Mr. Speaker, I have great respect and admiration for my friend. However, the notion is strange to me that he seems to be critical of the idea of parties standing in elections and making promises that are specific. I have two points. First is that specificity is okay. Voters can handle it. Second is that in the process of the study my colleagues and I worked on, where we went around the country as part of the electoral reform initiative, I remember that at the time, the minister stood up in the House and said that the striking of this committee was almost as significant as women earning the right to vote. It is a strange irony that she later became the minister who killed that very initiative. Life works out strangely in politics. However, she saw it as important, as did I. A lot of us put a lot of energy into it. Our families made some sacrifices. We listened to Canadians.

MMP, the system my friend described, was overwhelmingly supported, as it is by the evidence, and as it is by our global partners in democracy. Even for those who do not follow the intricacies of voting systems, I would say look at the results. How do countries that use first past the post do when measuring economic, environmental and social measures? Are they more equitable? Are they more green? Are they doing better on the economy? The committee heard about all the research from the OECD, which is the developed countries of the world, the free democracies, Overwhelmingly, the OECD countries that use a proportional voting system get better outcomes, not just on the environment and social issues, which we might guess, but also on economic issues.

Aside from the actual way the vote is cast, most Canadians are curious about a couple of things. One is whether they will have a direct representative, someone they can call. Second is whether the kind of government they are going to get will produce better results for them, their families and their communities. The evidence on that scale is overwhelming.

I will end on this. With the minister, the Prime Minister's Office and the Prime Minister himself, I was not prescriptive in our attempts at negotiation. We never, at any point, publicly or privately, said that it was MMP or bust and that it had to be exactly that model. We set out a range of models. We also offered the government a slow roll. They could do it over a few elections. We offered as much as we could. However, in the end, the sincerity to actually do something about it was lacking, in all honesty, on the government side. There was not a willingness to see this thing through in any form other than the personal system the Prime Minister liked, one that is used by one house in the Australian government and that does not work for Australians or anyone else.

The Prime Minister should have known better. In the end, the declaration he made was that the decision to betray this promise was his and his to make. I fundamentally disagree with that type of notion of what parliamentary democracy looks like.

Nathan Cullen

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