Electoral Reform Committee on Aug. 23rd, 2016

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Welcome to the witnesses and my thanks for providing us with those presentations.

My question goes to Mr. Macfarlane, but I would also like to hear comments from Ms. Goodman, and from Mr. Cooper, of course.

Canada is a federation, not a legislative union. Fundamentally, the idea was to guarantee minority peoples like mine that their rights would be upheld so that they did not find themselves engulfed by the identity of the majority people, in this case yours. The current electoral system contains mechanisms that provide protections.

In your view, if the reform of the voting method led us to choose a mixed-member proportional system, what measures would be put in place to guarantee that minority rights would be upheld?

[Prof. Emmett Macfarlane]

I think part of the discussion about the electoral system ignores a lot of related policies that aim to protect minorities. I would say that regardless of the system, there are a set of things we can discuss in terms of ensuring fair representation and protecting minority rights. One is charter values. We have a problem in this country with leaving those rights questions too readily just to the courts. I think Parliament could be much more activist about the charter and thinking not only in terms of how we craft policy and legislation to avoid constitutional infringements but also about how we enhance the values of the charter. You can think about how this rule might relate to the electoral system in a couple of ways, the big one being the parties themselves and things like candidate selection.

Professor Melanee Thomas gave a great presentation to the Canadian Study of Parliament Group a few months ago. She pointed out that electoral system reform isn't the most effective way of making changes relating to representation of minorities. The most effective way to get there is to change our political culture and to change how candidates are selected in parties. Some of our parties are cognizant about gender representation and others less so. I know I risk opening the can of worms of how much Parliament should regulate the conduct of political parties, but it's an open one, and I think there are things that relate to the electoral system but aren't inherent in the system that are more germane to protecting minority rights.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Okay. Thank you.

In case my two other colleagues would like to make any other comments on this, I would like to add that my question really was about the rights of minority peoples, not those of all minorities.

[Prof. Barry Cooper]

I would only add that federalism is also a good protection, and historically it is what has protected of the position of the major self-understanding of minorities in Canada, namely francophone Quebeckers. With the charter and with the implications of the last 30 years, francophone minorities outside of Quebec and anglophone minorities inside Quebec, although to a lesser extent, have also been protected, mainly through court decisions.

As you mentioned earlier, sir, if it's not broken, there's no need to fix it.

[Prof. Nicole Goodman]

I would agree with Professor Macfarlane's comments.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Okay. Thank you.

Mr. Chair, as I only have a minute to left, I will stop there.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

So you are going to put that minute in the bank.

We'll go to Ms. May now, please.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I want to thank all the witnesses for coming here today. I think I would like to start by asking Professor Macfarlane some questions.

Your brief is very helpful and clear, and again congratulations for the new baby.

I find you've taken a run at some of the academics I hold in highest regard. I thought I would start by asking about your comments about the term “false majority”. It's a term that was, as far as I know, invented in relation to first past the post by Professor Emeritus Peter Russell, a political scientist from the University of Toronto, in his book Two Cheers for Minority Government. I was wondering if you're familiar with the larger context in which he coined the term “false majority” to describe a government in place with a vast majority of seats but with a minority of public support.

[Prof. Emmett Macfarlane]

I too hold Peter Russell in the highest esteem. He's an academic hero of mine. I'm not sure who originally coined the term “false majority.” My concern is less about where it emanated than how it is employed in this debate, and it's often employed in a way, I think, not to argue in favour of a different system but to, I would argue, misrepresent the nature of the system we have.

Our system is simply not intended to translate the national vote into equitable shares of seats. It's a different system. When the average Canadian hears that false majority governments result from it, without having the context of knowing that someone is arguing for change rather than describing what a system does, I think we lose the empirical versus the normative frame. The implication is that the first-past-the-post system is, obviously, illegitimate because it's producing undemocratic results, but that's a value proposition, not an empirical statement.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

In terms of what Professor Russell was saying, I would agree with you entirely if our system of Parliament was members of Parliament who weren't controlled by party discipline. In effect, a false majority—and again, I'm paraphrasing Professor Russell and of course also Professor Donald Savoie—in our system of Westminster democracy, more than in any other Westminster democracy, creates power in the executive. Our prime minister has more power relative to our system than a U.S. president has in their system, or a U.K. prime minister or an Australian prime minister has in theirs, and so on. That's why there's a question of legitimacy when 39% of the votes translates into control of the executive and the legislative branches.

Would that be a concern of yours at all?

[Prof. Emmett Macfarlane]

Yes, absolutely. I think my point was that a lot of people don't frame the debate that way. I'm not accusing Professor Russell of misrepresenting anything. I think the way the term “false majority” is frequently thrown around shows it being used in a more disingenuous way. That's my only concern. I think there are, as I said, legitimate arguments in favour of pretty much any major electoral system.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Taking that point, I want to switch to Professor Cooper.

I've read your piece with interest—I've read many of your pieces over the years, good heavens—and I don't always agree with you. We can discuss climate change and the connection to fossil fuel burning on another occasion.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

This is an electoral reform committee, I remind the members.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Yes.

The piece that I think is very relevant is your piece from April: “Don't Hold Your Breath Waiting for Alberta's Right To Unite”. Our colleague and fellow member of this committee for the moment, Jason Kenney, is very keen that you be wrong, but it goes to the heart of the problem with first past the post.

In your comments, you said that with proportional representation we'd have a proliferation of smaller parties, but your example actually came from first past the post and the splintering of Progressive Conservatives and Reform and the Bloc. I just want to ask you, if you could cast your mind back to the 1993 election, whether you have any concerns that the country wouldn't have had better representation had we not had a first-past-the-post system, which, for 16% of the vote gave Progressive Conservatives two seats, while 6.7% of the vote for the NDP gave them nine seats, and in the previous election the Progressive Conservatives, with 43% of the vote, had 169 seats.

Does this in any way create any concern on your part about first-past-the-post perverse results, in your interest of voices on the right not forcing themselves to unite in order to get the kind of Parliament that the voters would want?

[Prof. Barry Cooper]

As I said in my earlier remarks, and Professor Macfarlane said it as well, there's no best system. I think that Peter Russell would agree with me. I've known him for a long time, and this is kind of conventional wisdom. In your example, there are anomalies that, whether you're a Conservative or not, you might regret, but surely that is up to the parties. It's not a function of the electoral system. What happened with the disintegration of the Mulroney coalition, in some respects, was foreseeable, like it or not, but I don't think it had anything to do with the electoral system. It righted itself; it just took a long time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

We'll go to Ms. Sahota now.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

My first questions are for Ms. Goodman, and if I get through those I'll have one for everyone.

Online voting seems to be where we're headed in the future, as you say, and a lot of experts have said so, but there have been concerns about integrity and us not being ready. It's hard for me to fathom. I'm thinking that the issues we have with the Internet are ones that anybody in the world would have regarding the security aspect. Can we get into the case of Estonia and how they accomplished online voting there? How are they doing with the results? Have they been able to keep the integrity of their system?

[Prof. Nicole Goodman]

Thank you for the question.

Estonia is a much smaller country. I'm a social scientist, so I can only speak to the security a little bit from what I've studied, but they have a really robust system in place in terms of authentication. Since 2013, they've been working on verification as well.

You mentioned electoral integrity. There have been a couple of instances in which the integrity of elections in Estonia has been called into question, and I think they are important to highlight. One was in 2011, when a student claimed that he could tamper with the system by using election-rigging malware. Around the same time for the same election—but they don't think it's related—one vote was declared invalid during tabulation. They investigated this vote and what might have caused it, because someone could theoretically cast an invalid vote. No bugs were identified.

On the student issue, he wrote to the National Electoral Committee and to three major newspapers, and it eventually went to the Supreme Court, which dismissed the appeal, arguing that although the student was an Estonian citizen and could be subject to voter disenfranchisement attacks, he knowingly put the malware on his own computer and his rights were not violated. Shortly after that, one of the other political parties also filed an appeal to dismiss all of the votes in the election, and that was also dismissed by the Supreme Court.

Around the same time, Estonia started to approach the 25% mark in terms of votes being cast online, and that also raised concerns. When you have more than 25% of the votes being cast online, arguably there's more incentive for someone to try to tamper with the election. The vote share in terms of online voters has continued to increase, and they have not had any issues.

Based, however, on this incident, they worked toward verification. There are different types of verification, but basically the simplest kind is for you to be able to verify that your vote has been cast as you intended. Universal verification is considered the best, and that's cast as intended, recorded as cast, and then counted as cast.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Okay. That's interesting.

Since we don't have any examples for national elections, can you point to any examples of municipalities or provinces that kept the integrity of their systems intact?

[Prof. Nicole Goodman]

Yes. Internet voting is used more in Canada at the municipal level than anywhere else. Ninety-seven municipalities in Ontario used it in 2014. There are a myriad of different approaches that they use, because they somewhat have autonomy over what they can do. Larger municipalities such as Markham and Halifax in Nova Scotia, for example, typically use two-step approaches, which require the online voter to register first. We know that this lowers uptake and fewer people will use it, but there is an argument that this adds an additional measure of security.

However, if the federal government were going to implement online voting, I think it would be really important to look at how you are going to authenticate the voter. You may choose to use something that's a little bit more rigorous than municipalities use, but authentication is one area that would have to be worked out. You could certainly look at Estonia and Norway, which have the most comprehensive systems out there, although it's been discontinued in Norway. Then verification would be the second piece that you would want to look at.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Why was it discontinued in Norway?

[Prof. Nicole Goodman]

It was political considerations. Partially it was that turnout didn't increase necessarily, and a lot of political parties, particularly conservative parties—no offence meant—typically don't like online voting because they think it's going to encourage liberal supporters and a lot of young people to participate, and that's just not true.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

Mr. Richards, the floor is yours now.