Electoral Reform Committee on Aug. 23rd, 2016

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Thank you.

Professor Cooper, how do you see the value of local representation and accountability fitting into a new system?

[Prof. Barry Cooper]

I think local representation works reasonably well now. I would agree with Professor Macfarlane that the implications have to be thought through pretty carefully, because you're making things much more complex. For instance, who's got responsibility for riding interests in a multi-riding?

You, as members of Parliament, have pretty clear ideas of where your responsibilities lie, where your interests lie, and this sort of thing. I think it would be much more difficult to sort a lot of that stuff out under whatever form of PR by which you get elected. There are differences. I don't know the technical part as well as some of my colleagues do, but there are different implications for different kinds of PR. It will affect your jobs in a major way that I've read about. There's been much reflection on this aspect.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

You've had five minutes now, Ms. Sahota. Thank you.

Go ahead, Mr. Richards.

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

Thanks.

Professor Goodman, I have a couple of questions for you.

You mentioned earlier, I think in your opening comments, about advance polls and their increased usage over the last while. There's no question that in the last election we saw a very significant increase in the use of advance polls. I think there are a lot of reasons for that. Some of them are the more typical reasons that advance polls see greater usage. The other aspect of it that was significant were the changes made in the last Parliament to the Elections Act, which increased the number of advance polling days. Therefore, that subsequently led Elections Canada to better promote advance polling because they were trying to make sure the public was aware of the increased number of advance polling days.

Certainly a lot of your research and the discussion you've had today are about trying to ensure we increase voter turnout. Obviously online voting is one of the things that you believe could help to do that.

What I wanted to discuss specifically is the idea of advance voting. Obviously, many Canadians are very unaware that they can vote almost any day during the election campaign by simply going to a returning office. It's something that I think many people are surprised to hear about. It's obviously something that you would be well aware of.

Would you agree that probably most Canadians are unaware that they can vote any time during the election whenever the returning offices are open?

[Prof. Nicole Goodman]

I think it might be something that some people aren't aware of. I'm biased because I love politics, so I was aware of that. I definitely think that increasing the number of advance polling days is a step forward in terms of accessibility, and so would instituting voting centres be, so that persons aren't required to go to a specific poll location but could go to a more central location or perhaps to any polling station. Measures like that can really help to improve voter access and also perhaps group turnout.

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

Would you say that if Elections Canada simply promoted the idea that you could go to a returning office and vote during the election with a special ballot any time during the election campaign, it would help to increase turnout?

[Prof. Nicole Goodman]

I think it would help people who aren't voting for everyday life reasons, such as being really busy with three kids or something like that, and they just couldn't make it to the poll. For people who don't vote because of lack of interest or because they don't like the candidates or they are apathetic, it's not going to help.

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

I certainly would agree.

The reason I point that out is that if the security isn't there and so on, it might be an alternative to Internet or online voting because it sort of solves the same problems that it would seek to solve.

You wrote a paper called “Internet Voting: The Canadian Municipal Experience”. You state in that paper, when talking about the city of Peterborough, “turnout may have been artificially high in the 2003 election given that there was a referendum question on the ballot.”

Given your research on voter turnout, do you typically see higher voter turnout in referendums as compared to other electoral votes? Why do you think that would be?

[Prof. Nicole Goodman]

I'm not an expert in terms of referendum turnout, but my understanding is that turnout for referendums is typically a bit lower than for elections, particularly at the municipal level. Switzerland would be an exemplary case where that's not true, but I think turnout in referendums would be lower.

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

Do you have any research that backs that up? I ask because in the last federal example in Canada, turnout was quite high. Do you have research that backs that up, or is that just an opinion?

[Prof. Nicole Goodman]

I think it depends on the issue. With the Quebec referendum, for example, people often point to that and say that people will come and turn out if it's an important issue. We saw electoral turnout declining federally and provincially during that time, but everyone came out for the referendum. Sometimes municipally, when a question is on a ballot, more people come out.

It depends on the nature of the question. The Sunday shopping question got a lot more people out municipally. It depends on the nature of the question, issue salience, and how important it is to people.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

Mr. DeCourcey, you have the floor.

[Matt DeCourcey, Liberal, Fredericton, NB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'll return to Professor Macfarlane to start.

I wonder if you tell me whether you agree or disagree with the notion in the media that, given that the electoral system operates within a larger system of governance and political culture, it might be foolhardy for us to try to look at past voter preference and past voter behaviour to predict what an election outcome would be in any new model that we might move to.

[Prof. Emmett Macfarlane]

Some reforms would result in entire changes in the party system itself. Regardless of the reform, parties will adapt their behaviour to reflect the system and the outcomes they think they want to pursue. It's not simply the question, “if the 2015 had been held under system X, what would have happened?“ That's a simplistic way to go about it, and it's not very compelling, in my view.

[Matt DeCourcey, Liberal, Fredericton, NB]

Given that—and I'll start with you and then ask your colleagues to reply—how should we go about presenting the myriad options for electoral reform in front of us and in talking about what they do and the values that underlie them when we tour the country? Should we be presenting a vast view of the different possibilities for Canadians to better understand and give us feedback?

[Prof. Emmett Macfarlane]

I don't think Canadians are interested in a sweeping seminar on all of the alternatives. There's some work to be done in at least narrowing down what the realistic choices are at this point and then debating those.

Even within PR systems, there are different thresholds and formulas you might apply that have implications about at what point a party might get a seat in the House, etc. I don't think Canadians need to know the D'Hondt formula for allocating seats in a proportional system. What I think Canadians might be interested in is giving input, as you go across the country, about what they see as valuable in terms of the nature of representation, and even how they vote, from their perspective, whether they like the simplicity of putting a check mark next to a name or whether they like the appeal of being able to rank candidates.

Those are straightforward questions, but we can lose the forest for the trees if we engage in some of these overly technical things. That's part of why I don't think a referendum would be overly complicated and technically overwhelm Canadians. By the time we got to that point, it would come down to one alternative, ideally, that Canadians would assess against the status quo.

[Prof. Nicole Goodman]

Yes, I agree. First of all, narrowing down the choices is important because you don't want to overwhelm Canadians by giving them.... I think even five choices is quite a few, so I would definitely say narrow it down. Education and outreach need to be key elements of the referendum process. Short videos have been found to be effective in terms of education and information. I think it's great. If the government does decide to go ahead with a more robust consultation or a referendum, then an important consideration is education and outreach.

People have accused referendums of not succeeding because there wasn't the outreach and the education that was needed. If we're having this big debate over whether we should have a referendum, and if you do decide to go ahead with something more robust, then you need to have the artillery behind you to push the information out there. You need to have the outreach and education so that it doesn't end up like the previous ones we've seen.

[Prof. Emmett Macfarlane]

If I could just add quickly, it is entirely possible to run a bad referendum. I think I would have faith in Elections Canada to do a good information campaign and I would have no problem with people strongly advocating during a referendum campaign, but it's entirely possible. At the provincial level we've had the governments involved in those processes just abandon ship before the referendum was even held. For it to be effective, everyone needs to be engaged, but if I didn't think we could do better, I'd have to quit my job.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

Mr. Dubé, the floor is yours now.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'll try to not make it as long-winded and perhaps give you a chance to answer, Professor Macfarlane.

I alluded before to how people vote and how that skews the results. In a comment you made in a response a few minutes ago—and it was a comment brought up yesterday by a witness—you said that when we get waves, we sometimes wipe out good local representatives, sometimes we get rid of bad local representatives, but sometimes voters are punishing a party or a party leader. How do you reconcile the importance of how our system now is supposed to give us good local representation, but people also want to be able to vote for a party or a party's platform? Do you see any way in the current system of being able to reconcile that? I honestly don't.

[Prof. Emmett Macfarlane]

I think it's a question of how we can confront obvious problems with the current system.

One of those is a high degree of party discipline. In Canada we have a degree of party discipline that exceeds other Westminster systems, let alone other countries. One option is to agree that a lot of voters are voting on the basis of the personality of the leader, since that's where all the media attention really goes, especially during campaigns. Do we choose to feed into that and abandon, to an extent, the focus on local representation in the system and move towards something that gives parties even more power in a lot of ways, or do we focus our attention elsewhere and try to change the culture around party discipline? Changing the electoral system is not the only way to do that.

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

Ms. Goodman, my question is for you.

A little earlier, we talked about the use of online banking services. There we are talking about something that is essential, given that everyone has to manage their banking services. However, not everyone thinks that it is essential to vote. I see a difference between the two realities.

I am especially concerned about young people.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

The translation is off, I'm told.

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

I will continue and the simultaneous interpretation will eventually resume.

Is it working?

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Yes.