Electoral Reform Committee on Aug. 23rd, 2016

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

But how could the provinces be involved in the process? Is it by coming here and having the premier sitting where you are and talking about it, or is it through having consultations within their own parliaments?

[Prof. Barry Cooper]

I think what would happen is that the Solicitor General of, say, Saskatchewan would appear before the Supreme Court of Canada and say that it is a fundamental alteration of the nature of the federation. Whether that's going to be a success or not is a separate issue, but I've heard provincial politicians say this. I'm not going to defend their reasoning, but I think that is one of the implications.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

Ms. Romanado s next.

[Sherry Romanado, Liberal, Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC]

Thank you so much.

I'd like to thank our three panellists for being here today.

Again, Mr. Macfarlane, congratulations on the new addition.

Because it's so rare that we have an expert on online voting in our presence, I am going to dedicate my first round to the issue.

Two of the guiding principles that we have in front of us are engagement and then accessibility and inclusiveness. I did read the report that was issued this morning and I found it very interesting, because I am very much a proponent of a better understanding of online voter participation.

However, your report mentioned that the typical online voter is older, educated, and wealthier, and it stated that if we were to implement online voting, we would only see perhaps about a 3% increase in voter participation. According to the guiding principles, we're trying to focus on folks who would not normally vote, meaning those who are perhaps living in regions, those perhaps who have never voted before, and so on. Looking at the typical profile, I don't think that online voting would address the voters we're trying to reach.

Professor Macfarlane, you mentioned also that mandatory voting treats a symptom of a bigger problem. I think you're correct.

My question is really to Professor Goodman.

If we know that online voting would not actually increase participation by groups that we're trying to address, such as youth and people living in regions and those who don't normally vote, and that it would only increase participation by those who are already voting, what would be the cost-benefit analysis of implementing an online voting system, given the fact that it's not going to address the issues that we've talked about?

[Prof. Nicole Goodman]

Thank you for the question. You raise a good point.

Typically, anywhere online voting is introduced, we see it mostly used among older, educated, wealthier people. It's a trend of convenience. People want to have convenience. We do see a lot of older people using it, the elderly and people in nursing homes. Some of them used the Internet for the first time. I was out in Nova Scotia and I observed some of the elections there, and they were voting online for the very first time.

It certainly can enable access. The general trend is for older people to use online voting. We do find that some groups of infrequent voters, people who have voted some of the time in past elections but not all of the time, or non-voters, people who have been eligible to vote previously but have never voted, are brought into the election process, but it's just modest.

With respect to your point on turnout, that 3% effect was over time in Canadian local elections. There is no guarantee, if the voting reform were implemented federally, that we would see that same effect because, if we look at voting by mail, which is another remote voting reform, we see that the effect is actually greater at the local level than it is in general elections. The same could be true for online voting. We don't know, because we don't have the data.

The problem in looking at countries like Estonia, for example, is that Estonia only allows online voting in the advance portion of the election and not for the full election. It's difficult to make claims about how a voting reform is impacting overall turnout when it's only offered in the advance portion of the election.

[Sherry Romanado, Liberal, Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC]

I have a follow-up question.

We have a fiduciary responsibility to the taxpayers. How much would it cost the general taxpayer, including increasing broadband connectivity to regions that don't currently have Internet, to be able to do online voting? What's the cost-benefit picture of doing this?

[Prof. Nicole Goodman]

Do you mean dollars and cents cost?

[Sherry Romanado, Liberal, Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC]

Yes, dollars and cents.

[Prof. Nicole Goodman]

I can't say exactly how much it would be. I know initially in Canada when municipalities were implementing it, there was a feeling that Internet voting was going to break the bank. What we have actually seen is that some municipalities have introduced it as a complementary method of voting in addition to paper voting. They've been able to keep their election costs the same. Typically they do this by having the same number of polling stations, but they'll reduce the number of tables within the polling stations. They find that they don't need them, because when they offer online voting at the municipal level, they see a lot of people moving to that voting method.

[Sherry Romanado, Liberal, Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC]

Since I only have 30 seconds, I'll let—

[Prof. Nicole Goodman]

Can I make one comment that I've been holding on to?

I want to draw people's attention—I don't know if this has been mentioned—to P.E.I, which is actually hosting a plebiscite on electoral reform at the end of October, and they're going to be using online voting to do it. I think there are five systems on the ballot, which is quite a few. I wanted to mention that to draw your attention to it. That might be something interesting.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

We now start the second round of questions and answers.

Mr. Aldag, you have the floor.

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

Great. I'll continue with our discussion, Professor Goodman.

One of the questions related to online voting. I was surprised when you said that it results in about a 2% to 4% increase as jurisdictions move into it. I would have thought it would have been more. I wonder if there are populations that drop off. You've talked about how older and more affluent populations tend to adopt it, but do you also see that there are people like myself who have voted historically in person, then decide to do it online, then never get around to it, and the window of opportunity closes? Is that one of the reasons we don't see numbers increased? Do people procrastinate? Do they end up having a technology problem? Is there some sort of trade-off, such as the gains, and do we lose other populations?

[Prof. Nicole Goodman]

Yes, definitely we see that the turnout effect is lower in areas that require registration. Fewer people are using it, because they forget.

You mentioned paper voters. A point I'd like to make is that one of the interesting findings from the Internet voting study published by the centre today is that we asked paper voters, the people who chose to go out and vote at the poll, if they'd like to see Internet voting introduced in future elections. A majority of them said they would. I think around 30% said that they would use it no matter what, but because of registration issues or time, they wanted to go ahead with paper this time. About 40% said they would like the option in case there was an illness or issues of special circumstance such that they might not be able to make it to the polls. I think there is support among paper voters for this change as well.

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

Okay, thanks.

I'm going to go to a question that came in on Twitter from Sebastian Muermann, and I'm wondering if you could give your thoughts on this. His question is, “How would Internet voting be affected depending on the type of electoral system chosen? Would PR be easier online? What about FPTP?”

“Does one system lend itself to online voting more so than another?”

[Prof. Nicole Goodman]

That's a great question. Thank you, Sebastian.

I haven't considered that, but I know that in Switzerland there is a combination of voting systems. I think they have some type of PR, and they have lots of votes in Switzerland because of the nature of the referendums there. They've had quite a lot of success with it in the cantons that have used it.

I would have to consider that more, but off-the-cuff today I don't think there would be...the voting mode wouldn't affect the electoral system.

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

Okay, thanks.

I'm going to move to Professor Macfarlane. I'd like to explore some of the comments you've made on referendums. I hopefully heard you correctly. One of the comments I heard you say was that there's no convincing argument against a referendum.

I was looking through some notes. Yesterday we had Professor Lijphart speak to us and present some comments I found to be useful. He talked about the danger of a vote being based on voter confusion and misinformation. We've heard other witnesses talk about how a referendum doesn't lend itself to complex questions, and when we get into this kind of thing, it is very complex. We've heard that results are highly volatile and unpredictable. They involve emotions and often outright lies. We've seen this in the case of the Brexit referendum with the parties that campaigned against it. One of them would take all of the money that was saved, not send it to the European Union, and put it into health care. The day afterward, they said, “Oh, well, we can't actually do that.” You have these outright lies being presented in referendum campaigns.

Other issues also come out, including general dissatisfaction with the government. A recent example was in British Columbia. We had a transit referendum in the Lower Mainland that was looking at an additional tax to pay for transit improvements. That referendum became not about the question but about the effectiveness of Translink, the body that oversees transit. What people ended up voting on was not the question being asked but something completely aside from that question. It was defeated.

To me, these start becoming compelling reasons to not have a referendum.

The last comment I have is one that came in from Twitter. The comment was from somebody in account lifestyles strategies, and they said, “I do not want to vote on something I don't understand. Can we not let government do its job and let us try the new system before voting?”

With all of that, are there any compelling reasons in there to counter your point that there are no convincing arguments against a referendum? When I see that kind of package of things, to me it says that maybe this isn't the best way to get input from Canadians. I turn it over to you for any comments.

[Prof. Emmett Macfarlane]

I really do not buy this idea that a well-run referendum would not lead to an informed vote. I think if we are at the stage where we believe that.... You could say many of those same things about general elections, and no one is suggesting we stop having those. The Brexit example has come up a lot recently because of some of the fallout there. I'm not sure that's an apt example, because you have an unprecedented situation there in which the long-term benefits and costs of Brexit are really unpredictable.

We know what different electoral systems do, and we have evidence that when Canadians are presented with options, as we've seen in citizens' assemblies in Ontario and British Columbia, they can very readily wrap their heads around the details of those systems. I think the better comparative example is New Zealand, which actually had a multi-stage referendum process that successfully achieved reform. If anything, the problem with that process was that it was stacked against reform just by virtue of the way it was structured, and still New Zealanders were somehow able to come together and consider the alternatives and choose one. I like to think Canadians are as capable as New Zealanders in that regard.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

We'll go to Mr. Reid now.

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

Thank you.

I concur that Canadians are as intelligent as New Zealanders and I just reject the argument made by the Liberal minister and the Liberal Party that Canadians are too uninformed, too stupid, too unwilling to learn to be capable of making a decision on this matter themselves.

This leads me to the questions I wanted to pose to Professor Cooper.

Professor, you made the comment that there is no best electoral system. I would submit to you, however, that there is actually a worst electoral system, and that would be not MMP or STV or alternative vote. It would be simply a system that has a predictable outcome on the vote—that is, it shifts the nature of how the next election would turn out even if Canadians have the same preferences they now have. We can guess at how that would work by looking at, for example, projections that have been made as to how different systems would have affected the outcome of the 2011 and 2015 elections. I think what we need to do is avoid a situation in which the mandate, real or imagined, the government got in the 2015 election is used to effectively change the rules of the game so that even if everybody voted the same as they did in those elections, we would have had more seats for the governing party.

Yesterday we heard from Harold Jansen, who did a study that showed that the alternative vote system would have produced improved results for the Liberals both in 2015 and in 2011, and pointed out a previous study that shows that earlier elections would have similarly been changed in favour of the Liberals. He said that on the three occasions in Canadian history when provinces adopted a system—didn't hold a referendum but simply adopted a system—that was distinct or different from first past the post—and this would be B.C. in 1950, Manitoba in 1921, and Alberta in the 1920s—the driving force was partisan self-interest of the party then in power. The new system would favour that party. Then when each of those three parties switched back to first past the post, they were similarly driven by the naked partisan self-interest of the party then in power, which would benefit from going back to first past the post.

The question I'm asking you is this. I believe this is the most convincing argument for a referendum. I say this without any prejudice as to whether first past the post is better or worse than other systems. I'm asking whether you agree that I am right that this is the real reason that a referendum is in this case a useful safeguard for the Canadian people.

[Prof. Barry Cooper]

The short answer is yes.

B.C. is the only one I knew about. I didn't know about Manitoba and Alberta. B.C. was very interesting because it was clearly designed by opponents of the CCF to prevent them from gaining office in the 1950 or 1951 election. Social Credit came out of nowhere with W.A.C. Bennett. He was elected to a minority government, and he then immediately, within six months, called another election, changed the electoral system again, and stayed in office for quite a while.

The assumption—and I think it's a valid assumption—is that parties are rational actors and they propose changes in the law in ordinary legislation or in this kind of legislation, which is not ordinary, because they see it will benefit them or their supporters. There's nothing sinister about that. That's the way politics works. I don't think it should be surprising.

Then bringing in a referendum adds another element of what's unknown. Who knows what the result of a referendum would be? All of the misinformation and propaganda that goes on during elections would be intensified, I think, in a referendum campaign.

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

Thank you.

I have a quick question to Nicole Goodman.

You mentioned you've got a paper that's available online as of today. I don't know if that's in English only. If it is, I wonder if you could arrange to have a copy just directed to our clerk and our analysts so we can get it translated. That way we can distribute it to members of the committee.

[Prof. Nicole Goodman]

Absolutely.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Boulerice is next.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Macfarlane, I am very pleased that you covered all the bases in pointing out that proportional methods of voting do not necessarily lead to unstable governments. It is a myth to make claims like that and I feel that it is important to say so clearly. On the contrary, these methods of voting can provide very stable governments. We have seen that in a number of western democratic countries, like Switzerland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Germany.

On Twitter, a person by the name of Jesse Hitchcock is following the committee’s work and wants us to talk more about what lies at the origins of the low turnout at elections.

In that context, let me suggest an idea to you, Ms. Goodman. I feel that the current method of voting, the one we call “winner takes all”, is an obstacle to participation. In some ridings in Quebec, members have been elected with fewer than 30% of the votes. In other words, the votes of 70% of the electorate were not counted. They just went right into the garbage.

I will take the results in the riding of Rosemont-La Petite Patrie as an example. In that riding, there was little motivation for Conservatives to go and vote. They had little chance of winning the election. The same goes for New Democrats in Mr. Deltell’s riding. We often hear people asking themselves: “Why would I go and vote? My vote will not change anything.” If proportionality were a factor, perhaps that vote would not make a difference in the riding, but it would count later as seats are redistributed.

Would voters not be motivated to get out and vote if their vote could count and give them a voice in Parliament?