Bill C-20 (39th Parliament, 2nd Session) Committee on April 2nd, 2008

[Dan McDougall]

Maybe before I answer that directly, I would say that we looked closely at the Australian situation when we were designing this bill, because we thought it was very instructive of the way a system could work. They are on the Westminster system. Their traditions are very similar to ours. Their legislation has worked very effectively over a number of years. They've had it for a very long time in Australia, so we looked closely at their rules, and to the extent we could, we actually followed them as a model.

We did differ in a number of instances here, though, in this bill and precisely in the ways that you're suggesting. The emphasis in Australia is very strongly oriented towards the party. As you mentioned, there's an option on the ballot in Australia, so that instead of making your selections of one, two, three, or however many candidates you want to select, you can simply tick off the box that says you vote for this party, and then the party determines the order of the candidates that they would like to see.

There was a conscious policy decision taken by the government here that that wouldn't be the case here, again in keeping with the desire to try to diminish the influence of parties in the process and make sure the Senate retained a degree of independence from what's happening on the Commons side, on the lower house side.

So this bill does not contain provisions comparable to those found in the Australian model.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

In some of the state models in Australia, STV is widely used, and I'm thinking here particularly of the Tasmanian model, which is really seen as the precursor for others who are trying to break away from this party-centric model. It includes things such as randomization of the placement of candidates on the ballot to ensure that the parties can't essentially direct first preferences to their preferred candidates, those who have been the best at winning the favour of the party bosses and so on. I have forgotten the name of that particular process, but it's a process of ensuring that that doesn't occur.

They also allow you to mark down fewer vacancies. If there are, say, five vacancies and you only mark down four, or if there are 20 candidates on the ballot and you only mark down your top three, your ballot still counts. What about those provisions in this law?

[Dan McDougall]

The Australians use what's called the Robson rotation for the way the candidates' names appear on the ballot. We use a similar provision, but it's slightly different in its construction.

The provision suggested in the bill is that the candidates' names be rotated. That's because studies have shown that the order of a person's name on the ballot can have a significant effect on voter reaction to that name. If you're fortunate enough to have a name beginning with the letter A and you're at the top of the ballot because it's alphabetical, there's a demonstrated benefit of about 3% to 5% associated with that.

So the bill provides that there be a rotation of names on the ballot here as well, to try to diminish the effect of that across a province for all of the ballots. Each candidate's name would come to the top approximately the same number of times over the course of the ballots as they're distributed across the province.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Can independent candidates contest Senate elections?

[Dan McDougall]

Yes, independents can contest the selection process.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Right.

[The Chair, Liberal, Albina Guarnieri]

Thank you, Mr. Reid.

We'll begin our five-minute round.

Madam Folco.

[Raymonde Folco, Liberal, Laval—Les Îles, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Mr. McDougall, I would like to come back to the very beginning, when you were describing the system at the request of my colleague. There is one thing I don't really understand, and it has to do with transferring votes once the quota has been determined. The surplus is transferred to the individual who has ranked second. His excess is transferred to the person ranked third, and so on. Subsequently, you start the process all over again starting from the bottom.

I would like to present you with a scenario. Supposing we are talking about a candidate for a Senate seat from Quebec. Quebec is very large and we all know how expensive it is to visit all the communities, particularly in Northern Quebec. A person might wonder what the point is of travelling all across Quebec to meet with people and get as many votes as possible when, in any case, the quota is only 555 votes, for example. All the candidate has to do is make sure he or she will receive 600 or 700 votes, without having to go up to Northern Quebec. The candidate may decide just to stay in Laval, the area he or she knows best, and get the 500 votes there.

What is the logic behind this idea of transferring votes from the top-ranked candidate to the one in second place, and from the second-ranked candidate to the one in third place? Doesn't that take away from the democratic nature of the process, as we were talking about earlier?

[Dan McDougall]

I would say the process is democratic. It is used in many different countries.

[Raymonde Folco, Liberal, Laval—Les Îles, QC]

But that is not an explanation as to why we are doing this. Did someone sit down at 2 a.m. one day and suddenly decide that he had the answer—transferring votes from the person in first place to the one in second place? What is the logic behind that decision?

What is the rationale behind it?

[Dan McDougall]

The votes are transferred because of the quota. The first step is to determine the quota, but it is not necessary to get more than the quota. If nobody receives more votes than the required number, the idea is to avoid an unused vote.

Maybe I'll try to explain it in English.

[Raymonde Folco, Liberal, Laval—Les Îles, QC]

It is a lost vote, not an unused vote.

[Dan McDougall]

The idea is to try to avoid wasted votes. There are a lot of complaints that the “first past the post” system doesn't function well because there are a lot of wasted votes.

[Raymonde Folco, Liberal, Laval—Les Îles, QC]

I understand that. I understand the “first past the post” system and all the weaknesses. That's fine. I'm not trying to argue against this new system; I'm trying to understand the logic behind it.

If we're talking about wasted votes, then I could say, well, if I voted for number one and my vote was surplus, and then my vote went to number two, I didn't want my vote to go to number two; I wanted it to stay with number one.

[Dan McDougall]

If you just want to vote for number one and nobody else, you can certainly do that. So you just mark the one.

[Raymonde Folco, Liberal, Laval—Les Îles, QC]

I understand that. You still haven't explained the rationale behind the fact that you want to transfer the votes from one to two, from two to three, and so on. That's really the point I'm trying to make.

[Dan McDougall]

The rationale is that if you're a voter and you vote for number one, number two, and number three, obviously that indicates that you have preferences other than number one, in the first instance. There's someone else you would like to see selected. You'd like to see this person selected first, this one selected second, this one selected third, etc.

You determine the quota. So your first person got to number one and has surplus votes. The idea, then, is to look at those ballots that are surplus to that and ask, what were the second preferences for those persons, and transfer those votes out so that those votes are no longer wasted. In a “first past the post” system, with the votes, once you get over the 50% threshold, whether you get 51%, 87%, or 98%, anything above 50% doesn't count any more.

[Raymonde Folco, Liberal, Laval—Les Îles, QC]

Excuse me. I think I finally got hold of it.

Are you then counting, for number two, how many votes he got as number one or how many votes he got as number two?

[Dan McDougall]

Maybe I can explain. There are three ways you could do this for the ones with the surplus number of votes. You could just look at those surpluses and ask what are the numbers on those, for number two, which would be the next instance. So of those surplus, you ask who is number two, and we'll give the votes there. That would be one way.

A second way would be to do a random selection. The problem with doing it that way is that you don't know that the number two preference on the 52nd ballot that is over the surplus isn't the same as the first person. Maybe the first person who contributed to your surplus had very different ideas as to who should be number two.

So what the process has provided for in the bill here is that you look at all the ballots, every one of them, and you look for that candidate who has received more than a surplus. You look at each ballot, and you look for what was the second preference for all of those persons. So every ballot is in play.

Then what you need to do is to determine what is the value of those. So the process here is that you calculate what's called a “transfer value”. The transfer value is simply that you would essentially consider the vote to be a whole number one, so what portion of that vote of the first preference would have been necessary in order to just achieve the quota and nothing more?

If, for example, I needed only 75% of every person's vote in here in order to reach the quota, that means that 25% of everybody's vote in here can be used for the second preference that everybody in here expressed.

[The Chair, Liberal, Albina Guarnieri]

Excuse me, Madame Folco, your time has expired.

Mr. Lukiwski.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Mr. McDougall.

I have to admit that while I'm very familiar with the concept of preferential balloting, I'm a little confused on the STV. In one of my former lives, for several years in Saskatchewan we used the concept of preferential balloting for nomination meetings. That's when you select, at the end of the day, only one candidate. It's fairly simple, although the administrators, the people counting the ballots, have to do so manually, and it takes some time if you have many candidates running.

So I would agree with Mr. Maloney's suggestion that perhaps there be some further explanation, either written or otherwise. It may be worthwhile, actually, to show in a demonstration how this thing works, because it does get a little confusing.

The one point I would make...and this we found out in Saskatchewan when we set up our own preferential balloting system. We examined the process in Australia and New Zealand, and we did a lot of field testing. I think Mr. McDougall mentioned the proposal that voters would mark on the ballot their preference among multi candidates by saying one, two, three, or four, indicating their first choice, their second preference, their third preference, and their fourth.

We found that voters are far more used to marking Xs rather than one, two, three, or four. So what we did on our ballots, if you can kind of imagine this, is put the names of the candidates vertically down the left-hand side, and horizontally across the top of the ballot would be first choice, second choice, third choice, fourth choice. People would just mark an X corresponding with the name and the choice they wanted. They didn't mark one, two, three, or four. We found that this avoided a whole bunch of confusion.

So if this is introduced in the form you're suggesting, I think there would have to be a whole bunch of education for voters on how to cast their ballots. I would just put that out as a suggestion. You may want to take a look at designing a system so that people can actually mark their preference with an X rather than a number. It might prove to be a little easier.

I have a couple of other comments, just based on some of the conversation and questions around the table. One question was that if there's not really an elected Senate and the Prime Minister still has the ability to appoint whomever he wishes, where's the democracy in that? Well, I think it's because of the constitutional challenges that could occur. Right now, to my understanding, in order to have an elected Senate you'd have to change the Constitution. But I know we'll have constitutional experts coming in later as witnesses.

There's no way the provinces would agree--I think Mr. Angus is quite correct, you wouldn't see seven provinces and 50% of the population agree--to an elected Senate, so this would still be the next best thing. It would allow the voters in each province to express their preference of who they would like to see as their senator, or senators, without having them elected. The Prime Minister then would appoint them, as in the current process, but probably based on the votes received by each of the candidates.

I would suggest that if a prime minister wanted to appoint someone other than the person who received the most amount of votes in the consultation process, then he would be doing so at his political peril. If he wanted to do that, if he wanted to appoint whomever he wished, then why would he go through this whole process of having consultations?

I think what the minister is trying to do here is to at least allow the people of each province a chance to express their preference. I think it would be natural to assume that the Prime Minister then, regardless of who received the most votes, will say, well, I'll appoint that person because the province expressed its opinion through a consultation process. That's the fail-safe system, I believe. I would like your comments on that.

If in the design of this system the bill were put together to allow constitutional challenges...because I can see that if we had straight elections, we'd be in a morass constitutionally. This is the next best system, I guess, to avoid getting into a whole constitutional crisis. Would that be an accurate statement, that this is something that will not--in your opinion, at least--result in any constitutional problems but will still allow voters to express their preference?

[Dan McDougall]

That would certainly be our opinion. To begin with, we were very conscious of the way the Constitution is constructed and what is necessary if one wishes to change the method of selection. That requires an amendment to the Constitution, as you mentioned, with seven provinces representing 50% of the population agreeing to that. As we have seen in the past, multilateral, complex, comprehensive constitutional change with respect to the Senate has been impossible to achieve. Indeed, the confederation of the provinces studied this for several years and were unable to come to any conclusion themselves as to how they would proceed with Senate reform.

As you suggest, from a democratic reform perspective, this would be the next best thing, where you're working within the existing system with the powers that are currently provided to the Governor General to appoint senators and the prerogative of the Prime Minister to make recommendations to the Governor General. This bill certainly respects those parameters and was designed with that in mind.

There are a number of ways, as I mentioned earlier, and some of the flexibility that we've designed into this process is designed to reflect those constraints as well.

The Prime Minister decides whether to invoke the process in the first instance. There's no obligation on the Prime Minister to have a consultation. The Prime Minister decides for how many provinces a consultation will be held. The Prime Minister decides whether it will be with a federal general election or in conjunction with a provincial general election. There is no obligation on the Prime Minister that forces the Prime Minister to make a recommendation to the Governor General. The flexibility is left with respect to the Prime Minister to do that. All of those design parameters are to reflect the constraints we have in the Constitution.

So yes, very much so.

To comment on your earlier point, in terms of the simplicity of design, the complexities, as I mentioned earlier, are really for the administrators. In terms of the voters, I think everywhere the STV system has been deployed--Australia, the United Kingdom, in some of the emerging democracies, and in the former Soviet Union--there's been no instance of the voters having difficulty following the system.

It is important that the voters have confidence that the process is well designed and properly administered. I think we have some strong degree of favour here in that Canada has a very well-regarded electoral system and electoral process with Elections Canada. We're a leg up on many other jurisdictions, if you will. Voter education I think will be particularly important on this. And everywhere this system has been deployed for the first time, the focus of voter education has indeed been on the simplicity of the system from a voter's perspective rather than from an administrator's perspective.

[The Chair, Liberal, Albina Guarnieri]

Thank you, Mr. McDougall.

Madam Picard, you have five minutes.

[Pauline Picard, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

I would like to raise two points, Mr. McDougall. In subsection 54(1) of the bill, it says:

54. (1) […] the nominee having obtained the smallest number of votes shall be eliminated from subsequent counts.

I would like clarification with respect to your response to questions from my colleague, Mr. Paquette, and Ms. Folco. I don't know whether it was a mistake or not, but you say that the votes are transferred to nominees ranked second, third and fourth, whereas in the bill, it says that the nominee having obtained the smallest number of votes shall be eliminated—in other words, starting from the bottom.

[Pierre Paquette, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

If the quota has not been met.