Evidence of meeting #24 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 saskatchewan.
As an Individual
No. Remember when the professors from Ireland were talking? I think the example they used was five candidates, and they said approximately one-sixth are wasted.
When you're calculating the quota in that, you're always adding one, so if it's four candidates and 10,000 votes, and you divide that by four evenly, it's 2,500 each, but if you add one to get 2,501, then you can't get four times 2,501 out of 10,000. It's that remainder that's wasted.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
Professor, you were suggesting a model of regional divisions in a province. As opposed to having proportionality within the province of Ontario, you suggested that the eastern Ontario region, including the city of Ottawa, would be severed off. I happen to represent a riding in that area, and I just looked it up. There are eight ridings in the city of Ottawa. There are eight rural, small-town ridings that include the city of Kingston. That gives you an idea.
That's a total of 16. You'll see why I'm mentioning this. I don't know if you chose that example with that number in mind, but it would mean that effectively one-sixteenth of votes would be lost and would not be factored into the proportionality. That works out to about 6.25%.
The reason I mention it is that if this system were used, it would have the effect of essentially eliminating the Green Party entirely, with the exception of Ms. May's seat, assuming that her seat remains the same. The reason is that the Green Party—and I'm looking across provinces here—got about 3.5% or 3.25% in the last election. It did better in some provinces—British Columbia got 8%, for example—but a 5% cut-off removes the Green Party from getting any seats in most provinces to start with. If you then subdivide a region like British Columbia into 16 member seats, that effectively removes it again.
I would argue that if we're trying to design an MMP system with the goal of maximizing proportionality, we first ought to set the cut-offs very low, and then I would argue that it would be problematic to create macro-districts or regions within provinces. We would be better off having a single list for each province. If you move away from that, you start getting the kind of problem that I just alluded to.
Prof. Lee Ward
Thank you for the question. On the threshold, I'm a little bit agnostic. I think 5% is logical. The Ontario Citizens' Assembly says 3%, and I could live with that as well.
I also think that when you change the system, you change the motivation of the voter. I can't help but think there might be some people today or in the past who would have voted for a political party, the Green Party, but maybe didn't because they thought they were wasting their vote.
Even a threshold of 5%, I think, is achievable. Once parties have this representation, then you can see them in a venue. You can see them in Parliament, and you're impressed or you're not impressed, whatever the case might be. We can't just use the past as prologue, in that sense.
I could be persuaded that 3% is a better threshold, absolutely.
In terms of breaking up the province, I think the regions preserve a certain notion of community of interest. The concern I would have with treating the whole province of Ontario as one regional list is that you want to guarantee that somebody from the Ottawa region is going to be on that list. One way to do that is to break the region up so that the party list, if you had an open list from which you'd actually select, would have people from the region. Then you'd know there would be representatives of the proportional—
Conservative
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
You would use a model in which 60% of the MPs would be from ridings; ridings would presumably be 60% larger on average, if we had the same number of MPs, but still, that would be who your local person would be.
My riding, which has about 100,000, now goes to being part of a riding that has 160,000, but that is still the local person.
Prof. Lee Ward
The concern would be that the region has to be entirely populated by people from downtown Toronto, which in principle it could be. I don't know any party that would do that, but you could in principle do that. That would be one way to guarantee that even the regional list includes that sense of representation.
Conservative
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Thank you, Chair.
Thank you to our witnesses. It's nice having...I won't say opposing, but differing views in front of us.
Mr. Ward, you talked about the runners-up, the extra MPs, the proportional part of the MPs coming from a runners-up list rather than an open or closed or party list at whatever regional level. You're saying that if there's a proportional seat that will go to the Conservatives, it's the next most popular Conservative as chosen by the electorate.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Okay. The other lists were just general comments.
Mr. Husum, I have two concerns. One is that the system you've suggested to us isn't proportional, just to confirm. In the two families of voting systems, if there are two broad families, one is the proportional side. If the voters vote 20%, it tries to translate that into 20% of the seats and 20% of the power.
The second concern—we've had a bunch of research that's been brought to the committee—is that there's a preference for centrist parties. We use this for leadership races. People are familiar with a similar type of system for leadership races, or nomination races within a riding in some cases, in which one person is going forward.
To Mr. Ward's point about satisfaction, my concern is from looking at this through the eyes of the voter. Using the point system or whatever system we use to count, if it's still my third preference who represents me, why am I meant to be more happy? If the results in Parliament are not at all proportional to what people had actually intended, and the counting and the voting turned it into my will, why am I leaving this exercise happier than when I went in?
As an Individual
I'm not saying that's the be-all and end-all. I'm presenting Borda count as a different way of counting. Personally, I kind of like what the law commission had proposed, although I don't like using first past the post with mixed member proportional. They use it in Germany, and I'd like—
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Essentially, you could see using a proportional system, and then the voting within it could take place the way you've divined.
As an Individual
I could see that. What I'm also saying, though, is that we've had chances for reform. Take B.C., for example; the voters got nothing out of that. The ranked ballot at least improves on what we have.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
But we've heard testimony that says that's not the case.
As an Individual
I disagree totally. There's lots of testimony, and they say lots of things.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Let me perhaps challenge one supposition, this notion of incremental change.
Parliament has been studying this thing for 95 years. We don't do this very often, if ever. We have this moment in front of us. My brief time in Parliament has shown me that when there are moments, there are moments, and they can flitter away like the attention span of a gnat in the way things come up and go down, and Twitter has made it worse.
Why not go for a proportional system, even a proportional system that you've suggested, modified so that the counting is not done by first past the post but in a modified way?
As an Individual
As I said, I'm fine with that, but don't lose the opportunity to make some improvement. If you have to sacrifice....
All the guests you've had have talked about trade-offs. Everything has been about trade-offs. You know, we lost that chance in B.C., and—
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Well, they set a bad bar. The challenge when you get into referendums is that it depends on whether or not the government of the day actually champions it. They didn't in B.C. and they didn't in Ontario.
I have a quick question for Mr. Ward before I run out of time.
One of the concerns I had about what you proposed today is that you hinted that ridings would get larger. I represent rural northern British Columbia, and it's pretty darn big already. Have you looked at any other models that avoid that particular concern?
Prof. Lee Ward
Yes. In terms of trade-offs, it's a question of the size of the House. If you're willing to increase the size of the House, then you don't have to actually change the size of the ridings. I think it's considered hard to sell politically, and that was seen as one of the downsides in the case of Ontario.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
We'd be fine, us rural folks, with the city folks having less. We're okay to sacrifice that.
