Electoral Reform Committee on July 27th, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

[Dr. Leslie Seidle]

Just to finish up, I reiterate Professor LeDuc's comment that you cannot divorce a referendum from a public education campaign. In B.C. they did quite well in that regard, in some other jurisdictions not so well, including in Ontario.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Okay, we're going to Mr. Cullen now.

Thank you.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Thank you very much to our witnesses.

Professor Seidle, it wasn't just the minister who suggested first past the post was antiquated. I'll read you a quote. “...Canada is now the only complex multiparty democracy in the developed world which still relies on a 15th century voting system designed for medieval England” said the slightly younger Jason Kenney at one point.

We agree in terms of the design being somewhat antiquated. It doesn't fit the updated House that we hope to design here in Canada with that radical notion that I think you've all since supported that the House of Commons should reflect the voices of the voters. It's been put forward as almost a radical notion, so we seek out that system and a process that can validate it.

To Professor LeDuc, Japan and others did take a long road. I think the first House of Commons committee met in 1921 here in Canada talking about electoral reform. So we're coming on to nearly a century, which proves your point that it isn't easy to get done, yet shouldn't dissuade us from trying if we are to approach that radical concept of actually reflecting what voters want.

Mr. Seidle, at the very end of your testimony you talked about one of the models. I may have gotten this wrong, so I want to clarify it. You said that AV, the alternative vote, the listing, doesn't give you an advantage over the current system. Can you expand on that a little?

[Dr. Leslie Seidle]

Okay. I said it doesn't give you “much” advantage—

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

I understand. Excuse me.

[Dr. Leslie Seidle]

—because you rank one candidate per party, whereby it doesn't give you any advantages to go within the party. Open party lists and STV in a sense incorporate some of the principles of the primary into the electoral system. You get to express preferences among parties' candidates.

On the point about its being antiquated, I didn't throw that out to be frivolous; I threw it out to make a point, which is that first of all, we don't know why you're looking at this. Is it only because it's old? If it's not for that reason, we should be told. The flaw in this is not at your table; the flaw starts in the program of the Liberal Party, because it has not explained what the public good is here. That's my purpose.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

I would be loath to defend the Liberal platform in its vagueness, which somehow worked, but it is what it is and we're here where we are. This building is old, and we're going to keep it, but we're going to take the asbestos out of it over the next couple of years, because that seems like a good idea, since, having built it, we've learned that it kills people. There is not something so extreme in our voting system, but updating is not a bad idea.

Mr. Cyr, you've approached the question of stability. I would suggest that in your comments and your recommendations you're also talking about accountability. You've made very explicit suggestions that we should make it more difficult for the government of the day to game the system. By gaming the system, I mean using tactics such as prorogation to avoid a confidence motion, as a previous Conservative government did.

Is this to build confidence in any electoral system that would lead to more sharing of power, lead to more minority parliaments? Is that your effort?

[Prof. Hugo Cyr]

The reason I mentioned these elements is that when there are criticisms or fears dealing with reforming electoral systems, oftentimes there are fears that there will be minority governments or coalition governments that will make things less stable. All the suggestions that I'm putting in this brief are meant to find ways for the elected officials to maintain and ensure a stability of the institutions.

If there is a mechanism in place to make sure that a majority or two-thirds are needed to dissolve Parliament, we can ensure stability. The goal here is to carefully examine the mechanisms that will ensure, regardless of the electoral system, the stability of a government, whether it is a minority, majority, or coalition government.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

In approaching this question, we recognize and have heard testimony that there's a general resistance to change amongst people: this is not a uniquely Canadian event. Yet we've also heard testimony that the productivity of governments that we have had even under our system has been quite good, under minority situations. The policies that come forward, the institutions that have been enduring, have come out of these.

Is there anything to fear out of any system that leads to a greater chance of these similar minority parliaments in which power is not the exclusivity of one party?

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

I think we'll have to defer the answer to another opportunity.

We'll go to Mr. Thériault.

[Luc Thériault, Bloc, Montcalm, QC]

I have said many times to witnesses that I found these panels very inspiring. I have many questions but too little time.

Mr. LeDuc, about a possible referendum, you claimed being concerned about spurious arguments. However, that is how we can lose elections. During the 2007 Quebec election, Mario Dumont said, on the subject of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, that $40 billion was about to “go up in smoke”, which went against the “economy first” Liberal slogan. He was absolutely right, but nobody believed him and he was called a clown. However, he was right: $40 billion was about to burn to nothing. The outcome was that he lost his election.

It might be possible to ensure a process for conducting an education campaign independently from political parties. It would certainly be much more legitimate. Indeed, why do we do this? We don't do it for political parties, or for insiders, or for academics. We certainly don't do it for ourselves. We do it to ensure that when the rules of democracy are changed, the people can feel they are an integral part of this change process. This could have a positive impact on the outcomes and on stability.

I would like to hear your thoughts not only on legitimacy, but also on the need to have the public give us answers on this debate, so that we can really accomplish something, and to take the time required to get it done.

What's the rush? Considering that we have been following this procedure for about 200 years, we might as well take the time we need for this process. I have the feeling that we are being told to hurry because we have been talking about this for 21 years. Let's stop for a moment. I wouldn't be able to find anyone on the street who could tell me the difference between the proposed models or indeed anyone interested in the subject. In short, we should take all the time we need.

I would like to hear your thoughts on this.

[Prof. Larry LeDuc]

I agree with almost everything you have just said. I think it reinforces Leslie Seidle's point about the importance of public education, which he made in response to the earlier question. On an issue like this, you can't really expect people to know a lot about different electoral systems. First of all, most voters think about elections only at election time. They aren't people like me who are talking about them and writing about them all the time, or people like you who are living the life of politics. They're interested in elections. They think about some of these questions, but only on election day, not over the whole electoral cycle.

Also, one of the things I've learned, looking at some of the other referendums on these topics that have taken place in other countries particularly, is that voters are not comparativists. I am a comparative political scientist. In addition to studying Canada, I study Europe. Most of the structures we use for students are comparative, to understand the similarities and differences between different countries, different political environments, different political processes, and so on.

Voters don't think that way. They're not sitting around thinking about first past the post versus list PR or STV. If you want to engage them, you have to give them the materials to work with. I think that's the point you have made, which I completely agree with.

[Luc Thériault, Bloc, Montcalm, QC]

Witnesses told us that, because people were not interested in this issue and they weren't aware of all the relevant differences, it would be appropriate for a committee like this to take action and propose something.

However, I think that by doing that we would be setting ourselves up for failure. No one can do things this quickly. In Quebec, a draft bill proposed a specific model. In this case, we want to consult Canadians across the country, but we have no specific model for them to consider.

There are steps to follow. The process followed by New Zealand is interesting, but there is an inherent resistance to change in every political system. This may well explain why the change process takes a long time in general, as was the case in New Zealand.

We have to recognize this and do things properly.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Okay.

We now go to Ms. May.

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

Once again, I am totally engrossed in Mr. Thériault's questions.

I'm drawn to the points that Professor Seidle made, but I see an answer to the question of why we are now engaged in this in the testimony of Professor LeDuc.

I want to draw you to something that I don't think you said out loud and ask whether you think that now is such a moment. Near the closing of your written testimony, you say:

The first-past-the-post, single member plurality, electoral system, which we inherited from Britain rather than choosing for ourselves, has produced a dismal record of misrepresentation, distortion and impaired governance....

The fact of the matter is that not only the Liberal platform, but the NDP platform and the Green platform together—the three parties, obviously us the least—attracted 63% of the votes in the last election. People will say they didn't care about first past the post when they were voting for your parties, but I actually found it, on the hustings, quite a significant, salient issue.

Do you think, having studied it and being someone who calls for electoral reform, that we need to start actually with explaining first past the post and why it is an unacceptable system in a modern democracy?

[Prof. Larry LeDuc]

I think we certainly need to do that.

Some of the polling evidence, which perhaps others have cited in testimony before the committee—I know André Blais was here this morning, but I did not hear his testimony, so whether he was able to cite some of this or not, I'm not sure.... I think some of the reservations that people have about elections in Canada and the way they are conducted touch on that point: people's feelings, especially if you live in a constituency that is considered a safe seat where the levels of competition are low from election to election and where you're told how important the election is, but you start to realize that your vote is not going to make much difference or the choices you're being presented with are not the choices you would like to see.

Now, those things don't come out explicitly in polling, but they're there. You can see that people have that feeling that they're being told the election is really important and that they should go out and vote, but yet their vote is not going to do anything; it's not going to accomplish anything in the place where they live and given the choices they're presented with.

You're trying to some extent to counteract that.

Also, in the line that you quoted from my brief I was citing Alan Cairns, who wrote in 1968, so these arguments have been around for a long time. I could have cited other things, but I cited the Cairns article because it is the single most widely cited article in the Canadian Journal of Political Science.

A student did a tally of this some time ago, a listing of how often articles are cited, and Alan Cairns' article on the electoral system and the party system, written in 1968, was the most-cited piece in Canadian political science. My colleague Peter Russell yesterday stressed the idea that this argument, as Mr. Thériault has also just mentioned, goes back to 1921. So these arguments have been around for a long time.

Now, we know why we have first past the post in Canada: the British gave it to us. And they didn't just give it to us; they gave it to every other British colony and dominion in the world in the 19th century. It is an electoral system that has worked okay in some places and not so well in others. It's probably not a good system for India, for example. The reason India has first past the post is simply its British colonial heritage.

But the British didn't differentiate; they didn't do studies of their colonies and conclude that in colony X or colony Y STV might be a better model, or maybe PR. They just thought that the British system was the best system and gave it to everybody, no matter when this happened or what the venue was.

Well, then societies change, as Professor Russell pointed out yesterday. Canada became a multi-party system in 1921, and it has been ever since. This system doesn't work as well in that environment. First past the post doesn't work very well anymore in Britain. Look at the cleavage with Scotland.

The idea that there's this glorious 19th-century British model that should be our first preference.... It has never been chosen in Canada and doesn't even work very well in the place that is its ancestral home.

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

Professor Seidle, I hope I have time to get the question out. In a paper you wrote in 2002, you said that the opportunity for reforming our electoral system in Canada was unlikely to come.

We may need to get to an answer in the next round for me, or another MP could pick it up, but you cited John Courtney's criteria or conditions, in his book Reforming Representational Building Blocks, saying that in order to change our electoral system in Canada, which you didn't think would happen, we need an opportunity, the opening of a policy window, which I suggest we have; an agreed-upon alternative, which I think is the job of this committee; and political will, which is the big question.

I think, looking at the chair, that we're going to have to hope that somebody else will ask this, or I'll come back to it in my next round.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Great. Thank you, Ms. May.

[Dr. Leslie Seidle]

Was that a question to me?

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Yes, but we have run out of time.

[Dr. Leslie Seidle]

I thought we were having a panel here.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

We are having a panel.

[Dr. Leslie Seidle]

Normally on a panel the presenters are allowed to come in, here and there—

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Well, no—