to give people that choice. Does that work for you Tony? I'm seeing head nodding. So that looks like a good sign. Perfect. All right, well, thank you all so much for joining us tonight. Really, really appreciate you being here for this discussion on the fight for proportional representation. Rayal, thank you so, so much for chatting with us. I'm seeing some thank yous from folks coming in now. So as a reminder, we will send out this video recording later. We will send out Rayal's slides. And if you go to the Fair Book Canada website, his email is there as well as the phone number. And I'm sure he'd be happy to chat with you more if you have further questions. So thank you again. Absolutely, I wanna thank everybody also for the opportunity to give a rather lengthy presentation. I know on Zoom, that's a little bit challenging, but I do find on this topic, my experiences that are somewhat longer presentation, people like it, they feel it wraps things up well. So if anybody wants to send me an email and say, Rayal, you're full of shit and that was way too long, you're welcome to do that. Well, hopefully no one will send that over. Please don't. We really appreciate our presenters and the time they give us. But I know we certainly all are, again, very passionate, opinionated folks in this movement to give people more power in their elections. So, awesome, thanks again, everyone. Have a good evening. Okay, and good luck to you guys getting reform in the States.