Thank you to the committee for inviting me to be here today and for taking your summer to work on this important and challenging issue.
I'm the campaign lead for electoral reform at an organization called Leadnow. We represent hundreds of thousands of Canadians from coast to coast to coast, and about 19,000 of our members live in one of your ridings. What our members have in common is that they want Canada to have a fair economy, a safe climate, and an open democracy.
Leadnow is a fundamentally member-driven organization, which is to say that we always start from what our community thinks is important and then we work to bring their voices to the people with the power to make an impact on those issues. I'm here today to do just that. I'm not speaking on my behalf; I'm speaking on behalf of the thousands of people who think it's absolutely vital that Canada replace our broken first-past-the-post voting system with some form of proportional representation.
To put together this presentation, we surveyed our community to make sure we were representing them accurately. Nearly 10,000 people responded within 48 hours to our call for input. They wanted us to share some key messages with you today.
I wanted to start by reminding us all what it is that we're solving.
The Leadnow community strongly believes that our first-past-the-post voting system is broken. It does not allow people to adequately and fairly express their preferences, and that, in turn, takes away power and choice from the voter.
It makes elections a game of riding-by-riding math and strategy. This is an issue that impacts our relationship with democracy. It impacts one of our most basic rights as Canadian citizens, and it shapes our relationship with our elected officials. It makes it difficult for people to accurately and fairly express what they really want at election time.
The fact that millions of people at each election cannot effectively exercise that right is not something to be taken lightly. It's not an unfortunate side effect, and it's something that affected nine million people in the last election.
Canada is, quite simply, behind the times when it comes to having a modern voting system. We're one of the few OECD countries that still use first past the post, and we are the only OECD country that uses it at all three levels of government. We are outliers, and we're using a fundamentally unfair and unjust way to run elections, and that needs to change.
As a little context, Leadnow's involvement in democratic reform didn't start with the election of this new government. We've been working hard to improve Canadian democracy since our founding in 2011. Over the years, we've held hundreds of events, meetings, and consultations where the topic of electoral reform has come up time and again. We've made thousands of phone calls, we've knocked on thousands of doors, and we've stood in the snow and canvassed until our pens froze. We were all waiting for this moment when we would have an opportunity for change.
Our campaign for proportional representation is called Vote Better, and so far over 24,000 people have signed on in support. About a third of those people have come from volunteers going to festivals, going out to street corners, and talking to people on their doorsteps, listening to their stories about why we need a fairer voting system.
The reason we've done this is simple. Our community believes, as I know everyone in this room also agrees, that having an open and transparent democracy is absolutely foundational to moving forward and addressing the really big, pressing issues of our time. We need a democracy that's fair, inclusive, and collaborative.
Some of you might be aware that we have, in the past, also run a strategic voting campaign, and that in the election before that, we advocated for inter-party co-operation. We did so because our community was frustrated by the distorted results produced by first past the post.
Our preference would be that people would not have to work around the pitfalls of first past the post in order to express what they want. Strategic voting, as you know, happens when voters vote for who they think can win instead of who they might truly want. It happens when people are afraid to vote for their first choice lest it split the vote and empower their least favourite choice. Canadians have been doing it for a long time. Without good local information, they're often guessing at what the most strategic choice actually is. Expressing their true preferences and seeing that preference reflected in an outcome should not require strategy or access to polling information.
We believe this frustration with first past the post is commonly felt. I personally have spent a lot of time going door to door for both our election campaign and this campaign in various ridings around Ontario, although my colleagues have done so in other provinces, including Manitoba, B.C., and the Maritimes. I did not encounter very many people who were unfamiliar with the tough choices that first past the post forces them to make: should they vote with their hearts and accept that it may split the vote in their riding, should they vote for the candidate they think is most likely to win, or should they just not bother to vote at all because the conclusion seems forgone?
We know that first past the post can lead to big changes in the power structure of Parliament, even when the popular vote doesn't change very much. You see situations in which parties increase their share of the popular vote only moderately, a couple of percentage of points, but actually make huge gains in seat count due to how those votes are concentrated in key ridings. This can have the impact of propelling parties into majority governments without a majority of the vote, as we know, which we know can also give a party a tremendous amount of power. It also means that voters in those key swing ridings may get more attention than voters in the safe ridings. These are symptoms of a broken voting system in action.
Democracy is not a finished product, but something that we have to constantly refine. Fortunately, one of the things we have going for us in Canada is that we're a country full of people who really believe in democracy. Leadnow is a community full of those people, and this room is full of such people. The question, then, becomes what to do as the next step.
When asked this question, the Leadnow community overwhelmingly told us that they want to see PR replace first past the post, with 85% saying it was their preference, because it's the only way to address the fundamental flaws with first past the post.
We prepared a brief—which I don't believe you have in front of you today, but which you will have shortly—that presents more detailed reasons for our preference for PR. I believe many of the other experts who have been before this panel have already summarized many of PR's benefits, but we'll summarize a couple of the things that we think are most important.
First, it's fundamentally more fair. First past the post is what's known as a winner-take-all system. It gives the people who did not vote for the winner no voice. It also creates wild distortions in seat count, to the point where governments often receive majorities without a majority of the popular vote. In contrast, PR would make every vote count and give voters greater choice, without having to resort to strategic voting. Whether you're a Conservative in downtown Toronto or an NDP voter in rural Manitoba, you deserve to have your voice heard.
Second, it is more inclusive. We have seen some evidence that it is more diverse, although I appreciated Professor Thomas' comments on that today. We feel that it would help to prevent parties from focusing only on the regions of the country that are seen as winnable and instead produce policy that considers the entire country.
Third, it's collaborative. It would make politics less of a zero-sum game and force parties to work together across party lines to address those big issues. Our community has told us that they're tired of adversarial politics and they want governments to take the time to compromise and craft solutions that will stand the test of time, rather than spending their time undoing or amending previous policy decisions by previous governments.
I will end by relaying our appreciation and thanks from our community for taking on this issue. As I said earlier, I believe we all share common values of appreciation for democracy and we want to do what we can to be more inclusive of everyone.
We know that changing our electoral system is a big step. You've been hearing a lot of different arguments over the last couple of weeks, and you will be hearing more as you go out on the road. The Leadnow community believes that this is a time to be bold. This process has opened an amazing window of opportunity to leave a lasting legacy and give Canada an improved electoral system. The truth is that we lag behind the rest of the world in using an unsophisticated voting system to try to represent a population that is growing increasingly more diverse. It isn't meeting the challenges of representing everyone's voice, and that has impacts on real people. It's not just an abstract question of which system is best, but a question of whether we want to be committed to ensuring that everyone is included in our democracy. There is clear evidence that PR is the best way to rectify that problem.
I want to end with a quote from one of our community members in Toronto, who wanted us to share this message with you:
Political systems evolve. Let us not assume or be lulled into the belief that our system is a static and 'finished; done' project.
Rather, let us always and continually find ways—sometimes small, sometimes major—to better manifest democracy and representation. Let us never fear new ideas. Our current system has shown its flaws; it would be irresponsible to not try something new now.
Thank you.