Electoral Reform Committee on Aug. 30th, 2016

[Prof. Louis Massicotte]

I believe that the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada is much more qualified than I am to answer this question, as he is familiar with all the required mechanisms, all the work that must be done in preparation. My understanding was that the current time frame was realistic, but I defer to him on this issue.

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

Thank you.

I now have a hypothetical question. Let's assume that there was a second opposition party, that its platform indicated that it wanted to reform the voting system and that it obtained power with a large majority thanks to the current system. What do you think the chances would be of the party wanting to change the voting system? Let's say the party turned to another voting system, such as the preferential ballot system. What are your thoughts on the preferential ballot system as compared with the existing one?

[Prof. Louis Massicotte]

That is the option involving minimal change. That way, the ridings would remain the same. The voting ballot would be exactly the same as the one that already exists. All that would change would be the way the ballot paper is marked.

In addition, it would take longer for the results to be known. You may have heard about the Australian election. I believe you have spoken to the authorities. I was travelling at the time, but I felt that it took a very long time for the results to be known. So it would take a bit longer.

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

What about the distortion between votes cast and the number of votes....

[Prof. Louis Massicotte]

There would be no change.

It is well established by political scientists that the single member majority system and the first-past-the-post system both contain distortions. Some studies even claim that the single member majority system is even more unstable than the first-past-the-post system. However—and this is important—the person who wins the riding obtains more than 50% of the votes.

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

Mr. Chair, do I have any time left?

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Yes, you have a bit of time left.

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

I would like to put the same question about the preferential voting system to you, ladies.

[Katelynn Northam]

Can you repeat that? Sorry.

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

What do you think about the preferential voting system?

[Katelynn Northam]

Our community has told us very clearly that proportional representation is the only system or family of systems that will address the core issues that they have, which is the distortion of the overall results. We do know that alternative vote or preferential ballots will not solve that problem.

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

So you don't think that it's a worthwhile system.

[Katelynn Northam]

That's not what we're advocating at this point, no.

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

What do you think, Ms. Thomas?

[Prof. Melanee Thomas]

I like preferential ballots with a large district magnitude. To me the idea that we would move from our current system, with just the X on the ballot, to a preferential rank that would simply elect one candidate is a big change for no payoff.

However, we have had scenarios in western Canadian provinces in which we've used something similar to single transferable vote. If your district magnitude is large enough, you can solve a number of problems potentially related to strength of party discipline and proportionality, but the kicker is introducing the preferential ballot alongside a larger number of representatives coming from a district. The drawback is that either those districts have to be so much larger than ours are now that it's unfeasible or that we need to do something like tripling the size of the House, which also strikes me as not feasible.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

We'll go to Ms. May.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to all the witnesses.

In the first five minutes that I have, I want to zoom in on this issue of recruiting women candidates, because it's something about which I have a lot of personal experience. With the permission of Professor Thomas and Ms. Northam, I'd like to share my anecdotal experience and ask you if there's any academic literature to back up some of my intuitive observations about why proportional representation will help us have more women in Parliament.

My first anecdotal experience was that as a woman and as executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada, I was viewed as a desirable candidate by various parties. At different times I was flattered, yes. Leaders of the New Democratic Party, Liberal Party, and Progressive Conservative Party all, at one time or another, tried to woo me, and it was a very nice experience, but I said, “Oh, my gosh, I don't want to do that thing.” I'll tell you what my reasons were.

I've now gone through the experience of being at the other end of the phone, trying to convince really fantastic women candidates to put themselves forward and run in an election. I succeeded in the last election—not as well as the NDP, to give credit where credit's due, but 39% of our candidates were women. That's 131 women out of 336 candidates.

Here's something that I'm wondering may be an informal barrier or at least a factor that I can't find in the academic literature. Women say, “I'm prepared to work hard and I want to make a difference, but I don't want to jump into a pond full of snapping crocodiles. I don't like the culture of politics.”

I think Ms. Northam said earlier that the Leadnow community is tired of adversarial politics. My observation, particularly from consulting with Green Party members of parliaments around the world who deal with proportional representation systems, for the most part, is that when you change your voting system toward a proportional representation/consensual system, you change the culture of politics. It becomes less nasty. You do away with what Susan Delacourt describes in great detail in her book Shopping for Votes. You do away with targeted dog-whistle wedge issues and you create incentives for consensus and working together.

I would suggest as my last point—and then I'll ask for your comments, starting with Professor Thomas—that this may explain why, in looking for elected women in Canadian politics, there are proportionately far more at the municipal level, where for the most part we don't have political parties.

You're shaking your head. Do we not have more women elected in municipal governments? We always had, traditionally.

In any case, I'll turn to you now. Personally, I think this is a factor that won't come up in the reasons. You're right that if you just change your voting system and that's all you're looking at, you're not going to get more women. As a point of fact, democracies with proportional representation have more women. Personally, from my experience, this could be a factor. I'd like to know if there's any research on that.

I'll go to you, Professor Thomas.

[Prof. Melanee Thomas]

There is some, but it's not necessarily in the direction that people assume that it is.

The first thing I would say is that the snapping crocodiles—I like phrasing it that way—may or may not keep women out of politics. I've never seen that as a particularly gendered thing. The nastiness that some people see in politics keeps a lot of sensible people out of politics, women and men alike.

What's more likely to affect women, and this is something—

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Was that a...? I don't know how to take that.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Anyway, go ahead.

[Prof. Melanee Thomas]

Sorry.

Some people just like the cut and thrust of politics and are prepared to deal with that context, whereas other people are more more likely to say, “I'm doing important work here and I don't necessarily want to.”

What bothers women more now—and this comes up routinely in my classes, which is why I say we're on it when we're studying this—is what the Internet and social media do, because this gives a lot of misogynistic, really gross voices a very large microphone. It's very unpleasant and it's very violent. It's one of the things that is emerging because we have more women in executive positions, especially as premiers at the provincial level, so that's giving us the data that we need to work on this issue more systematically.

One of the things I will say about consensus politics, though, is there is an excellent study done by Tali Mendelberg and her colleagues at Princeton that notes that if you operate under consensus rules, women's voices never actually achieve parity in terms of men. They look at things like perceived competence, perceived leadership, actual numbers of speaking times, and number of times they were rudely interrupted by the men in the group. It doesn't matter how many women you have under consensus rules; you don't actually hit parity there. Where you actually do hit parity is when you have majoritarian rules with a supermajority of women. This is an experimental study, so generalizing from that into an existing set of political institutions is something I would not do.

One of the things I would also say is about the local politics myth. There's this idea that local politics is really friendly for women. I live in Calgary. Calgary City Council is not a friendly place for women. It hasn't been for quite some time, and I don't think it will be any time soon either.

This idea about local politics is a myth. Consensus isn't necessarily the thing that solves the sexist problem either. It seems nice, but I don't think it solves the problem.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you very much.

We'll go to Ms. Romanado now.

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

Thank you so much.

I'd like to thank my esteemed colleagues for their presence here today.

Professor Massicotte, we heard from the Broadbent Institute yesterday. They did a study with respect to what people thought about the voting systems and what was important to them in terms of their values. Of those polled, 51% said that a stable majority government was important to them.

In your brief you talked about the fact that it's very unlikely that in the future we'd see a party with a parliamentary majority on its own if we were to adopt an MMP policy. My concern would be that instead of Canadians having a voice prior to an election, backroom deals would end up happening after the election to create these coalition governments. There's a concern that this is directly in conflict with the needs of Canadians.

You also mentioned a little about the changes to constituencies or ridings. Either the capacity of MPs to actually serve their constituents would drop when they have that much more than they currently do, and/or we would have to increase the size of the House to between 500 and 675 members, which I think Canadians would not agree with.

I'm just a little concerned. You've been very honest about some of the pitfalls of MMP and your thoughts on dual candidacy. If somebody loses an election but still ends up being a member of Parliament, I think that is completely unacceptable. I'd like you to talk a little bit about that.

[Prof. Louis Massicotte]

How much time do I have left, Mr. Chairman?