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.
3:35 p.m.
Conservative
Alain Rayes Conservative Richmond—Arthabaska, QC
I understand there is no urgency.
I will return to that later.
3:35 p.m.
Liberal
Ruby Sahota Liberal Brampton North, ON
Thank you. We've definitely been having some interesting conversations.
I want to preface my questions with a comment.
I think from all the testimony that we've gathered, it's quite hard to say that good policy only comes from a certain type of government and not from another type of government. We've had some great things from majority governments and we've had good things from minority governments. We've had failures from minority governments as well. However, we do know that in Canada at least they all came under the first-past-the-post system. I don't know if you can necessarily make the direct link that changing the electoral system is always going to automatically result in all good policies and collaboration, because we've also had witnesses come before us who have said some disastrous policies and platforms are coming out of PR countries and European countries right now.
I want to move on to Professor Thomas. I'm really intrigued by a lot of the research that you've presented to us here today. I believe you were speaking of Norway earlier when you were talking about women being elected. I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit about that. You quickly passed over it, and I wasn't able to get the facts that you were pointing to.
3:35 p.m.
Prof. Melanee Thomas
Thank you for your question.
This was a study that was done in the nineties by two Americans, Richard Matland and Donley Studlar, comparing Norway and Canadian provinces to see whether or not small parties that introduce a greater number of women in their candidate lists or as part of their candidate profile act as a contagion to force bigger parties to diversify the kinds of candidates they offer the voting public. In Norway, under that particular system, under those constraints, they did find evidence of that particular effect, but they didn't find similar evidence in Canada.
What this means is that Canada can have smaller parties that arguably aren't contesting for government because they're not able to win a plurality of seats or a plurality of votes that gets manufactured into a majority of seats. What it shows in the Canadian case is that the contagion effect we saw in Norway does not exist in Canada.
The reason I cited it in this particular context is to suggest that when people say proportional representation is good for women because it gives women greater access points, we can speak to studies that have looked at this function in an established proportional representation system and found it, but it takes a lot of logical leaps to suggest that we would be able to manufacture that same kind of effect in Canada simply by changing the electoral system.
I think the argument that's more plausible is to say that we have had parties that have been pushing for greater diversity in terms of who gets presented as a candidate to voters, but that this doesn't necessarily push other parties to do the same. For me that's the point. I don't see that changing how we translate votes to seats would actually change that particular part of Canadian elections at all.
3:35 p.m.
Liberal
Ruby Sahota Liberal Brampton North, ON
It's interesting that you point to Norway as well. Norway was also brought up by a previous witness earlier today, Mr. Loewen. It's quite scary when you look at the chart that he presented to us. Norway also seems to be a country that has a very large anti-legal immigration platform in the party that's been elected there, so bad policies, bad thoughts, can also come out of these PR systems.
It was very interesting when you said that perhaps we're asking the wrong question, perhaps especially when it comes to the issue of women. There are other things that you've said. You were saying there were other informal barriers. I like your link between finances and getting women elected. I think that's interesting.
Are there other informal barriers that you haven't been able to speak about that you think we should look at?
3:40 p.m.
Prof. Melanee Thomas
Yes. The general truism is that every electoral system manufactures a majority somehow, so this is the thing: we need to think about how we want to best manufacture our majorities when it comes to electoral systems.
The one that concerns me most in terms of informal barriers for electoral reform is implicit assumptions about what makes a good candidate and who's the best candidate. I think built into recruitment policies and into how we approach the political system is a lot of latent sexism and latent racism, this idea that a good candidate or a good politician looks a certain way.
This is why New Zealand's experience is important. They switched in 1996 and saw an immediate bump in the number of women who were elected, but 45% of them were from party lists. A very small number came from districts, about 15%. That allowed people to speak what they had always thought, that women just aren't good at winning in the districts. The only thing that's changed in New Zealand is that you've seen pretty minor variations in the overall number of women who have been elected. Instead, what we've seen equalized is the number of women elected from the list seats and the number of women elected in the districts.
Part of the informal barriers is that because the numbers required for parity are so low, at 169, it's just inconceivable to me that people who wanted to recruit and nominate 169 women couldn't do it if they wanted to. The numbers are not on anyone's side there.
For me what gets loaded into this—because we know that voters aren't discriminating—is that when people are doing the recruiting and deciding when they're going to ask and when they're going to recruit, what are they thinking that they don't want to say about who's a good candidate? To me this is the important, fundamental thing that is not going to change.
3:40 p.m.
Liberal
John Aldag Liberal Cloverdale—Langley City, BC
Thank you.
Professor Thomas, in your opening comments you noted in passing that you would like to talk about the New Zealand experience during the question-and-answer period. You touched on it a couple of times, once in response to Mr. Reid's questions and now in response to my colleague's. I don't know if there is anything else you wanted to draw from or to share on the New Zealand experience. We have heard a lot of it. If you have additional thoughts, I'd like to give you the floor to do that.
3:40 p.m.
Prof. Melanee Thomas
Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
As I'm sure you have heard, New Zealand switched to mixed member proportional in 1996. They also had dedicated seats for their indigenous population. For Canada, I think New Zealand's experience will be much more useful as a road map than anybody else's who's used mixed member proportional or any other system without making the change to it. This is why I think New Zealand is the most important comparison case.
People will say, as I know I said when I was a younger student, that in 1996 there was a jump immediately from 21% women in the New Zealand legislature to 35%. Since then, though, it's remained pretty stagnant. They go between 34% and 41%. It currently sits at 38% after the 2014 election. This just suggests that although we've moved the bar, New Zealand is still stalled.
The reason, I think, has to do with where the women are. If you just dump the women into the party list seats that are meant to be top-ups, New Zealand shows that most women came from that. People actually said that New Zealand shows that women can't win in the districts. We know from places like Canada and Britain, and especially from Canadian voters, that Canadian voters certainly don't discriminate on the basis of sex, yet in the New Zealand experience you saw it, and then people actually started to articulate that women can't win in the seats.
The difference between 1996 and 2014, when they had their last election, is that women were about 30% of members from both district seats and from list seats. What we've not seen is parity. New Zealand switched their electoral system, and it gave a certain kind of access point for women. I'll concede that when they made that particular system more proportional, women got into the legislature through those list seats, but they've not hit 50%. What it enabled people to do was to explicitly say something sexist about women's abilities to win elections, which we know from other cases isn't true. What we end up seeing now is an equalization between women in the districts and women on the list, but they're still 20 points away from parity, so there are still informal barriers.
3:40 p.m.
Liberal
3:40 p.m.
Liberal
John Aldag Liberal Cloverdale—Langley City, BC
Okay.
I have one other question, but I will only take a minute. If you have anything else, go ahead.
3:45 p.m.
Prof. Melanee Thomas
The only thing I'll say is that electoral reform in New Zealand did not remove the informal barriers that keep women from achieving representational parity. That's the point. I think that gets lost in a lot of the discussion about PR being good for women.
3:45 p.m.
Liberal
John Aldag Liberal Cloverdale—Langley City, BC
There was another point of clarification I was looking for or hoping to get from you. My note-taking is bad, so you might have to give me the context again, but at one point you were talking about district magnitude and the large size. Perhaps you could remind me as to whether that was in connection with trying to get greater proportionality. If we were to go to a different system, how large do you think the size should be? We've heard for multi-member ridings that it should be five. Some have said 12. Are you thinking of something larger? What are you thinking in that context?
3:45 p.m.
Prof. Melanee Thomas
In the context of what I think about preferential ballots, I would have said that a preferential ballot on a district magnitude of one—i.e., just changing the ballot structure—for me is a change that's not really worth doing. I would be more supportive of a preferential ballot if we moved to something like the single transferable vote, where you would need a district magnitude of at least three, preferably five.
The difficulty there is that Canada already has very large districts, both in terms of population and in terms of geography, depending on which one you're looking at. How do you draw those boundaries in a way that preserves local representation in a meaningful way? The difficulty there is that if you increase district magnitude like that, you also have to increase the number of seats to keep that strong local link, because we are so geographically dispersed.
3:45 p.m.
Liberal
3:45 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia
Thank you very much.
We'll go to Ms. Rempel for five minutes, please.
3:45 p.m.
Conservative
Michelle Rempel Conservative Calgary Nose Hill, AB
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Dr. Thomas, just going back to my previous comments, I don't think financing reform is the panacea to see more under-represented groups, and I want to be clear about that, but I do think it's important to talk about it.
From my own experience and from trying to encourage other women to run, financing is something that comes up. I think sometimes women will say, “Well, I don't have the same networks as my male colleagues do to raise money.”
I was trying to introduce a new topic and I wanted to give you a little more time to expand upon that. I do think very strongly that third party financing reform could tighten things up and perhaps level the playing field for some women, or under-represented groups in general, or groups with differing political thought. The last thing I'd want to see—and I think all political parties are guilty of this practice—is the use of third parties as proxies to get around electoral financing rules.
I'm wondering if you could expand on this topic in some of the time I have left to see if I could get some support. Could you give some of your thoughts on that particular aspect? I don't think it has been discussed in Parliament or in the context of this committee yet.
3:45 p.m.
Prof. Melanee Thomas
I think money matters most for women at the nomination stage. This is one of the things you talked about. Regulating how much people can spend on nominations does a lot for historically under-represented groups.
Something that should be noted for the record is that networks matter. They matter for money, but they matter as much for recruitment. Electoral district associations that have women on their executives, especially women as their EDA presidents, are much more likely to run women as candidates, simply because you have somebody with a network who knows a woman and can do that kind of recruitment.
Women tell us that money becomes a barrier also at that nomination stage, and it matters in ways that don't matter for men. It's not just about getting money for getting on the ballot and mounting a campaign, but for things like after-hours child care. It's for things like hair and clothes and the whole presentation in which women are required to engage in ways that men aren't.
This comes into the third party financing side of things. I can imagine a scenario, as you see happening south of the border, in which a third party that doesn't like a particular kind of candidate decides that they will engage in a very targeted kind of campaign on grounds that we would say would be undemocratic and problematic. In that sense, I would always say that this kind of campaign finance regulation would be good. Money matters in that particular context, so having a control on it is important.
When it comes to actually helping women's numbers, though, being able to regulate and have clear pathways for things like nominations and recruitment is where the money really matters for gender parity in terms of elections.
3:50 p.m.
Conservative
Michelle Rempel Conservative Calgary Nose Hill, AB
To continue with this thought, you talked a little about how PR isn't necessarily a panacea in removing some of these barriers. Just thinking forward, I would think that third party financing would have quite an impact in terms of how candidates would be selected on a list or how candidates would be chosen in a PR system, given that there might be—I'm just theorizing—more individual distinction, depending on how the system was set out.
If there was a change to the electoral system, do you think third party financing could have even more impact and therefore require perhaps stronger legislation mirroring the kind we have with federal political parties right now?
3:50 p.m.
Prof. Melanee Thomas
I would say that introducing any kind of a party vote would be a change from what we do now, which is vote for a local candidate. If you were to move to a mixed member proportional system, under which you vote in the district and then you also vote for your party overall, or if you were to move to a list PR system where the vote is simply cast for a party, then third-party voices, as you've described, would become very important. They could direct their campaigns at an actual ballot or an actual ballot decision that doesn't have any kind of link to that local sense. That kind of set-up would be something that would need to be addressed.
What I would say about list construction is that I'm less concerned about third party financing in how the lists are constructed and more concerned about the informal barriers that already exist inside political parties, because parties draft the lists.
3:50 p.m.
Prof. Melanee Thomas
It means that in places like Sweden, where we know they've been able to elect a gender-equal parliament, it's because you had parties that voluntarily zippered their lists and alternated between women and men.
In the Canadian context, I identify that most of the informal barriers that block women's candidacies or put women into districts they can't win and all these other sorts of things are in the black box of political parties, and it cuts across the spectrum. The problems are with the parties.
Third party finance matters in terms of how you might persuade somebody to vote for a party, certainly, but there are other powerful barriers that exist inside Canada's political parties that would come into play on list construction and any other kind of candidate nomination.
3:50 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia
Thank you.
I should mention that Professor Massicotte has to leave at 4:00, so when he does leave, it's not because of something we said.
We'll go to Mr. Boulerice, please.
3:50 p.m.
NDP
Alexandre Boulerice NDP Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
To begin, I have a brief comment. Professor Thomas, I am sure my colleague Kennedy Stewart would agree with you and would be very happy to hear you say that, if there were financial consequences for political parties that do not field an equal number of men and women as candidates, the problem would be solved overnight, because that is exactly what he proposed in his bill.
Ms. Northam, I would like to hear your thoughts on the radical idea that a voter could vote for their first choice, for the candidate they would like to see in Parliament, and get what they want. This is in fact the case in the majority of democracies and Western countries. In Canada, we have a system that creates systematic injustices.
I'll give you two examples and I would like to hear your reaction.
On Vancouver Island in the last election, the NDP won 33% of the vote, the Green Party, 25%, the Liberals, 21%, and the Conservatives, 21%. Yet five NDP MPs, who are all excellent and who I like very much, and one Green MP, were elected, but no Liberals or Conservatives. Even though Liberal and Conservative voters account for 42% of the votes cast on Vancouver Island, they have no representation in Parliament whatsoever.
The same could be said of my NDP friends in the heart of Toronto. They are there and account for a considerable vote share, but they are not represented either.
The same is true for Conservative voters on the Island of Montreal. They are there, represent a percentage of voters, but they have no representation.
In your opinion, what should we do to ensure that NDP voters in the heart of Toronto, Conservative voters in Montreal, and Liberal voters on Vancouver Island have a voice in Parliament?