Liberal leader and then NDP cabinet minister Gordon Wilson. She was included in the Televised leaders' debate along with Liberal leader Gordon Campbell and Premier Ujjal Dosanjh. The Greens hoped to be viewed as a progressive alternative for voters. Carr finished third in her riding with 6316 votes (27%), against 6349 for Wilson (28%) and 9904 for victorious Liberal Harold Long. The Green Party received 12.4% of the provincial vote in this election, a significant increase from its 2% total in the 1996 election. The party's largest number of votes was received in Saanich-Gulf Islands, one of only 17 constituencies that had been voting Liberal since 1991. In 2004, Carr ran for the Greens in a by-election in Surrey-Panorama Ridge, held following the resignation of Liberal Gulzar Singh Cheema. She finished a distant third with 8.4% of the vote as the NDP recovered to win the riding. This result was a harbinger of the party's decline in popularity in the 2005 general election, where its share of the vote fell to 9%. Carr was a vocal supporter of a mixed member proportional (MMP) system under which some members are elected from constituencies like they are today and others are selected from party lists when needed to "top up" the legislature to ensure that the percentage of seats a party gets equals the percentage of popular vote it gets (similar to the system New Zealand adopted in 1993 and in Germany since the 50s). In 2002 she became the proponent of an Initiative under BC Recall and Initiative Act to hold a referendum on whether or not to adopt MMP in BC. Called the Free Your Vote campaign, it brought together a broad coalition of British Columbians and even included the official support of trade unions such as the BC Nurses' in a petition drive under the province's citizen initiative legislation. Despite having condemned this legislation as unworkable after an anti-grizzly bear hunting initiative by her husband, proponent Paul George failed to gather and submit sufficient signatures, Carr threw the energies into this campaign which, although it too failed to gather sufficient signatures in all but four ridings, The nearly 100,000 signatures gathered created the largest voting reform organization in the province and increased awareness and support amongst Greens and non-Greens alike for electoral reform. Many credit it with spurring the Liberals to establish a Citizens Assembly on Electoral Reform a