Electoral Reform Committee on July 27th, 2016

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

After?

[Prof. André Blais]

I think it's around December 5.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

You couldn't speed them up? We have a report to write.

I have a question from Twitter for you, Professor Blais. It's from Laurel Russwurm. Earlier, she asked how we felt about dropping the voting age to 16, but now she's got a new one. She requests that I ask you, Professor Blais, whether it would be adequate to hold a referendum after an election or two, when the new system has been used, as Professor Himelfarb suggested. That's her question.

[Prof. André Blais]

This is a normative judgment as a citizen. I think it would be preferable to no referendum at all, but I think that before making a substantial change there should be a referendum to make sure that Canadians agree with the principles of trying a new system. I think it would be a second-best approach.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

On the same general topic, but perhaps at a higher level of abstraction, I want to ask Dr. Himelfarb about a shared op-ed in The Globe and Mail by Mel Cappe, a Clerk of the Privy Council who followed him, and Janice Gross Stein. Are you familiar with it?

The argument they put forward was that as a representative democracy it's really a rather large change to decide that we want to move to a more direct democracy where lots of issues are put forward in referendums. I wondered if you had any thoughts on that? They were writing not just on this topic, but were were responding to Brexit.

[Alex Himelfarb]

I read the article, and actually retweeted it. I think there's a lot of merit in that view. In a representative democracy, the legislators are expected to represent their constituents and do some hard work. This is not constitutional, and so it's not required. It then becomes a political and normative judgment.

Their article was important in suggesting how complex issues can be easily hijacked in systems that appear more democratic but in the end are actually not. Asking people to leave or remain when there's so much misinformation is highly problematic. The investment in public education ought to be pretty rigorous.

I'm very comfortable with their general conclusion that direct democracy doesn't necessarily mean greater democracy. There is a place for referendums, but equating referendums with the quality of democracy is probably a mistake.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Sahota.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

I'd like to follow up on that.

Doctor, you've been quoted as saying that whether a referendum is deemed essential or not, what's most essential is what comes before that referendum. Of course, this is a part of what could possibly come before.

We have another leg of this committee's work that will involve engaging people across the country. One of the values that we were talking about that we hold dear is fairness. One of the mandates of this committee is also to engage those who have been disengaged for some time. Inclusivity and accessibility are what we are trying to achieve.

Do you have any ideas—and this can go out to all of you—about how we can enhance the work of this committee and really reach out to those people?

Regardless of what we do, we want to make sure we have complete engagement in the voter turnout. Also, as my colleague was saying, we have representatives who represent this country. I come from a minority group and I'm also a woman, but some of these things could start becoming one-offs. I heard a statistic on the news yesterday after watching the Democratic Party convention in the United States that something like 80 countries have elected women as the leaders of their country, but those were all one-offs. Only under five of those countries have ever done it again.

How can we improve the system so that we're not just having a couple of years here and there where we have great representation, but make it something that we hold as a value going forward? Engagement is definitely important for this committee. How do we improve on that?

[Alex Himelfarb]

I think that's a multi-barrelled question. To some extent, you're asking something that goes beyond electoral reform, about how we keep disengaged communities more engaged, about how we bring them into the system. I think electoral reform is part of it, but I think it's much bigger than that.

It has to be a deliberate, committed strategy to reach those who are most disengaged. There are a number of ways to do it. I thought it was interesting that one of the committee members asked a question from Twitter. I think that's a great thing. I would probably be doing that a whole lot more. I would probably be linking to the large community in the social media through this committee. I'd probably be doing it intensely through various local organizations when you go into your next stage. I thought it was really interesting and reassuring how much time the government and the opposition parties spent in getting this process right. That's pretty reassuring. The debates are understandable, but the notion that people were listening to each other was pretty reassuring.

The extent to which this committee is deliberate in its outreach will be reassuring. The extent to which it's open and transparent is reassuring.

In the last decades, we have lost institutions that people trust to provide information that's not partisan. It's interesting that in New Zealand when they were talking about electoral reform, they created an institution for public education that could be trusted, that was non-partisan, that provided information. To have that kind of institutional capacity would also be useful, given how much distrust there is now in our democratic institutions.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

That's excellent. Yesterday we heard from a witness that education should just be done by political parties and the media, and not government. I was shocked to hear that type of testimony. I agree with you. I believe we should be getting out and engaging people and educating them. You have some unique ideas.

Does anybody else want to add to that?

Dr. Milner, I know you have done some work in this area.

[Prof. Henry Milner]

We've had different ways of doing it. In British Columbia we had a large citizens' commission. In Quebec we had a mixed commission of politicians and citizens. There is no right way. As was said, the crucial point is that efforts must be made to present objective, non-partisan, easily accessible material in every way possible and to allow for and invite input, using the latest technologies for that. It's never going to be perfect; we're not going to have a completely informed population. Many people have other priorities than the way we do elections. To the extent that the resources are used effectively, as I said before, I think this committee is on the right track.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

We'll go to Mr. Kenney.

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

Following on the same line of questioning and on the theme of legitimacy, I wondered if the witnesses would comment on whether they think a citizens' assembly would be a preferable form of non-political, non-partisan consultation with the electorate to study these complex issues. I ask in part because the norm, certainly in Canada in the case of Ontario and British Columbia, was to have citizens' assemblies to remove from the process those of us who have an obvious stake in the electoral system. Would the witnesses support a recommendation from this committee that a citizens' assembly be constituted to review options on electoral reform?

[Prof. André Blais]

Can I address this question?

This is a very interesting question because I've closely examined the citizen assemblies in British Columbia, in Ontario, and in the Netherlands, and we have a book, When Citizens Decide, about this. I was so impressed by the quality of discussion and debate in these three instances—the Netherlands, British Columbia, and Ontario—and I think this is a very good example, with one problem. The problem is that politicians were not involved, so all these citizens were discussing the issues and and all the parties were absent from the discussions, so they had to develop ideas without taking due account of the real, concrete constraints that politicians face.

I would advocate a model that is closer to the Irish model. The Irish just had a citizens' assembly in which there was a lottery, and most of the participants were ordinary citizens, but with a fraction of members of Parliament in the citizens' assembly. This is, I think, a very, very interesting idea.

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

In Ireland, you said that TDs are involved in the assembly. The members of the Dail are involved in the assembly in Ireland. Is that correct?

[Prof. André Blais]

You interviewed two of them yesterday, but there was a third person, David Farrell, who was basically the chair of that commission. As I recall it, I think it was three-fourths ordinary citizen members, and one-fourth members of Parliament, and also members from the various parties. They had constitutional assemblies on about six or seven different topics, and they came up with proposals on each of these topics.

[Jason Kenney, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

Some members of the current government, including the Prime Minister, have expressed a preference for the alternative vote system, which some argue actually magnifies or increases the problem of false majorities. For centrist parties, it can do so. If one looked at polling data from the 2015 election and allocated second choices based on an AV system, the current governing party would have ended up with a disproportionately even larger percentage of seats.

I wonder if any of the panellists would care to comment on whether they see a problem of false majorities in a strict, single-member seat AV system.

[Prof. Henry Milner]

I've never understood the advantage of preferential systems per se. It seems to me that we know the disadvantages, which are that these systems make it difficult for parties that are not within the mainstream—even harder than it is under our system—to get elected, so you have less diversity. Where it's been brought in, it's usually been done pretty much to either keep out so-called extremists or to allow two parties who are close together, but can't agree, to keep out a third party, let's say. In the case of Australia, you had the National Party and the Liberal Party getting together to keep out Labor. In other words, the actual principled advantage of a preferential ballot to my mind.... I mean, you can say in theory that the local candidate who is elected is less disliked than he or she might be under our system, where you could have 40% in favour and 60% despising that person. But that's really unusual, and certainly it doesn't seem to me that you'd want to build your electoral system based on that kind of idea. To me, it's essentially a red herring that has been brought in, and I'm not quite sure why. If we had extremist parties that were threatening to become very significant and undermine.... When I say “extremist”, I mean parties that don't believe in democracy.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thanks very much.

Mr. Aldag.

[John Aldag, Liberal, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

I'm going to go to present a couple of comments from Twitter. The first one is from Sebastian Muermann, who says, “Going forward, process of elimination for what is NOT going to work in Canada will be a good tool for [our group and] will allow us to move forward”. Indeed, we've heard that we may need to find a smaller number of items to take to Canadians instead of this huge shopping list. Another person, Ken S., has posted on Twitter, “#redherring”, and noted there are some that we shouldn't be looking at.

In my mind, I'm not quite ready to start throwing out options. I'm still a bit higher up. I came across a quote from Professor Milner, from an article in late January, that indicated that we need to be identifying principles to move forward, that this ought to be paramount. From Mr. DeCourcey we had started to talk about values, and we heard that fairness is one of those values. In response to Mr. Cullen's questioning, Mr. Himelfarb said that we need to have principles.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on what these principles should be. Ultimately, who should help us define them? Canadians are going to have to buy into this, the principles that will guide us moving forward, which from there will help inform this handful of systems that we take forward and the ones that we throw out.

I put to each of the panellists: what principles would you give to us, and how else do we get those from Canadians? We've heard that we need to have a system that's designed in Canada to meet our unique needs, and to me, the principles are a key part of that.

I'll throw it out to each of you: what are those principles? Who else should be identifying those principles? Your thoughts would be appreciated.

[Prof. Henry Milner]

My feeling is that abstractions are good in seminars for graduate students. To really have a discussion even around principles, I think you need to present concrete proposals and then invite interventions in which people are asked to express an opinion on either side, drawing upon principles. But asking for the principles as such is an abstraction, and I would say that most people don't think that way. If they do, it's because it's imposed on them by the situation. It's not the way they naturally operate.

Yes, I think the principles are important, but I do think that what I mentioned is the best way to get at them: to say here's the system, and here are the alternative systems that, based on our discussions, best reflect our views and those of the people who've presented their positions to us. Now we take it to the people in our districts and we ask them. When they choose, when they express a preference for one or the other system, we ask them to explain their preference in terms of these values—not the other way around.

[Alex Himelfarb]

I agree with that, although I think it's important to have principles. Linking them to actual proposals is going to be the key, because what really matters is the tension among principles. To take an example, there are two principles that I think we would all nod about. One of them is accountability to the electorate and the other is representativeness. We are a representative democracy. Now, the question is: are you committed to both and the tensions between them, and what systems best capture both? If you start looking at some of these principles, you'll find that some of them are in tension with each other, and then the question becomes, what systems reconcile those tensions best?

[Prof. André Blais]

My response would be that I oppose going from principles to choices and only then coming up with concrete questions. In my class, I've basically designed about 20 questions about the potential consequences of electoral systems. By the way, you're all invited anytime to come to my classes on Thursday morning. Just email me and I'll invite you and you'll see how students think about it.

You need to discuss the impact on the number of parties, on government duration, on links between MPs and citizens, on the representation of women, all of these specific questions, and then at the end you have to discuss values. But let's talk about the concrete consequences of electoral systems. That would be my argument.

I remind you as well that you're all invited to this public forum that was organized on October 20. There will be four political scientists, each one arguing for one system, who will present all the evidence in favour of these four different systems.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

We'll go to Mr. Blaikie now.

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Thank you.

I'd like to pick up on the matter of the process. As I see it, there are two considerations. First, we have to look at how we go about reaching a decision on a concrete proposal at the end of the process. Mr. Kenney talked about that. Second, Mr. Cullen touched on how we come up with a concrete proposal that is regarded as legitimate.

The consensus, I believe, was that it would be preferable to present Canadians with concrete ideas and questions when the committee engages in public consultations across the country.

The makeup of our committee makes it rather unique. In that sense, do you think that, at the end of this whole process, we should put forward the system we believe the government should adopt and lay out its attributes?