A commentary by the author of Storm the Ballot Box: An Insider’s Guide to a Voting Revolution. She is an award-winning journalist and a former interim leader of the Green Party of Canada.

I met Wendy Bergerud during the 2015 federal election campaign. She was volunteering for Fair Vote Canada and came to my Green Party campaign office to get me to sign the Fair Vote Canada Pledge.

I told her electoral reform was part of the Green Party platform, so I would happily sign the pledge, and she didn’t have to give me her two-hour presentation.

Nothing doing; she wanted me well-prepared and went to work with her flip chart.

Wendy was a couple of years older than me, a wife and mother and a former biomatrician with B.C. Ministry of Forests. Her goal was to convince every candidate and me in Victoria that nothing mattered more in this election than changing our electoral system.

Wendy was a member of the 2004 Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform. One of 161 British Columbians who had been chosen at random to study different electoral systems around the world.

She was not political before being chosen for the Citizens’ Assembly, and while she became passionate about improving democracy, she was........

© Times Colonist