Evidence of meeting #16 for Electoral Reform in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was issues.

A video is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Pippa Norris  Professor of Government Relations and Laureate Fellow, University of Sydney, McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics, Harvard, Director of the Electoral Integrity Project, As an Individual
Thomas S. Axworthy  Public Policy Chair, Massey College, University of Toronto, As an Individual
Matthew P. Harrington  Professor, Faculty of Law, Université de Montréal, As an Individual

4 p.m.

An hon. member

Give him a raise.

4 p.m.

Some hon. members

Oh, oh!

4 p.m.

Liberal

Matt DeCourcey Liberal Fredericton, NB

It depends on my time allocation.

Dr. Axworthy, I would agree with you that Liberals have always endeavoured to adopt good ideas and put them into practice. But I will follow up on my colleague Mr. Ste-Marie, on the question of the size of Parliament and whether parliamentarians should exert their ability to introduce change to the electoral system.

What appetite would there be from Canadians to grow the size of Parliament, in your view? What is a reasonable size of constituency for a member of Parliament, perhaps a member representing a local constituency? What's the reasonable number of electors for that person to be accountable to? Are there other considerations that we should be mindful of?

4 p.m.

Public Policy Chair, Massey College, University of Toronto, As an Individual

Dr. Thomas S. Axworthy

We could have the Sergeant-at-Arms or the Speaker here, or the Board of Internal Economy, but I'm not sure how much more space our House of Commons could take in terms of increased numbers of members, unless we get away from the Canadian tradition, which is that every member has a place in the House of Commons, a seat, and adopt the British system of not having that and coming into a Parliament when one can.

We have increased the numbers recently in the past few years. I think, though, that you get to a point where the numbers become too large for people to grasp, and it's hard then to organize your very system. My view would be that it perhaps could be expanded more, but I don't think radically more. A House of 600 in Canada, for example.... Britain has roughly that with considerably more than our population.

I think you do begin to hit limits, and just adding more members is not a solution. As a member of Parliament, you could tell me the rough size of a riding. Probably anything much beyond 100,000 gets very difficult to service.

4 p.m.

Liberal

Matt DeCourcey Liberal Fredericton, NB

Dr. Harrington, flowing from that question, with the size of ridings and other modalities we have to consider with different systems, where should we be careful about moving toward section 42 considerations as opposed to section 44 considerations? What sorts of aspects of potential change should we be mindful of, in your view?

4 p.m.

Prof. Matthew P. Harrington

I would suggest that Parliament have a great deal of leeway in the organization of ridings. I think the court seems to be rather deferential to that and regards it as a housekeeping issue. With ridings, and with the number of members of Parliament, I think the court seems to have made clear that it regards that as something left to Parliament itself to determine.

I think the court's big problem is the selection question. When you look at the Senate reference and the Supreme Court reference, they're about how the members are chosen. More instructive than the Senate reference is the Supreme Court reference. As I've pointed out, the qualifications we are discussing are after Confederation, and the qualifications that were before the court were those created in 1875. They weren't in the Constitution. Parliament created these qualifications and the court said, “Now you can't change them because they're so long entrenched”, and that's the question I have.

When you talk about expanding the franchise and when you talk about ridings and those kind of things, that's within Parliament's purview. Once you start to talk about how I get to be a member of Parliament, it triggers a bit of scrutiny.

4 p.m.

Liberal

Matt DeCourcey Liberal Fredericton, NB

If I have any time at all, Dr. Norris, I note there was no mention in your opening comments of STV as a potential option for us. You mentioned the status quo, alternative vote, pure PR, and MMP. Was that intentional in any way? I ask because you've mentioned it since.

4:05 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

Be very brief, please.

4:05 p.m.

Prof. Pippa Norris

There are a thousand different permutations. In fact, there are 193 electoral systems around the world.

4:05 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

Oh, my God.

4:05 p.m.

Prof. Pippa Norris

It all depends on the details. STV is one, but I can give you a block quote and I can give you 10 other varieties of voting that we can use beyond STV. STV is a form of PR for me. It's just...small constituencies and a particular way of voting.

4:05 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

Thank you.

That number of 193 just discouraged us a bit.

4:05 p.m.

Voices

Oh, oh!

4:05 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

Go ahead, Mr. Richards.

4:05 p.m.

Conservative

Blake Richards Conservative Banff—Airdrie, AB

Professor Norris, I have some questions for you in this round. In response to an earlier question, you briefly touched on what I want to ask you about. I think you ran out of time. You were asked about strategic voting under our current system here in Canada. It seemed to me that you were making the point that strategic voting is something that could happen and probably does happen under almost any type of electoral system. Would that be an accurate statement, and can you elaborate a bit more on why that would be?

4:05 p.m.

Prof. Pippa Norris

Strategic voting is voting not with the party that you support, but voting because of the tactics of who you think is going to win in that constituency. Under any system where you have many parties in a single-member district, people are going to look at the polls, they're going to look at the previous elections' votes, and they're going to calculate that maybe they prefer, for example, the Green Party, but that the Labour Party is going to get elected in Britain, for example, so they're going to vote for them.

You get exactly the same calculations under any of the other systems, but the strategic decisions are being made by the voters about where the best support can be. When you're in a large district, you might think that with a small party you get a better chance, so you can vote for them, but you also have strategic decisions being made by parties about who's their best coalition partner, how they can best put forward a certain number of candidates in any district, and how they can maximize their chances in the way they compete across different areas of the country. Strategic voting goes on across all these different systems, and it's not normally seen as a fundamental problem. I'd argue that it's just a different way of expressing your preferences on the chances of who's going to get in at the end of the day.

4:05 p.m.

Conservative

Blake Richards Conservative Banff—Airdrie, AB

Okay, thank you.

You mentioned today, as have others on this panel and earlier ones, that there's no perfect electoral system. There's no best electoral system. You recently had a podcast on the Policy Options forum, in which you stated that there is no best electoral system and that it depends on your problems, on your challenges, on your society, and that it is the society's choice. You also went on to state that it is up to Canadians to say what are the issues and what are the challenges in regard to electoral reform. I wonder if you could expand a bit more on what you mean by saying it's society's choice and that it's up to Canadians.

4:05 p.m.

Prof. Pippa Norris

Different countries have different problems that they're facing right now. In the United States, the key issue is party polarization, where parties and politicians won't talk to each other, and there's all sorts of fundamental gridlocks, as we've mentioned, between the Senate, Congress, and the Presidency. Those are the sorts of issues facing the United States, and they might want to think about electoral systems, rules of the game, that might promote a more consensual system.

By contrast some other countries that have proportional representation are facing party fragmentation. They have too many parties; they can't ever get anything done; they can't get the executive to be stable; and they have a continuous changeover of prime ministers, leaders, parties, and governments. So for them, they need to think about moving more towards a majoritarian system.

It really depends on what the challenges are, and the way that I've always thought about it—I know you can't really see this—is as a matrix. In other words, you have certain challenges down the side. It might be, as the minister said, efficacy, diversity, simplicity, user-friendliness, local accountability, security, and consensus government, and you have certain types of rules, particular systems, that will strengthen or weaken each of these values. However, unfortunately not all of the, as it were, checks can be put into any one column because different systems have different values underlining them and will give you different types of consequences.

4:05 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

Would it be possible to get a copy of the chart that you were just showing us? It would be great if you could get that to us. We don't have high-definition here, so it's a little hard to read, but if you can get that to our clerk, we would really appreciate it.

4:05 p.m.

Prof. Pippa Norris

I will send it, absolutely.

4:05 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

Go ahead, Mr. Richards.

4:05 p.m.

Conservative

Blake Richards Conservative Banff—Airdrie, AB

I guess one of the challenges we've had here in Canada is the changing number of principles. You had mentioned, I think, the eight principles that were outlined and then later on, just a few weeks later, there were five principles. So there seems to be a moving target here, and that's one of challenges, of course, but we do appreciate that you'll provide that.

You talk about challenges and each country having its own unique challenges and having to determine how best to meet those challenges. I would say that one of the challenges that we face here in Canada is obviously the extra large country that is so sparsely populated with a great diversity amongst our different regions. I wonder if maybe you can maybe comment on the different electoral systems and how—

4:10 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

I don't know—

4:10 p.m.

Conservative

Blake Richards Conservative Banff—Airdrie, AB

—they can help us, or what challenges they might present, in terms of alternatives, with that unique set of challenges.

4:10 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

I don't think we'll have time to go through all of the electoral systems.