Though the Special Committee on Electoral Reform hasn’t quite finished its meetings, on Wednesday the NDP released its submission to it — a submission that, based on its consultations, calls for proportional representation but stops short of recommending a specific voting system.

According to the New Democrats, of the 37,000 Canadians they’ve reached through town halls, online engagement and mailout surveys, 84.3 per cent agreed or strongly agreed that a party’s seats in Parliament should reflect the percentage of votes it received.

The next highest percentage — 81.7 per cent — said having a local representative was important.

“There are three principal things that came forward through our consultations,” Nathan Cullen, the party’s democratic reform critic, said at Ottawa’s National Press Theatre Wednesday.

“Canadians want their votes to be equal, effective and empowered by adding proportionality to our system. Number two, that Canadians want to maintain the strong connection they have to local representation. Number three, they want an increase in the representation of women and other visible minorities in their House of Commons.”

What that means in terms of a specific voting system still needs to be fleshed out, said Cullen.

“I suspect a mixed system, a hybrid in which a certain percentage of Parliament — 50 per cent, 70 per cent — are elected directly as they are right now, and a further 50 per cent are made up through proportionality. How you get there is … a question of design,” Cullen said.

“We certainly didn’t want to prejudge and come up with a specific riding-by-riding model, and I don’t even think the committee is going to come to that level of detail … The main point of departure here was, ‘Do you like the kind of system we have right now? With its distortions? Or do you like something that’s more proportional?’ As soon as you head down that path, then you start to make some choices.”

The NDP’s submission also concluded that Canadians aren’t ready to lower the voting age and that online voting is currently out of the question.

Though Canadians were divided on mandatory voting, they say they prefer some sort of voting incentive to punishing those who don’t vote.

When it came to the best way to ensure the process is legitimate, the submission said survey responses varied “between expanded consultations requiring multi-party support, and potentially a referendum before adoption or after two or more elections.”

It didn’t clarify, however, what percentage of Canadians voted for each of those options.

“The challenge was because we used several different formats — we used online, we used telephone town halls, we used live in-person ones. There wasn’t a consistency in drawing: do you want a referendum? So there wasn’t a way to empirically translate that as much as we did the other clear kind of questions,” Cullen said.

“The other piece of it is, the answer to that question changes dramatically on answering the question before. If Parliament comes up with a system that all parties an agree to, the interest in holding a referendum drops dramatically. If it’s just the Liberals standing alone, even people who are quite wary of a referendum … it suddenly goes up dramatically.”

The electoral reform committee, which has conducted 39 hearings, continues Monday with one in Iqualuit before returning to Ottawa to hear from some final witnesses.

Cullen said Wednesday that he thought the committee would be finished with witnesses within the next two weeks. It will then begin drafting a report and recommendations, which is due by December 1.

You can read the NDP’s submission here.