Evidence of meeting #19 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 politics.
A video is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Matt DeCourcey Liberal Fredericton, NB
Right. Then it would be even broader than that and include gender and age demographics. Representational equity would comprise all these different considerations.
Prof. Melanee Thomas
Yes. Socio-demographics are the easiest ones to identify, and to be frank, women are the easiest socio-demographic group to capture as this big umbrella, on the understanding that all of these groups are going to be very diverse in their own policy-relevant viewpoints.
Some will extend the idea further to ideological groups and to different ways of thinking, but the bulk of the research in terms of equity is looking at groups such as women, visible minorities, and indigenous peoples in Canada. It is anybody who has been historically barred from participating in electoral politics for some reason, and things like that.
Liberal
Matt DeCourcey Liberal Fredericton, NB
Thank you.
To borrow from a phrase used this morning, I think that would represent an unalloyed good in our democracy, in our Parliament, and I would understand that to be different from the pursuit of a Parliament that represented the partisan divisions of the country. Would that be clear as well?
The second part of that question is this. From your testimony I got the sense that pursuing representation of the different political parties in Parliament is not necessarily the way that we should be pursuing representational equity in Parliament, and if that's true, what would you then advise us to pursue as tactics, as policies, as recommendations from this committee that would help increase the representational equity of Parliament?
Prof. Melanee Thomas
I would say that the distribution of votes and how that maps on to the distribution of seats is a different question from what the population looks like and what the representatives look like. Those things ought to be seen as distinct.
Of course, since I have indicated that I think political parties across the spectrum are part of the representational problem when it comes to representational equity, I can't say that partisan equity is a way of getting at representational equity.
The reason we talk about demographic weight is important. It's because we know that women are going to be ideologically diverse and they're going to have a diverse set of policy preferences and a diverse set of policy-relevant experiences that will cut across a number of partisan preferences and partisan boundaries. The same holds for visible minorities and the same holds for indigenous peoples. As a result, the kinds of questions that need to be asked for the solutions would be what you actually want the representatives to look like.
For women I think this is easier, because we can say women are 50% of the population and therefore ought to be 50% of the representatives, or you can make the argument that this should happen. What we need to avoid, though, is the idea of replicating other forms of inequity. Having 50% of the representatives made up of white, wealthy, educated professional women does not solve the problem.
What we also want to see is diversity within communities. Right now, when you look at visible minorities and indigenous Canadians by demographic weight, you see they're more present in the current House of Commons than women are, but they're disproportionately masculine, older, and all these other sorts of things.
Liberal
Matt DeCourcey Liberal Fredericton, NB
Sorry.
I was going to ask how we simplify this question when we go abroad and consult with Canadians, because I think it's an important question to put before them.
Do we ask if they want to see demographic representation in their Parliament and if they understand that it's different from partisan representation? Do we ask what value they place in higher regard?
Prof. Melanee Thomas
I know what the public is probably going to tell you, because we've asked it in the Canadian election study.
Politically engaged Canadians tend to be older and whiter and more wealthy and more masculine than the Canadian population as a whole, and they're going to be disproportionately the ones who will testify when you go on the road show. When you ask them about representational diversity, they're going to say representational diversity isn't a problem. Men don't think women's under-representation is a problem, but women do. White people tend not to think that visible minorities' under-representation is a problem, but visible minority communities do.
Therefore the discussion that needs to take place is on whether or not you want equity in representation, because it actually matters for the information that gets put forward in policy. If you put that question to the majority, you're probably not going to get “Yes, we think that's a good idea.” You're going to have a lot of people who say that the status quo benefits them, so they like it. In that sense, I think putting this kind of question to the engaged public is probably.... I know the kind of answer you're going to get, and they're not going to say there should be more women or more visible minorities or indigenous peoples.
The decision to solve those representational inequities and the solutions to those inequities go back to political parties because they do the recruitment. When you've got people who are tasked with recruiting people to stand as candidates and then getting them nominated and then getting them elected, that's where targeting and identifying people you think would be good representatives comes down.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'll stay with you, Professor Thomas, and maybe Ms. Northam has a comment as well.
You've cited political parties. I know you meant to say “with the exception of the NDP”, which has done an okay job—not perfect, but a better job, I'd say—yet we haven't been a “contagion”, as you called it earlier. Can we seek a better word, perhaps—
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
—when talking about trying to improve the representation of women? I've been on a number of NDP committees as we sought to talk about those barriers, as Ms. Romanado mentioned, and it was not just to talk about them but to then remove them. We have a proposal in Parliament right now to do that, to, as you said earlier, connect the money. If parties had a financial disincentive to having a low number of nominated women, then parties would do more.
Am I connecting the dots fairly from your comments? I don't want to exaggerate or misrepresent.
Prof. Melanee Thomas
I think so.
Where the mechanism applies for me is that we know no one gets to be a candidate for a political party without the leader signing the nomination policy, so I would backstop this idea by saying that if leaders wanted their candidates to look a certain way, they wouldn't sign nomination papers until they had candidates who looked the way they wanted them to.
To be frank, and this is where—
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
It's if there was a financial hit, right? The connection would be that the reimbursement would be lessened.
Prof. Melanee Thomas
Yes, exactly. This is the thing. I understand that particular policy and I am deeply cynical when I endorse it, but no party leader is going to set up a scenario in which they're not going to get their full reimbursement. They'll direct their people to find the candidates to maximize the money. It is a really cynical approach, but I'm not the only one among my colleagues who thinks that if this were tied to the money, the problem would be solved overnight.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
I can understand the cynical view, but if Canada is sitting 62nd in the world right now, we need concrete mechanisms, not gestures, not symbolism, not tweets. We need things that help guide parties and party leaders in how we construct ourselves to offer Canadians a choice that more fairly represents Canadians, as radical as that notion sounds.
I don't know, Ms. Northam, if you had any comments on this particular mechanism or anything that was just said by Professor Thomas.
Campaigner-Electoral Reform, Leadnow.ca
I think we're broadly supportive and would agree with the fact that there are multiple barriers to women's participation and that we have to look at all of them. We had suggested PR as one possible way to do that, but I acknowledge, obviously, that it's not the main solution.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
This is again for both of our witnesses.
We were given a study of 60 years of the Australian experience. Under the winner-take-all ranked ballot, two and a half times fewer women were elected to the Australian legislature than what was done under the same election conditions, the same political culture, under a proportional system. It was two and a half times more women. While we don't offer it as the silver bullet to the question that we're trying to solve here, the evidence we've been given by a number of esteemed academics says that this is something we should take note of.
Campaigner-Electoral Reform, Leadnow.ca
That's the evidence that we've seen also. As I said, we're looking at all the solutions, and the experience of countries with PR does seem to show that there is improvement in that area. I think we have a lot of work to do on improving the participation of women in politics, so we have to look at all the solutions.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Professor Thomas, is your argument then that there's correlation, but not causation? Is that the general sentiment around proportional systems?
Prof. Melanee Thomas
One of the things, when it comes to empirical models, is that the type of electoral system stands in as a blunt indicator. You can't say the system causes a bunch of things, because you don't know what is actually working as the causal mechanism.
In the case of Australia, I would note that you spoil your ballot for the Senate if you don't rank order every single candidate, which means that most Australians are simply checking the box and saying “I'm going with the party's order”, and the party determines the structure of the list.
It goes back to my main point, which is that if parties wanted parity on their lists for STV in the Senate, they would structure their lists accordingly. The same thing holds with the alternative vote. This is the sexist idea that women might not be able to win in the districts in the same way that men would be able to by looking like the good candidate or the best candidate to win.
This goes back to the nomination of candidates. In the Canadian context, we can tell you that every single political party in the lead-up to the 2008 and 2011 federal elections disproportionately nominated women in ridings where they knew their party wasn't going to win. That held for open seats as much as it did for incumbents.
I don't think I'm making such a strong assumption in suggesting that parties have a rough idea about where they're actually going to win, and they nominate candidates accordingly.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Nevertheless, we have never, in this country, broken through even the 30% glass ceiling by having 30% women on the ballot in our elections—
Prof. Melanee Thomas
That is not true.
At the provincial level, we have a government caucus that is 47%—
Prof. Melanee Thomas
Yes, but the provinces tell you that parties can do it differently if they wanted to.
