Electoral Reform Committee on Aug. 30th, 2016

[Prof. Peter John Loewen]

The written submission has all the data that backs up the claim I've made. It lists—

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

Whose?

[Prof. Peter John Loewen]

My written submission has all of that data.

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

I have your written submission.

[Prof. Peter John Loewen]

Sorry, there's a 10-page written submission as well, in addition to the comments that I made, which I'm happy to forward to you.

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

Okay.

[Prof. Peter John Loewen]

I'll tell you my view more generally of this as a political scientist. I did a lot of cross-national studies. The estimates that are derived about the effects of PR, both negative and positive, are all very subject to case selection, to how we model things, to the exact estimators that are used.

It's a very muddled debate at the academic level, and pointing to a single book and saying this single book is the authority on the matter really misrepresents the diversity of viewpoints in that debate.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Ms. May, I'm told by the clerk that this 10-page additional document was distributed this morning.

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

I'm sorry, but I don't have it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

It was done at the last minute.

Go ahead, Mr. Aldag, for five minutes.

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

I'll continue from where we left off with Ms. May and Professor Loewen.

As you were going through your brief, the piece that really jumped out at me was the comment on the exploitation of social divisions. That is something we haven't seen as we've explored any sort of PR system, so I want to talk a bit more about that. You ran out of time in your response to Ms. May, but I would like to get your additional thoughts on it. You might have had more to say.

The observation I had is that we already see this kind of social division in the first-past-the-post system. As we saw in the last election, there was a fairly strong anti-Muslim narrative that entered the discussion, so I'm curious to see, in your research, what the effects are within a proportional representation system.

Could you give us some comments or expand on what you were saying?

[Prof. Peter John Loewen]

Thank you very much for the opportunity. Let me make two points on that.

One is that there was a furtive and, I think, ultimately unsuccessful attempt to stir up anti-Muslim sentiment in Canada in the last election. Ultimately it's difficult to sustain that when, as a party, you have to have more than one issue on which to win and you have to convince people across a large number of constituencies that you are a candidate worth voting for. It's easier to sustain in countries in which the electoral system is more permissive. I don't hold the belief that the people of the Netherlands, for example, are inherently more racist than Canadians, are inherently more anti-Muslim, but I do see, for example, that Geert Wilders' party is garnering a very large share of the vote right now in the Netherlands, particularly because he doesn't have to face up to the difficulties of winning a large number of constituencies. He can simply appeal to a small group of people with, frankly, bigoted views across his whole country.

More generally, I don't want us to paper over the achievements of our country and how difficult it was to assemble it. There was a time when if you were the Prime Minister and you were composing a cabinet in Canada, you needed to have an anglophone minister and a francophone minister from Quebec. Not only that, you needed to have an anglophone minister who was from one of the mainline churches; you needed to have an anglophone minister who was from the Presbyterian Church, for example. You had to worry about representing Irish Quebeckers and you had to worry about various diversities within Quebec, not to mention all the other diversity that exists in our country.

We are a country that's been assembled together by people who are at various times really at odds with each other and don't have a certain degree of mutual understanding. Our electoral system created incentives for parties to paper over those differences, and in fact smother them and integrate people into parties as well as they could. I think it has a lot of do with the success of our country. At the baseline, we're probably a country that shouldn't have worked out, yet we did. That may be by accident, it may be by dumb luck, or it may have something to do with the electoral system that we had in the past.

My final point, I guess, would be that perhaps it's not the case that we have that degree of social enmity today, that we have these differences that could be exploited, but when I look at the rise of anti-immigrant parties in otherwise developed countries, I worry that such divisions might be exploited in our own country, not to mention regional divisions that still exist as well.

Those are my concerns.

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

Thank you. I have a second question for you.

You've outlined a number of more modest reforms that could deal with some of the issues that you've identified. We've also heard from Professor Maskin that other majority systems could deal with some of these issues. Are there shifts within the first-past-the-post system to something like a ranked ballot? Would you consider that too radical, from your perspective, or does that start dealing with some of the issues without getting in and really shaking things up?

[Prof. Peter John Loewen]

I think there's a qualitative difference between shifting to an AV system or a ranked ballot system, however it gets operationalized, and shifting to a system in which we create different types of members of Parliament or we use a fundamentally different rule to convert votes into seats. Is a move to ranked ballots a fundamental change? I'm not sure. I think there is an argument that it could be. You could argue against it, I suppose. It's not the shift that would occur under, for example, MMP, or certainly open-list PR.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

Mr. Richards is next.

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

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

I have some questions for all of you, but I have a couple of rounds, so hopefully we'll get some opportunities.

Professor Loewen, I think I'll start with you.

In front of me here I have a few comments that you've made. For the benefit of everybody else, I'll read them—they're very brief—and then I'm going to have a question based on that.

It was actually last summer, I think before the election was even completed, that you made the comment, and I quote: “Those who wish to reform [our voting system] should do so with a clear mandate over detailed plans and with broad public approval.”

Here's another comment you made, and I quote:

Whatever one thinks of the merits of different electoral systems—and there is much to recommend a variety of different systems—it seems remarkable that this decision would be left to parliamentary committees and then a simple vote of the House.

I sense that your use of the term “remarkable” wasn't meant to have a positive connotation.

Then following the election in December, you also wrote:

In short, one cannot argue at once that we need reform to address false majorities and that this government has a mandate to change the electoral system.

I would certainly agree with your comments. There are good reasons for those comments, but I wondered if you could explain a bit further for the committee, and for the record, what your reasoning is for why the current plan of committee study, and then a vote in the House, is, as you've said, “remarkable”, and I presume in not such a positive way.

[Prof. Peter John Loewen]

I think the thing that's special about the decisions that the committee is making is that they have a direct impact on how you are elected, which is to say they have a direct impact on whether you'll remain in your roles and whether you will have better or worse chances after the next election of being returned.

This is another way of saying that you're not disinterested parties in making this decision. I think there are any number of decisions you make from which you would remove yourself if you were an interested party. That's a principle, for example, that governs how cabinet ministers can make decisions over financial matters. It seems to me that it's a very important decision and it seems to me that's it's one for which, because you all have such a self-interest in it, you ought to get the approval of the voters.

There is a secondary consequence, and there are two scenarios that I can imagine. One is that you choose a new electoral system, and for whatever set of electoral dynamics, it locks itself in. You never get a group of parties that want to change it again. However, Canadians don't like the system. That's seems to me to be relatively undesirable as an outcome.

The other outcome, I suppose, would be that you might come back to me and say, “Don't worry; we can just change it again.” Then we start to get into the territory of the electoral system becoming a continuous election issue, with parties always looking for advantage after the next election. They're always changing and redesigning the system to their advantage. I think that's a worrying state of affairs and a worrying potential.

It seems to me that one way around that is to say that you have to have all-party consensus on how to change an electoral system. That two years ago, when Parliament was considering changing issues around what piece of ID you could use to vote, I heard some members, and certainly many academic colleagues, say that you have to have all-party consensus if you want to change a matter even that small. I can't imagine that we can then change the electoral system without all-party consensus. If you believe the first thing, you ought to believe the second.

The other point is, why not just ask voters?

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

Sir, can I stop you right there? It's because I have a follow-up question and we have less than a minute.

It's on that very point. What is the best way to ensure that we do have the public's buy-in and to ensure that it isn't done with political self-interest? Is it a referendum? How do we ensure that the Canadian public has bought into any changes that are made?

[Prof. Peter John Loewen]

My own sense—and this is something on which I've changed my view over the years—is that the most desirable way would have been for you to draw up a citizens' assembly to come up with a recommendation and to even put the design decision in the hands of a disinterested group and then to leave the decision to a referendum.

This would be done with a full effort on an education campaign to people about what the options are, with evidence and with balance. That would have been my desired outcome. However, I think the absence of a citizens' assembly doesn't mean that you then don't have a referendum. Even at this point, it's sensible to put this decision to people and ask them whether they approve of the rules that you're setting for yourselves.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

We'll go to Ms. Romanado.

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

Thank you so much.

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

Thank you very much for your presentations.

Yesterday we heard from the Broadbent Institute. We talked a little bit about a report that was issued, called “Canadian Electoral Reform - Public Opinion on Possible Alternatives”. This study was conducted right after the last election. The report states that in choosing the five goals of a voting system that are most important to them personally, 55% of Canadians polled noted the goal that the ballot should be simple and easy to understand. Some 55% of them said that was important to them. Then 51% said it was important for the system to produce stable and strong governments.

You can see that based on this poll, folks want something that's simple and folks want something that's going to provide stability. As soon as you hear of a minority government or a coalition government, people start thinking, my God, perpetual elections.

Given that, Professor Maskin, can you talk to us a little bit about how your proposed system would address those specific values that Canadians, according to that poll, have said are important to them?

[Prof. Eric Maskin]

Yes.

First, on the issue of ballot simplicity, which I agree is important, at the moment a ballot lists candidates who are standing. What I am proposing is that instead of just checking off one of those names or filling in a circle or pushing a button for one of those candidates, a voter would have the opportunity to do more and actually rank the candidates.

However, I think it's very important that voters not be required to rank candidates, or at least not be required to rank any more of the candidates than they want to. If there are eight candidates on the ballot, perhaps they'll choose to rank three or four of them, or a voter could just continue to vote for a single candidate. That would be putting one candidate first and basically announcing that the others are in a tie for second. That would be fine too. In any case, it would be up to the voter. That kind of ballot, I think, would be agreeable, because in principle voters could continue to do exactly the same as before, but they would have more opportunity for expression.

As for stability and strong government, when I propose moving to majority rule or, for that matter, alternative voting, both of which are majoritarian schemes by contrast with PR systems, majoritarian systems tend to produce majority governments. That's not a guarantee, but they are more likely to do so than proportional rule. If voters want stability, they're more likely to get it under one of these majoritarian systems.

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

Thank you.

Further to that comment, Professor Loewen, you mentioned that some of the guiding principles that we're looking at and some of the things that are wrong with our current system could be addressed by a federal solution. For instance, if we want to increase participation, it's not necessarily another electoral system that can do that. We could implement mandatory voting, or civic education outreach, and so on, and I agree with you that we've been hearing from various witnesses in that regard.

However, in terms of feasibility and cost, and in terms of having a less radical solution to address some of the issues and problems we're facing, what would you say to Professor Maskin's recommendation of moving into an AV system, or something similar, to address some of those issues without such a radical change?

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Answer briefly, please.

[Prof. Peter John Loewen]

I think it's a less radical change than PR, and on the issue of implementation, I think you should take the chief electoral officers at their word when they testify about the difficulty of implementing new electoral systems in short order.