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.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Michael Boda  Chief Electoral Officer, Elections Saskatchewan
Charles Smith  Associate Professor, St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan, As an Individual
Darla Deguire  Director, Prairie Region, Canadian Labour Congress
Jim Harding  As an Individual
Kenneth Imhoff  As an Individual
Robert Bandurka  As an Individual
Nial Kuyek  As an Individual
John Klein  As an Individual
Ross Keith  As an Individual
Dave A.J. Orban  As an Individual
Lorna Evans  As an Individual
Erich Keser  As an Individual
Patricia Donovan  As an Individual
Calvin Johnson  As an Individual
Patricia Farnese  As an Individual
Jane Anweiler  As an Individual
William Baker  As an Individual
Russ Husum  As an Individual
Lee Ward  Associate Professor of Political Science, Campion College, University of Regina, As an Individual
Carl Cherland  As an Individual
Nancy Carswell  As an Individual
David Sabine  As an Individual
Randall Lebell  As an Individual
Shane Simpson  As an individual
Dastageer Sakhizai  As an individual
D-Jay Krozer  As an Individual
Maria Lewans  As an Individual
Norman L. Petry  As an Individual
Rachel Morgan  As an Individual
Dauna Ditson  As an Individual
Frances Simonson  As an Individual
Rodney Williams  As an Individual
William Clary  As an Individual

7:10 p.m.

NDP

Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC

If Toronto wants to take one on the chin for the rest of the country, so be it.

That's not on the record, is it, Chair? I love Toronto. Go, Jays.

7:10 p.m.

Voices

Oh, oh!

7:10 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

Thank you.

We'll move on to Mr. Ste-Marie for five minutes.

7:10 p.m.

Bloc

Gabriel Ste-Marie Bloc Joliette, QC

Good evening, gentlemen. Thank you for coming to present your points of view. It's very interesting.

I would like to start with a question for Mr. Husum. In fact, I'll repeat the question my colleague Ms. Sahota asked.

There are polls where we see the first, second and third choices of citizens. Have you applied this data to your model to see the results?

You just said that you have done this exercise, but it seemed more theoretical. Did you use real data? I'm interested in knowing whether, when your model is applied, the distortions between the percentage expressed for each party and the number of seats is less and, if so, what the extent of the reduction is.

7:15 p.m.

As an Individual

Russ Husum

I'll answer in English.

This is all theoretical. Every exercise I've worked with has been theoretical. As for how it would play out in reality, it should work the same way, but to say that I've actually seen it in an election, I'm not sure. There are different ways that it's used, but I don't know that it's actually used in the political system.

7:15 p.m.

Bloc

Gabriel Ste-Marie Bloc Joliette, QC

It still worries me. As Yogi Berra said, the difference between theory and practice is that, in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. We should see what it is.

Do any countries use a system that works with a scoring system as you present it?

7:15 p.m.

As an Individual

Russ Husum

I don't think so. As far as I know, Australia is the only country that actually uses the ranked ballot, so this really would be a made-in-Canada system. As for the Borda count, I think they use it for things like the Academy Awards or for sports, maybe, but nothing bigger than that.

7:15 p.m.

Voices

Oh, oh!

7:15 p.m.

Bloc

Gabriel Ste-Marie Bloc Joliette, QC

You have just got my colleague, Mr. Cullen, interested.

I read the document you sent to us with interest. If you can apply the survey data to the model, you could then send us the results. I would be very interested in that.

Mr. Ward, I have a lot of questions for you too. Thank you for your presentation. It was dynamic, to say the least. It was very good.

Having said that, I still have a concern about the model that you are proposing. As my colleague, Mr. Cullen, said, our constituencies have 100,000 residents. If we ended up in a constituency with half a million people, it would be difficult to maintain contact with them.

You gave the example of Scotland, where regions can be separated afterwards. That is one way of going about it. Try to convince me some more.

7:15 p.m.

Prof. Lee Ward

The trade-off is that even in the larger ridings you will have more representation, so that you in fact may have somebody who.... It's a larger area, but you can in fact contact someone who thinks the same way you do about these things.

Hopefully, even the larger size wouldn't mean that it's more distant. I'm from Scotland. My family is Scottish. I always laugh because they say, “I have four representatives and I can choose who I want to call to represent me.” I think, “Well, lucky you.” Hopefully, we would have a similar system in Canada.

7:15 p.m.

Bloc

Gabriel Ste-Marie Bloc Joliette, QC

Thank you.

I have another quick question.

Unfortunately, I am disenchanted with politics. They did a similar exercise in Quebec. They wanted to establish a proportional system. However, when a party is in opposition, it supports the proportional system, but once it gets into power through the current system, it doesn't want to change anymore.

If that was the case with the current government, apart from a proportional system as you are suggesting, what might be some other ways to improve the electoral system?

7:15 p.m.

Prof. Lee Ward

If I understand the question, it's about how would you correct the party in power.

7:15 p.m.

Bloc

Gabriel Ste-Marie Bloc Joliette, QC

Yes, what other less significant way—

7:15 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

What would your second choice be?

7:15 p.m.

Prof. Lee Ward

My second choice would be some kind of multi-member constituency with STV, because you have greater choice, but the virtue of that system is that it produces only some proportionality. Let's not settle for “some”; let's do an actual proportional system. It must be multi-member constituencies.

7:15 p.m.

Bloc

Gabriel Ste-Marie Bloc Joliette, QC

As regards the proportional—

7:15 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

Thank you, Mr. Ste-Marie. Unfortunately, you have no more time left.

We now move to Ms. May.

7:15 p.m.

Green

Elizabeth May Green Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to start with questions for you, Professor Ward. Then I hope I can get to you, Russ, as a fellow British Columbian.

There's this issue around thresholds. I'm picking up on a conversation that Scott Reid and I are having across the table about the Green Party and the cut-off. I wanted to agree with your point about a different voting system. I'm not taking a position on this at the moment, but I wouldn't fear a 5% cut-off if we were in a system in which there were lists and you had to have a threshold.

After the strategic voting wave of 2015, we talked to a lot of pollsters who watched what happened to our vote. We lost half of our vote in the last week of the campaign, and that was because people began to say, “Right; I have to stampede to the party that I want to vote for strategically.” It sounds like a pathetic turnout and it's hard for me to look at it and say that we only got 3.5% of the popular vote, but when I look at all the other parties in Canada combined, the smaller ones, I see that they got less than 2% of the vote.

We do hear a lot in the back-and-forth about the downside of PR when people talk about smaller extremist parties that make it into parliaments. They're usually talking about the Knesset very specifically. I will give you a wide open moment to say anything you want to add about how using your preferred choice of what sometimes gets called “the best loser”, but which you kindly call “the runner-up”, would mitigate against extremist parties getting a foothold.

7:20 p.m.

Prof. Lee Ward

I think it would, because you would have to make an argument that would have some resonance in the community. You'd have to have some kind of response.

To be clear, if you have mixed member proportional, you will have single-member ridings, and you could have a situation in which a candidate wins a riding but his or her party doesn't meet the threshold, a situation they call “overhangs”.

In the German system, when you have an overhanging seat, you compensate with seats for the other parties, for mathematical reasons that I'm sure Russ could explain better that I could, or you could go the route of saying, “No, we'll just let it stand”, so if you have a very popular candidate who may be an extremist and for some reason is very popular in that riding, it's contained to that riding. It isn't something that meets the threshold, so therefore it won't be included in the calculations for the proportionality.

However, it also means that a really good candidate could win in a riding, could excel, and that party would see benefits later on. People might say, “I really like that candidate. I'm going to think about that party in a way I hadn't thought about it before.” I think it would work both ways.

I think extremism is a function of political culture rather than of the system. We are not an extreme country. It's true that we are a regional country and at times that has led to extreme problems, but I think PR would reduce the sense of regional blocs being represented in Parliament, because you should, in principle, see greater representation of all the major parties in various parts of the country, and you would still have avenues for smaller parties to break through. I think it's the best kind of balance of them all.

Again in response to Mr. Reid's question, I am agnostic about the threshold. I don't think 5% is.... I mean, that is unique to German history. There was a history of extremism in Germany, so it made sense, but I'm not sure Canada is Germany, and I think that probably a 3% threshold would work. That would be the kind of debate I would love to see us have, because we'd have moved forward so far in that case if we did.

7:20 p.m.

Green

Elizabeth May Green Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC

I'm very attracted to your idea that we need a principle of empowerment. I like the five principles that have come down to us. The minister put them forward. They are the basis of the mandate of this committee, and in seeking a new voting system, we should attempt to be constantly mindful of these five principles, which include, of course, local representation and fairness and simplicity. The notion of going beyond encouraging participation to delivering empowerment, I think, is one that we should take on.

I don't really have a question. Perhaps you want to add to the reasons that you think empowerment is a much more powerful concept than mere participation is.

7:20 p.m.

Prof. Lee Ward

I'm concerned about declining voter turnout in Canada. As a professor, I am always struck by the fact that my students love Canada and think it's a wonderful country and everything's great, but our voter turnout is pretty low. They say that's something that happens in bad countries where things aren't working well, and I say, well, not necessarily, but it's a problem, and it has to be addressed.

To Ms. Sahota's point earlier, to me it's true that you can't have a system in which every single vote will count, but we should have a bad conscience about the lack of representation. We accept whatever that threshold is as a kind of necessity, but I think we cross a psychological barrier when we say that the intention of the system is not to create winners and losers but rather just to determine what the people have said.

I would say to my students on election night, “What's your first question?” They would say, “Who won?” I would say, “Shouldn't it be 'what did the people say?' ” The second question is which party won, but the most important thing is what the people said, so we should move in that direction.

7:25 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

I was so enthralled about what you were saying, I lost track of time. You're just a little bit over there, so we're going to move to Mr. Aldag.

7:25 p.m.

Liberal

John Aldag Liberal Cloverdale—Langley City, BC

Thanks to both of our witnesses for being here.

I'm intrigued with the ranked ballot discussion simply because we haven't heard a whole lot about it.

I'm going to start with you, Mr. Husum, about why we should have an alternative vote. That was the first thing I wrote down, just because we haven't heard a lot of people go there. As you were speaking, I wrote down a couple of things, one of them being that it's easier to implement change. Beyond that, is there anything that really leads you to this as a solution or an improvement over what we have now?

7:25 p.m.

As an Individual

Russ Husum

Well, it's an improvement. I guess that's the main thing. I'm saying that we've had chances before. People seem hesitant about this big change, and I'm just saying that the ranked ballot is easy to implement and it does make an improvement. There will be varying opinions as to the degree of improvement. It's not proportional, clearly not, but it's definitely not first past the post anymore.

Take Ms. May and the Green Party; you could try voting for them, knowing that your second preference will still take effect.

Arend Lijphart from San Diego talked to you. He was interviewed by the CBC, and he said that the ranked ballot would be better than first past the post and it wouldn't squeeze out, he thought, smaller parties, which is one of the things you hear and that I don't quite get. If first past the post hasn't squeezed out small parties, then why would a ranked ballot? With a ranked ballot, you can at least take chance on a party, knowing that your second preference will still count. I agree with him; I don't think it will squeeze out small parties.

My point is that I just don't want to lose another chance to improve the system. I'm not against maybe moving to some form of proportional representation, but maybe that's step number two at some point. I don't like it that there's no representation except Liberals in Atlantic Canada, for example. I don't think that's good. There's a lot of blue representation in Saskatchewan and Alberta, for example. The Green Party is under-represented, for example. I don't like that, but let's not walk away with no improvement. I believe the ranked ballot is an improvement over what we have.

7:25 p.m.

Liberal

John Aldag Liberal Cloverdale—Langley City, BC

Thank you.

Since we started this, I've been out. I've done five town halls so far. As we talk about change, I always do a bit of a straw poll about how many people want change, and the number of people who say, yes, they want change has been fairly overwhelming, but when we start poking into it, we start seeing people pulling back a bit on some of the systems when fairly drastic change is involved. When we start talking about things like minority governments and coalition governments, a lot of the people I've spoken with have hesitated. I'm not putting words in their mouths, but I hear the message that there's some hesitation to going that way, that Canadians kind of like their majority governments.

Does the system you're proposing, the counting method, it lend itself, as we've heard often happens, to more majorities, or will it bring parties a bit closer to the centre in having to find some collaboration because they're going for that second vote?