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.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Dennis Pilon  Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, York University, As an Individual
Jonathan Rose  Associate Professor, Department of Political Studies, Queen's University, As an Individual
Maryantonett Flumian  President, Institute on Governance

11 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

Okay.

Go ahead. You have 45 seconds.

11 a.m.

President, Institute on Governance

Maryantonett Flumian

I don't get to rebut?

11 a.m.

Liberal

Sherry Romanado Liberal Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC

Yes, absolutely.

11 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

Yes. Go ahead, Ms. Flumian.

11 a.m.

President, Institute on Governance

Maryantonett Flumian

Thank you.

Then I would say that the measure is not what the voting system is, it's what the effectiveness of the governance model is? The question is too narrowly asked when you're asking about this system or that system, because it's not a duelling battle about experts. If this committee can agree to a solution, the country will probably support you. That's the way our parliamentary system of governance works. It's imperfect at the best of times, but that's the way it's intended to work. It's as legitimate as my and your role, and there's nothing more important than the sanctity of this House for all of us. If you're an elite, it's because we chose to make you an elite. We accept that role in our system. It's a better use, a more legitimate use, of the respective roles that we all play in a governance cycle system. It is much broader than just the one aspect of how you cast that actual vote. It legitimizes all your roles—the role of governance, the role of the importance of Parliament, the role of our democratic institutions—and it also understands, as Westminster models of governance have over the many years we've been around, how you will help—and your daily work here is to help evolve that system for modern times. Therefore, your question about effectiveness has to broader.

11:05 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

Thank you very much.

Mr. Richards is next.

11:05 a.m.

Conservative

Blake Richards Conservative Banff—Airdrie, AB

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

I want to reinforce something Ms. Romanado said in the very beginning of her question. I thought it was really important and I am simply summarizing what she said but, certainly the point was made very clearly that this needs to be about the interests of Canadians, the voters and the people, when this decision is being made, and not about the interests of politicians. I really wanted to congratulate her for raising that very important point, because I think it is an important one and it is the reason I believe it's so important for us to have a referendum prior to any changes being made.

Ms. Flumian, I have a couple of questions for you. You had written an article for iPolitics, I believe, or had made some comments in iPolitics about the Broadbent Institute survey, indicating the five identified goals for a voting system. Obviously those five goals were simplicity, strong and stable governments, allowing voters to directly elect an MP who represents their communities, ensuring that government has MPs from every region, and having a system that ensures a party's number of seats matches its level of support.

You indicated in your comments that it seems that only the existing single-member plurality system satisfies four of the five criteria, one through four, and that this situation shouldn't make reform impossible but it won't be easy either, especially with the tight timelines that will have to be met if everything is to be up and running at Elections Canada in time for 2019.

That brings a couple of questions to mind for me. First, could you elaborate for the committee on why the other models don't live up to those five standards?

11:05 a.m.

President, Institute on Governance

Maryantonett Flumian

I think there's hardly enough time here, but I could always provide you with an answer in writing for your deliberations.

11:05 a.m.

Conservative

Blake Richards Conservative Banff—Airdrie, AB

Sure, but if you could try to be as brief—

11:05 a.m.

President, Institute on Governance

Maryantonett Flumian

I would come to the conclusion that there's enough pressure for some form of reform. It's your responsibility here to determine how much reform the system requires and how much it can tolerate over what period of time. I think that if I had to rest my case on any of those things as being the most important today, for the deliberations of the discussion today, it's maintaining that thing that is really important to Canadians, which I argue is the connection with the constituency. That isn't to say that we shouldn't be experimenting or looking at experimenting with some form of proportional representation on top of that, but I do think that's a very important connection.

11:05 a.m.

Conservative

Blake Richards Conservative Banff—Airdrie, AB

I certainly appreciate that and I would certainly share the view that it is a very important point as well.

I might come back to this if we have a bit of time at the end, but I wanted to ask you a second question that came to mind from your comments there as well.

With reference to the timelines necessary, do you think that the fixed hard deadline is unreasonable if we want to be able to do electoral reform properly? In other words, do you think the very tight timeline makes this process difficult and would make it unreasonable?

11:05 a.m.

President, Institute on Governance

Maryantonett Flumian

I think reasonable men and women can come to reasonable conclusions, so I think the first test of that will be how as a committee you work together and what you will present as a report—hopefully not a series of reports—to the rest of the Parliament of Canada, to the government, since they're only a proxy for the people of Canada. I think that's the first test.

How much unanimity or how much consideration will you give, what's the balance of your consideration, and what are you going to propose as a group? As I said, the purpose of this, I think, is to put you in the driver's seat, legitimize the role of parliamentarians who are our representatives in this holy House, and have you work in the fashion that our system currently requires you to work, which is to mediate those differences and try to come as close as possible to fashioning solutions that represent all Canadians' interests in this matter.

11:05 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

You have 35 seconds.

11:10 a.m.

Conservative

Blake Richards Conservative Banff—Airdrie, AB

I wanted to try to return to that first question I had but I don't think we have much time, so maybe I'll thank you in the hope we can come back to it on the second round.

11:10 a.m.

President, Institute on Governance

Maryantonett Flumian

If you come back early enough.

11:10 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

Thank you, Mr. Richards. I appreciate the cooperation.

Mr. DeCourcey is next.

11:10 a.m.

Liberal

Matt DeCourcey Liberal Fredericton, NB

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I would like to thank all three witnesses for joining us today.

Ce matin, I will ask questions in English.

Professor Rose, I appreciated your channelling Dr. Seuss to tell us in what areas we should be thinking in passing perhaps a new system or electoral change for Canada, thinking about who we are, where we are, and where we want to go. I would submit that perhaps this is a potential title for our report, when the time comes. I also appreciated the focus on values and principles and the suggestion that those should guide the discussions we have with Canadians. Inevitably there will be tension there.

Ms. Flumian, you also highlighted another tension, which is whether we are valuing our conversation on the way we experience voting or on what type of Parliament we want reflected back toward Canadians.

I'd like to ask you both to expand a little bit on those conversations.

11:10 a.m.

Prof. Jonathan Rose

Thank you.

I think that in the discussions around electoral reform, many issues are being conflated, and if I leave you with any one idea, it is to try to disentangle these various threads. The threads are these: what we want out of Parliament, what we want Parliament to do, and then, relatedly, what role citizens should play.

I think that in an exercise that involves a fundamental thing—arguably a constitutional thing—such as a voting system, citizens need to be involved. We can have a reasonable discussion about what that involvement looks like, but I think they do need to be involved. If they are involved, I think the involvement needs to be based on education.

I'm not suggesting that citizens learn the mechanics of electoral systems, but my experience has demonstrated and shown me time after time that citizens, if asked, will rise to the task. We don't ask them enough. All citizens have opinions and ideas about what is important in elected representatives, and to me it's the goal of this committee to tap into that and to relate it to the work they do.

I'll leave it there.

11:10 a.m.

President, Institute on Governance

Maryantonett Flumian

Thank you.

I'll touch briefly on this, and you can see it in my written submission after this presentation.

I would think that, yes, citizens make the greatest connection with what all of this means to them in terms of outcomes. What is our parliamentary form of democracy, based on democratic principles that we hold dear in this country, meant to do? That's their litmus test for how this works: How well do we work together? What compromises do we come to? The mechanisms and modalities are important only insofar as they help us to achieve those outcomes. Here, I think, you have to step back a bit from the very particular questions and ask about those outcomes.

If you ask about those outcomes, I would also ask the committee to look at a few other things. If we change the way we elect parliamentarians and therefore the balances you are trying to create within the system, also give some thought to the implication this has, because Parliament in and of itself, without the functioning of government, does not end up in outcomes. Isn't that right? It's the combination of the two.

We have some parliamentary conventions you should look at. What does loss of confidence mean in a house that functions in a very different fashion? Explore that, because that may give you insights in the reverse order into what you're trying to achieve. Explore the issues of what dissolution means in a world in which loss of confidence may be explored in a very different fashion.

What does it mean? We know that historically, in our current system—and this doesn't mean we shouldn't change it—loss of confidence leads to dissolution. Is that what's going to happen in a world in which we may put other mechanisms in place? This is an important part of our governance fabric, which leads or doesn't lead to outcomes being achieved by the way we manage things.

We have a few of those conventions in place that we should be paying some attention to. If we make these changes, then let's not repeat some of our past behaviours. If we vote to make these changes, how do we put these things out, in terms of conventions and how they're to behave, in a most transparent fashion? Does an incumbent prime minister publish for the House and for all Canadians an understanding of what those things mean, so that the Governor General is instructed as to what the presumed wisdom is and so that Parliament knows how to behave, and also the various constituent components of cabinet?

What happens if we propose a system—and I could live with any of these systems, and God bless democracy—in which we have multi-party members of cabinet? The issues of cabinet solidarity have been fundamental to the way we function. How would we explore those? I'm not saying we shouldn't look at them.

11:15 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

These are definitely interesting questions, but we'll go now to Ms. Benson. Welcome to the committee.

11:15 a.m.

NDP

Sheri Benson NDP Saskatoon West, SK

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I'm going to direct my questions to Mr. Pilon and Mr. Rose. First, though, I'm going to give you a scenario. My background is in the non-profit sector. I worked in the community and spent a lot of time on committees and consultations. Actually, just last week I was part of a round table in Saskatoon on changing a government program.

Often when we're trying to generate information to help some group make a decision, the potential impact of our discussions is unclear. This group wanted to know more about the question we'd asked them to answer. We went back to what had happened before. We looked at what wasn't working and what we wanted to change. I'm interested in your comments about our need to hear from people in order to roll up this information into coherent data that can inform a decision.

I think there's a technical exercise here that we can use experts for, but what I want to know is how we, in the process we have now, can get citizens' input into this so that they feel they've had a say in improving the present system.

11:15 a.m.

Prof. Dennis Pilon

It's very challenging. The democracy exercises we've had have been excellent. They've shown that the public, given a chance to become informed, can make good decisions. I'm not against that idea, but that is not the situation we face now. If you go out and ask people what they think, they're going to tell you stuff they already know, which privileges the status quo. You are privileging the status quo in your process if that's what you do.

What do people know? They know what they've experienced. They don't have any experience of other methods of doing things. That's why I hear from this committee an overvaluing of how much you're going to get out of the public in the feedback that they might give you. They don't know anything about our institutions. I don't say that as a criticism. I think people are busy and they look to you to lead. They have a sense of which side they're on, of the kind of politics they want to see. That is what determines these decisions more than any of the things you're talking about.

Let me give you one quick example. Vancouver uses an at-large voting system for its city elections, which was adopted in the 1930s. There have been six referendums on whether or not to get rid of that system. They've all failed. The public, which you claim is so focused on local matters, has chosen to keep an at-large system, and it is divided strictly on partisan lines. Supporters of the right-wing party have seen that this at-large system works for them, so they want to keep it. The left-wingers think it's really bad and want to move to a ward system, but because the right-wing voters are more likely to come out and vote, they win. The less privileged voters, who are less likely to come out and vote, lose.

11:15 a.m.

NDP

Sheri Benson NDP Saskatoon West, SK

Mr. Rose, would you comment?

11:15 a.m.

Prof. Jonathan Rose

It is a challenging question. I appreciate where you're coming from and how it informs what interests you. I think you said it nicely when you asked what it is we want in an electoral system. To me, that's something that every Canadian has an opinion about. I agree with you that's there's also a technical exercise that comes later. For me, the role of the public at this stage is to help assess what Canadians want in a system. We have good ideas from public opinion surveys and other forms, but we haven't heard directly from Canadians.

I think the reason these exercises have not been successful is that they're merely consultation. When I say “merely”, I mean they are letting people vent about what they already know. It's important to precede that with deliberation. It's important to educate people so they can assess what they think they know and change their opinions in light of what they've learned.

11:20 a.m.

NDP

Sheri Benson NDP Saskatoon West, SK

Mr. Pilon and Mr. Rose have commented on what we need to talk to Canadians about. Where do the people come into the conversation? You both talked about how not knowing how your car works doesn't stop you from driving it. Could you say a bit more about how we can frame the conversation to make it more deliberative than consultative?