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Hi David and Kevin,

Have you heard the news? The PEI legislature passed a motion to have a citizen's assembly on proportional representation.

The motion was put forward by Stephen Howard, a Green Party of PEI MLA. I hope that the Green Party of NB will not be outdone! It's been a few years since your motion on proportional representation, which never came up for debate or a vote.

If you decide to make a new motion on electoral reform, consider making it about a citizen's assembly. There's a lot of support for CAs. People like the idea of direct democracy. It makes a nice change from the top-down approach. It also has the advantage of creating a system that can get buy-in from a broad swath of the population, including rural people.

It was rural people who voted no in PEI's last plebiscite on PR, because the proposed system had top-up seats at the provincial level rather than at a regional level. This led to the fear that urban people would dominate and rural concerns would be forgotten. The same concern exists in NB.

A citizen's assembly would include a representative number of rural folks, who would work together with city folks to find consensus on a system that would benefit all NB voters.

To see this happen in New Brunswick would be a beautiful thing.

Thanks for listening.

Best wishes,

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