Thank you very much, and thank you for the invitation to be here this morning.
I'd like to begin by mentioning five serious problems with first-past-the-post voting, the method currently used in federal elections.
The first problem is that it's often the case that the MP representing a particular electoral district is a minority MP, in the sense that most voters in the district didn't vote for that person.
Second, first past the post often leads to a serious discrepancy in Parliament, by which I mean that the majority party often receives much less than a majority of the votes. For example, in 2011 the Conservative Party had 53.9% of the seats but only 39.6% of the vote. There are many other examples of such discrepancies.
Third, the candidate elected in a district can often be wrong. I will say exactly what I mean by that in just a minute.
Fourth, a voter is in effect disenfranchised if she votes for an unpopular candidate, a candidate who is not likely to win the seat. If candidates A and B are the candidates who have a serious chance of winning, and I vote for candidate C, then in effect I have no say in the choice that really matters. I'm wasting my vote. I could vote strategically—that is, even though I prefer C, I could vote for A or B—but strategic voting itself is problematic for reasons that perhaps I can come back to in the question period.
Fifth, unpopular candidates or parties may be discouraged from standing. For example, suppose I'm a candidate on the right but one who disagrees with the Conservative Party on some important policy points. I may hesitate to stand for office, because if I do stand, I run the risk of splitting the vote on the right, and by doing so I may help to elect a left-wing candidate. For that reason, I may deliberately not stand, and through that decision I'm not only depriving myself of a political candidacy but I'm also depriving the electorate of another political voice.
Those, I think, are five serious problems with first-past-the-post voting.
It turns out that there is a simple voting method that solves all five problems. In fact, there is only one voting method that solves all five problems, and that is majority rule.
Under majority rule, voters now have the opportunity to do more than just vote for a single candidate: they're allowed to rank candidates. Candidate A is best, candidate B is second best, and so on. The winner is the candidate who is preferred by a majority, according to the rankings, to each opponent. The candidate is the true majority winner. The candidate would beat each opponent in a head-to-head contest.
I have a slide to illustrate this. Let's imagine that the electorate divides into three different groups: 40% of the electorate likes candidate A the best, then B, then C; 35% put C at the top, then B, then A; and then the remaining 25% like B best, then C, then A. This is just an example. It's not meant to correspond to any real-life situation.
What happens under majority rule? Under majority rule, candidate B beats A by a majority because the group in the middle, the 35% group, prefers B to A, and the group on the right, the 25% group, prefers B to A. That's a majority. That's 60%.
Candidate B also beats C by a majority because the first group, the 40% group, prefers B to C, and the third group, the 25% group, prefers B to C. That's 65%, so B is the true majority winner.
Let's contrast that with what happens under first past the post. Under first past the post, you just vote for a single candidate. Presumably the people in the first group will vote for A, the people in the second group will vote for C, the people in the third group will vote for B. A is the winner because 40% is the highest vote total, and so we get the wrong candidate elected. A is elected under first past the post, but a majority, 60%, prefer B. For that matter, in this example, a majority also prefers C to A, so A is really quite a terrible choice from the standpoint of majority will.
Majority rule solves all five problems that I described because the winner represents a majority of voters.
One of the problems in Canada is the discrepancy between the proportion of seats that the majority party wins in Parliament and the proportion of the vote that it gets. That discrepancy is very likely to fall under majority rule, because now the majority party will have a majority in every district it wins.
Furthermore, a voter who favours an unpopular candidate will not be disenfranchising herself if she ranks that candidate first, because if there are two other candidates who are the real contenders, she can have a say between those two other candidates by ranking one above the other further down her list. She has every incentive to vote according to her true preferences.
Finally, a right-wing candidate who somewhat disagrees with the Conservative Party or a left-wing candidate who somewhat disagrees with the NDP doesn't have to worry about splitting the vote on the right or the left by standing because, to take the Conservative example, voters on the right are likely to put both this candidate and the Conservative candidate above any left-wing candidate, so there's no vote-splitting.
For all these five reasons, I would suggest that majority rule is a good deal superior to first past the post as a voting method. I don't propose to go into proportional rule. I'm happy to discuss it in questions, but I'm not doing so here because it's clearly a much more radical departure from the current voting system.
Thank you very much.