Mr. Speaker, I rise along with my colleagues to speak to Motion No. 489, which I also will be supporting to go to committee.
This motion makes sense, in the sense that it would effectively create an efficiency-based change to our current system to elect Speakers. We currently do it through an exhaustive ballot approach, with multiple ballots. The alternative vote, or preferential voting approach, effectively compresses all of that and asks individual members to indicate in advance whom they would prefer as people fall off the list, until somebody acquires 50% of all of these votes.
I obviously accept, as my colleague who is introducing the motion noted, that there are differences. The mere fact that we vote ballot by ballot gives us time to talk to others and perhaps change our views, even though that is affected by the fact that the ballots are secret, and so the very purpose of multiple ballots seems to be defeated in our current system.
I see this as, effectively, an efficiency measure that makes a great deal of sense from that perspective. The other points that my colleague mentioned on clarifying such things as tie-breaking are also valuable.
I would like to also emphasize that the use of alternative vote—and I will use “alternative vote” and “preferential ballot” rather interchangeably—is not uncommon when it comes to electing individuals who have a functional role to play that is meant to bring together disparate elements within a given organizational setting. Examples are party leaders, presidents of associations, and Speakers of Houses. Lots of examples were given about how this method is also used in other countries, either the multiple ballot approach or the preferential ballot.
The key point that was brought up by my colleague is that we should not be thinking about this as a majority vote system; it is actually a consensus system. It is all about achieving broad support and allowing somebody to cross the 50% threshold, but with a whole series of votes that are second, third, and fourth choices. Therefore, it is a falsehood for us to say this is a majority system in any strong sense; it is all about creating consensus, even though almost always the people who are elected in this system probably have more of a plurality of votes than other candidates, but it is possible for somebody with fewer initial votes to leapfrog them. Nonetheless, it is erroneous to be referring to this as a “majority system”. It is first past the post, whoever gets past that 50% mark, but the 50% is actually not about first choices, and that is important for us to know.
The reason I want to make that clarification is that my colleague whose motion this is ended with a few references outside of the context where I said it is not unusual to have this. He gave the example of Australia, where the House of Representatives is elected according to an alternative vote or preferential ballot. That drags us into the realm of whether alternative vote is a valid way to elect multi-party legislatures, and here I just wanted to spend a bit of time explaining why support for this method in electing a Speaker in no way, from my perspective, translates into support for alternative vote as a way of electing, for example, members of Parliament, unless alternative vote is built into a broader system that accommodates the other needs of a fair voting system.
From my perspective and that of the NDP, obviously that would mean proportional representation. Alternative vote on its own, which currently is the policy of one other party in this House, is actually a regressive way to change our electoral system, and I will not even use the word “reform”. I want to ensure that we stay within the firm boundaries of electing Speakers as why we are open to AV here.
It is very important to note that in 1998 the Jenkins Commission in the United Kingdom made a number of findings. It basically said that alternative vote in the setting of multi-party legislatures, where members are elected in order to serve within a party system as well as represent their constituents, actually can produce and often does produce greater disproportionality than our already problematic single-member plurality system.
I want to be on record as saying that the alternative vote support that I have here is for the idea of electing leaders of parties for Speaker in this context, but I honestly think that there are so many other reasons that AV is not appropriate in other settings that we should confine it to the current context.