Electoral Reform Committee on Aug. 23rd, 2016

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'll direct my initial questions to Professor Cooper.

In your comments thus far you've had an opportunity to discuss the fact that your strong belief is that there's no best electoral system, and you've certainly talked about the merits and disadvantages of different systems.

I wanted to focus in a bit more on referendums and the importance of seeking the opinion of voters on any change that the government would seek to undertake. I saw in July that you wrote in the Calgary Herald that, and I quote, “the Liberals have neither political mandate nor constitutional right to change the electoral system without a referendum”.

I wanted to just ask if you could expand a bit on that and the rationale that you have for making that statement.

[Prof. Barry Cooper]

Let me say at the start that I'm not a big fan of referendums, as Professor Macfarlane said, but this is extraordinary legislation and there is a problem of legitimacy. This is not just idiosyncratic opinions of the two of us.

I think your common sense will tell you that if you're changing the rules of the game, the fundamental rules of the game, you have to make sure that the major players, namely the people of Canada, approve of it.

Now, having said that, what are the available ways of securing that kind of legitimacy? A referendum or another election, I suppose, where that is the sole issue, as the free trade election was a generation ago, might be one way of doing it, but it's unlikely that the Government of Canada is going to go to the people on changing the electoral system. It's a second-best alternative.

Ontario, P.E.I., and B.C., I think, have considered changing their electoral systems, and they've had referendums, and the proposals have all been defeated. If I were advising the Government of Canada at the moment, I would say that's probably not such a hot idea, because you're likely to be courting loss.

How, then, are you going to get legitimacy for this really basic change? I think it's a dilemma. I don't like referenda, but that would be one way, and the most obvious.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

Sure.

It's understood that the three previous examples of referenda on electoral reform in those provinces led to the reform being defeated. The Prime Minister has stated this. He believes that a referendum would most likely lead to a defeat, but is that a reason to avoid one? Does that mean the government should proceed without seeking the will of the people, or is it actually a good reason to have one, in order to avoid having one political party, or even a number of political parties, impose something on the Canadian people that maybe they don't want?

[Prof. Barry Cooper]

That's an excellent question. I don't think there's a clear answer to it.

I think that when the government opened this question, they hadn't considered the consequences seriously. Certainly this committee has heard from a lot of witnesses that there are a lot of implications that perhaps the government did not have in mind or even consider when they suggested that Parliament should change the way it creates itself.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

You have also stated in the past, and this is a quote, that:

Those who advocate changing the electoral system, who mouth the bogus claim about wanting ”every vote to count,” do not want to apply that principle to a yes/no vote on electoral change, even though it would produce a genuine majority vote.

Why do you think that is? What do you think is the disconnect between the goal and the process that people are advocating to be used?

[Prof. Barry Cooper]

“Who knows?” is, I suppose, the simplest answer, but assuming that political parties are rational actors, they set the procedure up in that way because they thought it would benefit their own agenda. I don't know why else they would do it, but the fact that it's inconsistent doesn't seem to bother people. Most of the time we are inconsistent.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you very much, Mr. Richards.

Mr. DeCourcey now has the floor for five minutes.

[Matt DeCourcey, Liberal, Fredericton, NB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I too would like to thank the witnesses for joining us today.

I wanted to return to you, Professor Macfarlane, and your testimony around the nature of proportionality.

You touched briefly on this idea of proportionality of representation perhaps being discordant with proportionality of power.

Can you expand on that a bit more? What do you mean by this, and how does this get misused by some people publicly?

[Prof. Emmett Macfarlane]

I think we need to focus on what PR does. As Professor Peter Russell told the committee, it is about translating national vote shares into proportional seat allocation in the legislature. We also hear that one of the main criticisms of first past the post is that a government can get 36% of the national vote and get 100% of the power. That 100% of the power is a function of the concentration of power in the executive and a majority government's dominance in the House.

The problem is that proportional representation is about proportional representation. It's not about the exercise of power. When you look at a context in which a party that gets 15% of the vote is able to leverage its way into a coalition government or get pieces of its preferred policies in play by propping up a minority government, that is exercising significant power. Nominally when 85% of Canadians voted against you, to me that is in some ways even more disproportionate than the power exercised by a plurality government in our current system.

This is not to say that any of that is legitimate. Responsible government means that whoever can control the confidence of the legislature gets to govern, and that type of arrangement could certainly happen under a first-past-the-post system. We seem to have a culture that doesn't lead to coalitions currently.

So PR is legitimate, but I think it's important to understand and to distinguish between what PR does in terms of proportionality and what it does not do.

[Matt DeCourcey, Liberal, Fredericton, NB]

Great.

I'm reminded of the conversation we've had with plenty of witnesses around the idea of trade-offs of values. You talk a bit about misleading rhetoric around different electoral systems.

As we prepare to embark to head across the country to meet with Canadians, what advice do you have for us to best lay out the options in front of Canadians in the most genuine and honest way possible so that they understand, on balance, the potential trade-offs that different systems will have?

[Prof. Emmett Macfarlane]

I think it's a bit of mental exercise of ensuring that we talk separately about what each system does in practice—the empirical aspect—and then about our normative arguments about each system. The normative arguments about each system are the criticisms one might make about the effects of these different values that each system has, and some of those criticisms are more or less empirically valid. I'm not sure the comparative evidence tells me that PR systems are inherently unstable. I think you have to cherry-pick a couple of countries to be able to make that claim, whereas many of the countries with PR systems are perfectly stable and their systems are stable.

On the flip side, if your argument is that PR systems tend to have the capacity to produce more narrowly interested or more ideological and even extremist parties, then we do see evidence of that. We have to separate fact from fiction. I think the starting point is speaking to Canadians about what each system does, what it looks like, how it works, and what the effects are empirically. We can then get into the debate about values when it comes down to looking at these alternatives and what order we are ranking values. If proportionality and vote equity are at the top, then we might look at MMP or STV systems. Are we concerned about accountability? That might fog things up a bit.

I think we have to be clear about separating the “what is“ from the “what should be”.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

Mr. Dubé, the floor is yours now.

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Beloeil—Chambly, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My first question goes to Professor Cooper. It deals with the idea of creating coalitions known as “inter-parties” and “intra-parties”.

I do not have the exact quotation in front of me, but yesterday, one of the witnesses said that, in a proportional system, different parties could form a coalition in public rather than doing so at a party congress or, with even less transparency, at a caucus meeting.

I have a hard time understanding why you consider that one of the proposals you made is better that the other. You use the expression—

big tent parties

to represent something positive because the coalition would already be formed and it would not be necessary for the different parties to do it publicly. In principle, the result would be the same because nothing would be stopping a region or a group of interests within a caucus to promote a party's program. The only difference is that it would be done in public.

I would like to hear what you have to say about that.

[Prof. Barry Cooper]

The main difference between interest groups operating within a party and interest groups negotiating in Parliament is party discipline.

Interest groups negotiating within a party to form an intra-party coalition generally do things in private. When you have parties that owe their existence in the House of Commons to a very specific and, let's say, narrow agenda, everybody knows what that particular party will want, and they will therefore be looking to the larger party, whatever it is, to see how great a concession the larger party will make to the smaller one. That's the difference in the style of negotiation that goes on.

That's important for two reasons. There's always going to be discontent in the electorate, and there's always going to be discontent within big-tent parties, but there are not always solutions to these discontents. The point of party discipline is that it's able to stifle what you might call irrational discontents, people wanting things that are impossible or unlikely or contentious.

Smaller parties are composed of, let's say, true believers who are less willing to compromise and who are not subject to party discipline. They have no reason to compromise. We've seen this most obviously in the United States in the last 15 or 20 years, but I think it's also true in Ottawa.

Compromise is not a bad thing—

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Beloeil—Chambly, QC]

But sir, I guess if we look at it, isn't that what PR is encouraging, though? I guess what I'm saying is that when you talk about party discipline, right now a good portion of the electorate sometimes gets frustrated with party discipline, but it's established in caucus, in private, whereas in a PR system you'd be forcing parties to have that negotiation in public. Would that not restore some credibility and some faith in the part of the electorate? At least then they would know why a vote is being held a certain way, or at least that the negotiation is taking place much more transparently. Again, it's not perfect, but it is better than an alternative.

[Prof. Barry Cooper]

Well, I guess if we are given a new electoral system that deals with PR, we'll find out, but it seems to me that there's at least as great a danger of an incredible deadlock.

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Beloeil—Chambly, QC]

Okay, fair enough.

Professor Macfarlane, I have a question for you going back to that question of the intention of the system and how it can be misrepresented when people are using certain rhetorical terms, such as “false majorities” and so on.

My question is about the fact that in this day in age, with the 24-hour news cycle and social media, a lot of people buy into the idea that they can vote for a party or a party leader and they kind of forget the aspect of the local representative. Sometimes it's not a question of being ignorant of the system; it's just that with party discipline or whatnot, people feel that's what they're doing. They feel they're selecting a representative for a party and sending them off, and they're going to toe the party line.

Therefore, when we talk about misrepresenting the system, is the system not already misrepresented in the way people vote anyway in first past the post? The importance of first past the post is geographic representation, but that's not how some people are voting, so are we not getting false majorities just because people aren't necessarily voting the way the system intended them to, when they do strategic voting and whatnot?

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Unfortunately, we're right at five minutes, so perhaps you could include the answer in a further comment.

Mr. Deltell, you have the floor now.

[Gérard Deltell, Conservative, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Welcome, madam; welcome, gentlemen.

My first question will be to Mr. Macfarlane.

You said earlier that you're not a big fan of referendums—good point—but you say this is “an exceptional case”. Why is it so exceptional for you?

[Prof. Emmett Macfarlane]

Unlike most technical pieces of legislation, this is something that will actually affect all legislation, because it will change the composition of the House of Commons. The fact that elections serve as the primary link between society and government makes it exceptional. Given the Supreme Court's recent and further articulation of the idea that there is a constitutional architecture, even though the electoral system is not laid out in the constitutional text, it is of constitutional significance, and although we are not clear from the jurisprudence, that may mean that electoral reform is a change of a constitutional nature.

I happen to think that if a formal amendment is required, as it is under reapportioning seats, it's something that Parliament can do itself. However, that constitutional nature is something else that adds to the exceptional nature of electoral reform.

[Gérard Deltell, Conservative, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Yes, but the point is that just by an amendment we can amend the law, opening the door to having a referendum on electoral reform, and everything will go on. As far as we are concerned, it's not a big issue, but we must have the will and the intention to call a referendum to solve this issue.

Mr. Cooper, you said a few minutes ago that a generation ago, in 1988, we had the election on the free trade agreement. I remember it quite well. We saw something very special, especially in Quebec, when we saw people very involved in the left movement and the separatist movement, like Jacques Parizeau, former PQ leader and former premier of Quebec, supporting the deal. He is not a Conservative and he is not a federalist, but he voted for that deal, so sometimes, yes, an election is a referendum election. We used to say that.

On this specific issue, do you think that in the next general election, the government should have the election of a new government and also at the same time a referendum on that specific issue?

[Prof. Barry Cooper]

The thing about a referendum is that it is either a yes or no, and the majority is unquestionable. The voters' paradox doesn't come into play. It would be very interesting, I think, if a referendum were coupled to the 2019 election. I think if the government went ahead—and it's presuming it's the same government and they win the election—then they would not run into much opposition from the Supreme Court. However, it's not just the federal constitutional architecture that's involved with respect to the central government: it also involves the provinces. I bet you dollars to doughnuts that some premier in 2019 will consider this a fundamental change in the nature of federalism, involving the provinces as well as the central government, so that you still won't necessarily avoid a court challenge.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Mr. Deltell, you have a minute left.

[Gérard Deltell, Conservative, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

You talk about the provinces. Do you think the provinces should be involved in the process of electoral reform, and how could the provinces be involved in it?

[Prof. Barry Cooper]

This is the problem. When this proposal was brought before this committee and eventually, I guess, before the House, I'm not sure that it was thought through sufficiently that it will involve the provinces. It's not just a change of the electoral system that elects the members of Parliament.