Electoral Reform Committee on Aug. 22nd, 2016

[Prof. Nathalie Des Rosiers]

Certainly, I think it concerns the translation of votes to seats and the fairness and the meaningfulness of this. That's why you vote: you want your vote to be translated into representation, and I think that was clear at that time. Certainly, people were concerned about stability, ensuring that the government was working, recognizing that the actors and the political culture in Canada would probably be sustainable, that we had actors that could work.

Finally, I think there was some concern, which I continue to share, that we have le suffrage universel and we want to have people who represent a little bit le miroir de la population. Representativeness in terms of the diversity of ideas, the diversity of voices, was important.

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

Thank you. I just wanted to make sure that you were able to close out on that.

Professor Jansen, I also had the sense that you may have more to offer on your research and thoughts on online voting. I have a couple of minutes here. Would you like to take us into some more of your thoughts on online voting and the benefits, and perhaps pitfalls, that we should be looking at?

[Prof. Harold Jansen]

Well, there's a technical side of it—and I'm not a computer scientist and there are other people better qualified to talk about that.

The major issue is the lack of transparency in the process. Things disappear into cyberspace and nobody's entirely sure what happens and you can't recreate a paper trail the way you can with a paper ballot. That's a significant issue.

There's the issue of identity verification. Are the people casting the ballot actually the people who are supposed to cast it? How do you prevent ballots from being sold or those identities from being traded off? There are all kinds of issues around that, which I think are fairly significant technical challenges.

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

The gains, though, that could be made.... It's going to be about a balance, right?

[Prof. Harold Jansen]

Yes.

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

It's things like inclusiveness. If the technical aspects can be worked out, then at what point do we say, yes, we're at that tipping point where it's now worth going down this road? Are we anywhere close to reaching that point?

[Prof. Harold Jansen]

My sense is that technically we've got a way to go yet to have things that are safe and secure enough. As I said, I'd be quite adamant about the idea that this would just be a supplementary option, and not something that would replace in any way polling stations. Even if we think we could cut down the number of polling stations, I think that would be a huge mistake. I'm very concerned about people losing out on the opportunity to cast a ballot in person when they're not comfortable doing so online. I think there are some really significant issues around that. I think we need to be cautious on that front.

I also am suspicious of how great the gains would be in terms of voter turnout. I think most of the issues lie around motivation, not opportunity. I'm suspicious of a lot of things when people say on surveys, “Oh, I was too busy to vote”. Often, it just means, “There are other things more important to me than voting.” Okay, citizens can make those kinds of determinations. Voting is not that onerous, and I think Elections Canada has done a pretty good job in the last 20 years of improving the accessibility of the vote. There are more ways to vote than ever before.

I don't think we should expect realistically huge gains in voter turnout. I don't think that should be a motivation. It would be more convenient for some people, but these are people who would likely vote anyway. What I found was that the people most likely to say they were very likely to cast a vote in our survey were people who had already voted. They would just switch to doing it online.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

We're moving on.

Mr. Dufour, you have about 30 seconds to answer the question.

[Christian Dufour]

Aside from security and verification issues, a vote can very easily be devalued. When we vote now, we always have to go to a physical location. Some effort is required. It is not a survey.

I always give my students the following test. I tell them that a government is elected on October 1 with a huge majority, that there is a dramatic event three weeks later and the government's popularity plunges to 20% in the polls. I then ask them if the government should step down. My students say yes but I tell them no because a poll is not a vote. When people vote, they go somewhere physically and can't change their minds until the next election.

So there is always a risk. On one hand, there is a desire to make voting easier and to reach out to people, but I'm not sure how effective that would be. Isn't there a risk that the vote itself would be devalued?

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

You have the floor, Mr. Reid.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

My questions are again directed to Professor Jansen. I'm drawing upon a couple of sources I've been reading. One is When Citizens Decide: Lessons From Citizens' Assemblies on Electoral Reform, by an assortment of esteemed authors. The other is Designing Deliberative Democracy: The British Columbia Citizens' Assembly. I think they address to some degree the concern you had. I'm asking you to comment on the quotes that I'm going to give you about voters lacking the information in a referendum to be capable of casting a thoughtful and intelligent vote.

In the first of those two books, on page 132, the authors observe:

Knowledge about the citizen assembly—the creator of the proposal they were now facing—contributed to voters' decisions. Knowing more about the assembly generated higher support for reform. But the impact of citizens' professed familiarity with the assembly varied in strength across the three referendums. The effect was strongest in the first referendum, British Columbia in 2005, and only half as strong in Ontario, and then negligible in British Columbia in 2009....

Of course, the citizens' assembly was several years old.

In the second book, on page 187, the authors say:

Evidently, the CA shook up the usual processes of voter choice enough to put the result into majority territory. The very same proposal would have received weaker support if it had been hammered out in the bowels of the legislature by a sub-committee of the Legislative Assembly and presented to voters as a fait accompli.

Obviously, what they're pointing at—and this is emphasized in more detail in the books—is that the exercise in credibility of having a non-partisan body design a proposal led, in one case, to a fairly strong majority in favour of electoral reform.

I'm now asking you again about referendum. If we were to adopt some form of system—I don't know if this committee can do this—that demonstrates that an impartial and non-partisan process has produced the result that has been put before the voters, do you think there's a reasonable chance that a system could receive a majority mandate from the people or voters of Canada?

[Prof. Harold Jansen]

In that research they also found that people who knew a lot about the STV system the citizens' assembly had proposed—people who were very well informed about it—were more likely to vote in favour of it. People who were less informed about it were more likely to be swayed by the fact that it was a citizens' assembly, so it was the idea that, I didn't have time to do the homework—and STV is a fairly complicated system to learn, all the ins and outs of—but a bunch citizens, people who I trust...I trust the process. Absolutely, I think there is some evidence there that just the moral authority of the process can help produce support for it.

In this case, that was a very special and very time-consuming process, and whether that is as feasible on a national level, where I would argue things are more complicated than on a provincial level—

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Do you mean it's too complicated to carry out a citizens' assembly?

[Prof. Harold Jansen]

I'm thinking of how would you compose a citizens' assembly? In B.C. they had two people from each district, a man and a woman, and they had two aboriginal people to ensure that there was sufficient aboriginal representation. In Canada, how would you ensure...? Every province would need representation, and there are different parts of every province. We also want gender representation, and we want to make sure that aboriginal persons are represented. So there are a lot of layers to how you would structure this when I think of the complexity of doing this nationally. For example, B.C. doesn't really have to deal with the linguistic divide between French and English, which is a very significant fact of life here.

So the question of design, of how you would do that, is incredibly complicated, and I understand that you're under a little bit of time pressure here. But I do think that research does point to citizens' assemblies being able to produce buy-in among citizens, that these assembles are not just a bunch of people who have some sort of agenda, or people talking about complicated things that I don't want to learn about. It can produce buy-in, absolutely.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Is there any time left, or is it all gone?

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

There's about 35 seconds, so there's time for a statement.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

I'll just ask a question. The alternative, unfortunately, as far as I can see based on your testimony, is that the adoption of an STV/AV hybrid in Manitoba in 1921 was based on naked partisan self-interest, as was the adoption of that system in Alberta in 1921, as was the elimination of STV in Alberta in 1956, as was the adoption of STV in British Columbia in 1951. So we're left with one other example of the electoral system being changed historically. When the Social Credit got rid of STV in British Columbia, was it motivated by naked self-interest too, or was it actually motivated by an impartial desire to improve the political system?

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

A very quick response to the point, please.

[Prof. Harold Jansen]

I would probably add another one to the naked partisan self-interest comment.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Ms. Sahota, please.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

I'd like to start by clarifying something I said that I think was misconstrued a bit. When I said that actors learn to work within a system, what I meant is that we have a political system in place, and whatever other political system we move towards, it hopefully will be one of further co-operation, just like this committee is. Whether it's STV or MMP or whatever made-in-Canada solution we possibly come up with, we are hoping that it's one that will foster co-operation, just like we have to do on this committee. Letting go of our majority on this committee, I think, was a good move, and we have to figure out how to work within this committee to come up with a solution that's best for Canada.

What I'd like to know more about is making a system that is right for Canada. We've been discussing a lot systems that are popularly known in different countries, but we've also heard from experts that there are slight tweaks made to every single system in every country. So there's no STV model, no MMP model, no AV model—even though there's just the one example of that. Every country has a slightly different solution for its population and demographics.

There are a few proponents of MMP here. I know that my colleague asked this question referring just to the Maritimes at that point. Could you give me just a sample of what a ballot would ideally look like, what an election here would look like, and how you would draw up a district anywhere in this region? How do you see it working here?

[Prof. Harold Jansen]

Thinking on the spot about how I would quickly design an electoral system, I would go for an MMP system. I would have two ballots, where you vote for a local candidate and party. I would probably enlarge the size of the House of Commons. I realize that doing that would open up cheap political points for opponents of electoral reform. It absolutely would. Adding more politicians is never popular, but I think that's a cheap shot.

I'm going to give one other reason that's often overlooked. The U.K. has an incredibly large House of Commons. They can't even seat everybody. If you've ever gone to watch it, it's quite remarkable. One of the interesting side effects is that some people have argued this helps to reduce party discipline. If you get elected as an MP and you're in a caucus of 300 people, the odds of your ever getting in cabinet are slim, so you need to find something that you're going to do with yourself if you're going to carve out a career as a member of Parliament. By enlarging the House of Commons, you're enlarging the number of backbenchers relative to cabinet. I think that could have an added side effect and benefit of perhaps encouraging a little more independence on the part of members of Parliament. That may be an added benefit, which often doesn't get discussed. I would probably err on the side of quite a number of adjustments to seats. I'd probably err on the side of being as proportional as possible.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Okay. We would have to add more members.

Would the number of members change from election to election to try to get to that proportional result? How would that work logistically? I'm thinking that in the House of Commons, it's going to take us—

[Prof. Harold Jansen]

To do it purely, you would do half and half. You'd have half districts. Realistically, I don't think doubling the size of the House of Commons is something you should recommend if you want to keep your jobs.