Evidence of meeting #12 for Electoral Reform in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was voters.
A video is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
Thank you. We have four-minute rounds now, correct?
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
Okay.
I want to go back to you, Jonathan Rose, but not with the question I was going to ask earlier. You said something that made me want to inquire further. You discussed the Irish model.
I don't know if you heard the testimony from the two professors from Trinity University who appeared earlier. They noted—and this connects to your observation about proportionality in STV—that in that country, the fact that the government gets to control the law as to how their system is designed from one election to the next has resulted in the size of districts being decreased, the number of members. There's a three-person minimum, and the country has been drifting closer and closer to three. Regardless of whether it's Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael in power, because both of those two parties have a communal interest in restricting proportionality, they're both likely, in a three-person electorate, to get one MP, whereas they can freeze out some of the smaller parties.
I guess I'm asking this question because you also raised the problem of the size of ridings. With this particular model, is there a fundamental problem in Canada that your riding either becomes too large in terms of geography or becomes too small in terms of members to be significantly proportional?
Prof. Jonathan Rose
Yes, I think those are the trade-offs. If you look at the Australian system, where there is better proportionality in the STV model—
Conservative
Prof. Jonathan Rose
Yes, the Senate. The number of people per district is much larger, so you can achieve proportionality if you have at least five.
If you try to think about having at least five or more representatives per district, and you look at the country, and you try to maintain the principle of representation by population, something has to give. What has to give is either the size of the district or the proportionality.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
Right. In Australia, I know it's 12 senators per state, but it's six per election typically, unless you have a double dissolution. Six achieves that goal at the cost of having, in the case of Western Australia, a single electorate or riding that is the size of Ontario and Quebec combined.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
That's the lower house, but the state of Western Australia is a single district for the purpose of Senate elections. You're right that Kalgoorlie is about 80% of that. I've seen the riding map.
At any rate, those are the trade-offs. The model that came out of the citizens' assembly that you were involved in was a different model. It was the MMP model. In your opinion, does that achieve a better result? I think in your case, you actually advocated adding some seats as well. Is that correct?
Prof. Jonathan Rose
That's right. With MMP, there are a number of different design variations. The big ones are the ratio between local representatives and the tier. The assembly members thought 70:30 was about right, with 25% on the tier about what you need. They wanted to return the legislature to pre-Mike Harris days, so it would have increased it from 103 to 129.
A number of other design decisions that the assembly members raised affect both proportionality and the values they wanted, including open and closed lists and the ballot structure. In Germany, in Saxony, you have an opportunity to rank your candidates in the local district. There's whether you want to have a threshold, and what the threshold would be. While the assembly members recognized that more parties might be better, they didn't want smaller obstreperous parties, shall we say, so they raised the floor at 5%.
Liberal
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
I have two questions coming off Twitter from Lea Westlake.
I'll put this to you, I think, Mr. Pilon. Do mixed-member proportional systems maintain local representation?
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Second, she asks if we could try proportional voting for a couple of elections and have a referendum; that way, the public would know.
Prof. Dennis Pilon
Well, I guess some people have floated that idea. I think my views have come through fairly clearly. I don't accept that the current system meets the democratic standard of the 21st century. It's a pre-democratic holdover. It's been kept in place because it served the partisan interests of the parties that could change it, and it's time to change it. That's my view.
I would say that putting something like the equality of our voting rights to a referendum is fundamentally unsound in democratic terms. We don't do that. Switzerland had a vote on women's franchise; they didn't get the vote until 1972. We didn't do that because we believe women should have the vote as a matter of principle.
President, Institute on Governance
We still only have one out of 22.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Ah...yes.
You mentioned earlier about privileging the status quo in a referendum, that there's a certain natural momentum for voters to maintain what we have, particularly if the question is complex. The analogy I'm thinking of is, if this were a race, a 100-metre dash—the Olympics are coming—and the status quo was competing against a reform, the status quo starts at the 50-metre mark and everyone says it's fair. Ms. Flumian, do you get a similar impression when questions are put in referenda?
Prof. Dennis Pilon
We want the result to reflect the reasoned opinions, the informed opinions. I don't think anyone would disagree with the idea that a legitimate outcome would be one in which we were confident the voters had the information and the capacity to participate, but I'm telling you that the evidence does not support that.
You can go forward, but it won't be an evidence-based decision. The evidence, I think, is quite clear. In Ontario, surveys that were done at the same time discovered that voters said a majority preferred a system that had a local member and proportionality in results. Those same voters then turned out and voted down a model that would have given them that. That is a perverse result, and it's perverse because, clearly, the referendum process was not one that the public could engage with effectively.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
That's particularly so if a government or parties then work against the passing of the referendum, as was the case with the Liberals in Ontario.
Prof. Dennis Pilon
That was fairly clear in all cases, in P.E.I., Ontario, and British Columbia. The governments were fairly hostile to the process and put a host of barriers in the way of the systems working.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
We talk about the tension between local representation and people voting for parties, platforms, leaders. Under mixed systems, are voters enabled with a choice if they want to fire their local MP but still believe in the platform of the party they happen to represent, or is it the reverse?
Prof. Dennis Pilon
Exactly, exactly. Both STV and MMP, the two models that are chosen most broadly around the world as alternatives, increase the power of the elector to see that their vote counts. In these cases 95% of the votes actually contribute to the election of someone, unlike our system, under which only 50% do. Also, voters are not forced into an either/or situation in which if they're unhappy with Party Left, they have to vote for Party Right.
