Electoral Reform Committee on Sept. 20th, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

We'll just be a couple of minutes. We're giving some attention to some technical details with the sound system. Do not adjust your screen.

The reason we're waiting a moment is that we want to make sure that all the comments are recorded so that we can create transcripts of the testimony and also so that we can record the comments of those in the audience who will be taking to the mike when we have our open mike segment of the meeting. It's important, but it should be just a matter of seconds, thanks to this very capable crew behind us here.

In the meantime, I'll just say what a pleasure it is to be back in your town of St-Pierre-Jolys. We had a very lovely bus ride from Winnipeg airport, and upon entering the town, we were very excited to be here. You have a lovely town. You can tell just riding through on a bus that it's a great place. Congratulations on the community you've built here.

I'd like to acknowledge, of course, Mayor Fallis, who is here today.

Thank you, Mayor Fallis, for giving us the use of your community centre and for arranging everything that needed to be done for us to hold this hearing today.

By way of introduction, we're on a cross-Canada tour for three weeks.

We started in Regina yesterday and we are in Manitoba today; we will be going to Winnipeg this evening for hearings. We will be going to the 10 provinces and the three territories in the next three weeks.

We'll be visiting every province and every territory over the course of about three weeks gathering citizen and stakeholder input that will be considered for the report that we'll be writing and publishing and tabling in the House of Commons on or before December 1. As you know, what brought us here is a campaign commitment, a platform commitment, of this government to move ahead on electoral reform before the next election.

The way that this is being done is the House of Commons, through a motion, established this 12-member committee on which all parties are represented.

It is also unusual for all parties in the House of Commons to have a place on this committee. Normally, committees are made up of members of parties that are officially recognized in the House. Places on committees are assigned according to the distribution in the House of Commons, so, with a government majority, members of the government party form the majority on each committee. However, for this committee, we have done things differently.

On this particular committee, even though we have a majority Liberal government in the House, there is no majority on this committee. There is no Liberal majority; there's not any other kind of majority. This is a different committee in that sense, and all parties are represented.

I would also mention that they have a lot of pressure. It's a high pressure job. I don't know if there's information available on paper that gives the committee's website address, but we can give that to you later. You can go to the website to obtain reference materials on electoral systems around the world. You can also access an online survey, a questionnaire that takes about 30 minutes to complete. I believe that so far, 4,000 Canadians have completed this questionnaire, or at least that was the figure that was given to me earlier today.

There's a part of the questionnaire that provides you with some basic information on electoral systems, and then once you've gone through that stage of the questionnaire, you go to the questions. It's a great way to learn a little about electoral reform. This brings me to another point, which is that the committee's role is like all parliamentary committees that travel, which is to gather citizen input on an issue, and in this case, it's electoral reform. Unlike other committees, we have a dual role, which is to reach out to Canadians to talk to them about electoral reform so we have, I guess, in a sense, a bit of a public education function. We have this dual role, in a way. We're here so that Canadians can be sensitized to the issue of electoral reform and be engaged with it.

Now, in addition to our work, in addition to the work we're doing, the Minister of Democratic Institutions is also consulting Canadians. Her consultation is separate from ours. It's being conducted in parallel.

In addition to those two tracks of consultation, the committee has asked all 338 members of Parliament to hold individual town halls. I had a town hall in my riding. My riding is in the western part of Montreal. It's called Lac-Saint-Louis. I did a town hall as a member of Parliament, not as a member of this committee, last Thursday. We're gathering input in many different ways in order to get a sense of where Canadians want us to go with this whole proposal of modifying the electoral system.

I think we'll get going. Even though at this point testimony will not be recorded verbatim, our analysts are taking copious notes. They have been sitting next to me for 26 meetings, and I can attest to the fact that it may not be through a recording device, but I think they're getting pretty much every word. So not to worry; your comments will be well recorded.

I also point out that our proceedings are in both official languages, of course. You have headsets so that you can hear the simultaneous interpretation.

The way we proceed is that each witness has five minutes to present their ideas and views on electoral reform. Then we have a round of questions where every member of the committee gets to engage with any of the witnesses they want to engage with for a total of five minutes. That includes questions and answers. It's not like the questions can be five minutes and then the answers come after. Both have to be within the five-minute slot.

We will start with Mr. Richard Kidd, who is here today testifying as an interested individual.

The floor is yours, Mr. Kidd, for five minutes, please.

[A voice]

It's 10 minutes.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

You're absolutely right. I apologize. My mistake. It's 10 minutes.

[Richard Kidd, As an Individual]

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for inviting me.

I'm here to tell you about an original voting method I've invented called the “every vote counts” system, or EVC for short.

My goal in developing this was to repair two glaring defects of first past the post: many votes are wasted votes, and seat distributions don't correspond well to the popular vote, or, as I like to put it, seat counts don't match vote counts. We need to ensure some degree of PR, even if it's not exact.

I'll start by saying that losing votes aren't the only ones wasted under FPTP; so are many of the winning votes. All a candidate needs to win a constituency is one more vote than the closest competitor. Votes in excess of that don't really matter. They're wasted. The voters casting those ballots could have stayed home on election day without changing the results.

With this in mind, I separated winning votes into two types: instrumental, those necessary to elect a winner; and superfluous, the excess ones. I experimented with a mixed member system, using equal numbers of constituency and proportional seats, whereby the instrumental votes elect the constituency seats and the losing and superfluous votes together elect the proportional seats.

The results were stunning. In nine sample simulations of real elections, eight provincial and one federal, the seat shares earned by the different parties corresponded to popular vote percentages with amazing accuracy—not precisely, but close enough to represent fair outcomes.

So version one of EVC was born. The instrumental votes elect the constituency seats. Losing and superfluous votes are entered by party into a pool of votes called the proportionality pool, or PP for short. Proportional seats are awarded to each party according to its share of the pool. Adding the two kinds of seats gives each party's final seat total.

I published the details of all of this in a booklet I mailed to all of the members of the original committee. Many of them aren't here today. It's the one I am showing, with a white cover.

I thought I was finished, but it was not so. One loose end kept nagging me: the problem of practical implementation. It's a problem that plagues all mixed member systems, including MMP.

If EVC were used in Canada, we'd have to cut the present number of constituencies in half, from 338 to 169. This would make constituency reorganization a very difficult task. I worried about this for a long time before I came up with a viable solution. Before I explain it, I have to digress for a moment to discuss another innovation of EVC, the concept of the vote weight ratio.

In mixed member systems, including MMP, losing votes never have as much elective power as winning votes. It always takes more losing votes to elect a single seat. The vote weight ratio is a measure of the relative difference in voting weights.

Take MMP, for example. In a typical MMP election, the vote weight ratio tends to average around 3:1. It takes three times more losing votes than winning votes, on the left side of the ballot, to elect a single seat, so the winning votes have three times the weight of losing ones. That's surprising, I know, but it's true. In contrast, the vote weight ratio in EVC elections is always much better, often lower than 2:1.

As just one example, if the last federal election had used MMP with the two kinds of seats equal in number, the vote weight ratio would have been 3.03. Under EVC it would have been 1.76, which is much better.

Now, back to the main theme. One way of solving the constituency reorganization problem would be to include fewer proportional seats relative to constituency seats, say, two-thirds the number. That would allow more constituencies to be available for reorganization. In my brief, I suggested a split of 210 to 140 for Canada. That's a two-thirds ratio, for a total of 350 seats. That would be feasible. Reorganization would be much easier with 210 seats to work with instead of 169.

There is a drawback, however, to this two-thirds option. In a mixed member system like MMP or EVC, decreasing the number of proportional seats entails a rise in the vote weight ratio. That's because fewer proportional seats are available for the losing votes to elect, so their relative weight drops. If you attempt this two-thirds solution for MMP, the vote weight ratio jumps from an average of 3.0 to 4.0. That's 4:1, and that's unacceptable.

For an EVC simulation of the last federal election, the ratio jumps from 1.76, which was good, to 2.48, and that's not very good. So I had to find a way of bringing it back down again. The solution to this new problem lay in modifying a basic feature of EVC, the status of superfluous votes. If you thought my interpretation before was a bit fishy, you were probably right. You were right. I've argued that superfluous votes aren't necessary to the election of constituency winners, and that's true, but it's not the whole truth. If the voters who cast those ballots had stayed home, the result wouldn't have changed. That's true, but they didn't stay home. They went out and voted for the winners, thereby contributing indirectly to the results by not voting for the losing candidates. If they had, some of those losers might have won.

Superfluous votes therefore do count toward the election of the winners, not directly but indirectly, by withholding votes from other candidates. This creates another problem. Superfluous votes have a dual value. They help elect the winners indirectly, but they also directly elect some of the proportional seats. It wouldn't be fair to assign them that much voting power. So what to do?

The answer was to split the value of superfluous votes into two portions, one indirect and one direct. I did this by introducing a new variable into the EVC model, a quantity I called q. I don't have time to explain the details of this except to say that q is a decimal fraction less than one that is multiplied by the superfluous votes to reduce their contribution to the PP, and this is the direct portion of those votes.

How does this q solve the problem of high vote weight ratios under the two-thirds option? It's simple. Remember that losing and superfluous votes both elect some of the proportional seats. If the superfluous votes are lowered in value relative to the losing votes in the PP, losing votes get to elect a greater share of those seats than they did before. They gain weight and the ratio goes down. For example, using a suitable value of q can lower the ratio for the federal election I mentioned from 2.48 to 2.0, which isn't bad at all, so the vote weight problem is effectively solved, making the two-thirds option feasible for EVC.

By the way, no such solution exists for MMP, because it doesn't recognize superfluous votes.

That's the EVC system as it now stands, the version I summarized in my brief. I don't think voters would have any trouble understanding its basic operation. They wouldn't need to know all these details to grasp the idea that if their votes didn't elect a constituency winner or weren't really needed, they would count toward electing a proportional seat. EVC is really very easy to understand.

To conclude, EVC achieves its goal of ensuring that no votes are wasted—that's rather obvious—and seat counts closely reflect the popular vote. That's a matter for empirical investigation, and I assure you that it's true.

Note also that under EVC, local constituency representation is preserved; badly skewed election results never occur; shutouts never occur; small parties are treated equitably; slim majority governments, believe it or not, are sometimes possible with a minority of votes; vote weight ratios are fair; proportional seats can be filled on the basis of regional and other important criteria like ethnicity, gender, and professional expertise; and no specious vote transfer procedures are necessary for all voters to have their say in choosing their government.

Ladies and gentlemen, your committee faces a tough challenge in persuading Canadians to accept whatever electoral system you finally recommend. In my opinion, your chances of success will be far greater if you offer them a fair, effective, made-in-Canada system they can understand.

I'm confident that EVC would fill the bill. I think Canadians would take to it like ducks to water and I urge you consider it seriously.

Thank you for listening.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you very much, Mr. Kidd. That was very interesting.

We'll go now to Professor Koop for 10 minutes.

[Royce Koop, Associate Professor and Department Head, Department of Political Studies, University of Manitoba, As an Individual]

I actually only have a five-minute presentation.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

That's fine.

[Royce Koop]

Thanks very much for having me in for the work that you're all doing on this obviously pretty important issue.

I'm a political scientist who studies politics in Canada primarily at the grassroots. This includes party organization in the constituencies, but more importantly, how members of Parliament represent the constituents in their ridings. My research over the last several years has involved shadowing MPs in their constituencies while they go about that task of being representatives, unfortunately not with anyone around the table today, though.

This research and experience has given me a deep appreciation of the role of constituencies and of community in shaping politics in this country, and especially the practice of representation. I want to spend my time today talking about local representation. I want to first talk about the centrality of local representation and service to politics in Canada, and then talk about the implications of this for the deliberations of the committee. There are other good things that electoral systems can help bring about, like gender equity, like proportionality, but I'd like to focus, given my own research, on local representation.

It's difficult to overemphasize the importance of local representation in a country both as expansive and diverse as Canada. Under the current electoral system, every citizen has a representative with some linkage to their local community, oftentimes very deep linkages, deep roots in their communities, and there's no doubt about who that representative is. Every Canadian has a direct local link to government, and their MPs arrive in Ottawa with distinctively local experiences that in sum reflect the diversity of the nation as a whole. Canadians expect their MPs to carry the unique views, needs, and concerns of their constituents from the communities of their ridings to Ottawa, and act upon them there.

MPs think that being attentive constituency MPs helps them get re-elected. We know from survey research that this is right. Canadians are generally dissatisfied with politics, but dig deeper and a paradox is revealed. Canadians are dissatisfied with the performance of politicians as a group, but oftentimes they're quite delighted by the performance of their own MP. How do we explain that? It may result from the representational work and the local visibility of MPs in their own riding, so this is a crucial and important part of democracy in Canada.

How does it impact on the deliberations of the committee? Local representation is often rightly seen as a strength of our current electoral system. Single member plurality, as the name suggests, organizes the country into relatively small ridings, gives each riding an MP, most of whom have a very strong link to the communities of the ridings. But other electoral systems also contain elements of local representation. A ranked ballot system, for example, would similarly preserve single member ridings in Canada. So, too, would MMP, a mixed member proportional system. This electoral system preserves constituencies and maintains constituency MPs, but it also adds list MPs, which brings about proportionality. If the committee wanted to maintain constituency representation, while also bringing about proportionality and all the good things that come with that, maybe the easiest way to do so would simply be to add 30 MPs who would be elected on party lists, while leaving all the constituency MPs alone. Cutting back the number of constituency MPs to make room for list MPs would hurt the quality of constituency representation.

STV, the single transferable vote, changes the nature of local representation by introducing ridings with multiple MPs. It doesn't necessarily hurt the quality of local representation, but it certainly does change it.

Ridings would tend to become quite large under STV. This was a consideration in the referendum campaign in British Columbia, after the citizens' assembly concern about ridings becoming larger. This is also a consideration for proportional representation systems, which would create problems for local representation as well.

In closing, I've seen the special representational bond built between MPs and their constituents in Canada. It's a bond that's nurtured by our current electoral system, the single member constituencies. I hope the committee would keep that relationship in mind when exploring alternatives to the current system or deciding to stick with the system as it is now.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you, Professor Koop.

I will now proceed with the questioning, starting with Mr. Aldag for five minutes, please.

[John Aldag, Liberal, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

Thanks to both of our witnesses. I would also like to acknowledge the members of the public who have come out to join us today and I look forward to the open mike session that we'll be having later.

I'd like to say, Mr. Kidd, that it was fascinating to read through your material. The thought that you've put into it was very impressive. I'll tell you that the piece I liked about it is the simplicity of marking an X. I think that's something Canadians could go with. It's simple.

The concern underlying the question I had as I was reading through it, though, as it gets into the mathematical calculations and as you had to add pieces to deal with distortions, is that then you get into more and more complexity. I wonder whether at some time we reach a tipping point whereby we may lose Canadians' ability to go with a system that is so new and innovative. Will they actually go with it?

The question I have for you is simply concerning your process. Have you had a chance to talk to anybody about this, or is it a model that you've come up with that you are throwing out to us, such that we have to then figure out whether it would actually work as designed?

[Richard Kidd]

Well, I have talked to a few people about it, and often the reaction is the one that you just stated, that because of the.... I know there's a lot of mathematics in some of the documents, particularly this one, if any of you have read this one, in which there's a whole section on mathematical derivations.

I think it's a case of not seeing the forest for the trees. As you mentioned earlier, marking an X on the ballot, knowing that if your candidate doesn't win the seat your vote is going to count towards electing a proportional rep, is a very easy thing to understand. Voters can be told, for example, that there's going to be a slight reduction in the superfluous votes that are entered into the proportional pool and so forth, but they don't really have to know that. I think just knowing that their vote is not going to elect this guy and it's going to elect a party that they support...I think that's the important thing, and I don't think they have to know all those details.

So I don't think it's quite as bad as you make it sound. Most of the mathematics that I think you're referring to refer to the calculation of the q factor, which is a very complex thing, but you can keep that as simple as possible; I don't think it's really essential.

That's about all I can say. I think it is a simple system and an easy one to follow. There are complexities in it, but there are complexities in something such as.... Well, talk about complexities: who understands how STV works? Can someone explain this to me in five minutes? I don't think so. You know, there are quotas and everything else.

[John Aldag, Liberal, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

Professor Koop, thanks for your comments. They were a bit briefer than I would have liked; I think you had more there.

I'd like to go into some of the work that you've done. I'm fascinated with your research polling local MPs to see how they work. As a new member of Parliament, I could benefit from reading some of your work and maybe lessons learned. I'll be looking for some of your material.

When you look at some of the systems we've heard about where we have the two tiers of members of Parliament, and the proportional representation models where you have list MPs coming in, have you looked at any of that kind of thing? Where I'm going with it is a question of accountability. Do you think that Canadian constituents would have the same level of interest or support for these list MPs as they do with that direct relationship you get now between members of Parliament and their local representation?

[Royce Koop]

Yes, there's no doubt that accountability is a real strength of our current system. People can very clearly see their votes have an effect in the riding. You get wasted votes, the phenomenon of wasted votes, but you can see if incumbent MPs get fewer votes than the challengers, they lose. It's that simple. It's transparent. It makes MPs accountable.

What you're referring to specifically is that under MMP you can have a party list. You can have list MPs. A government can go down to defeat. A party can get a terrible result in an election and yet list MPs can still win. If the party wins a certain proportion of the vote, they elect a proportion of list MPs.

I think if MMP was adopted in Canada, that would be a new experience for Canadians they haven't seen before. It would probably not be thrilling for them in terms of their sense of accountability in being able to hold politicians accountable.

Yes, it's a strength of the current system, for sure.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Reid for five minutes, please.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Thank you.

Mr. Kidd, if I could start with you, it looks to me, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, that you are trying to design a system that is relatively close to what we would normally think of as an MMP system. I think you were trying to correct the fact that in an MMP system in which 30% to 40% of the MPs are from the lists and the majority are from ridings, that way of structuring things will sometimes have a result that is not strictly proportionate. In the extreme situation, where one party wins half the votes but all the seats, you can only partly correct it when only 30% or 40% of the seats in total are list seats. Is that a good way of summarizing it, or have I completely missed your point?

[Richard Kidd]

I'm afraid I didn't follow what you're saying. In the MMP system, normally, the way it's done in Germany and elsewhere, half the seats are constituency seats. The rest of the seats are not strictly proportional seats, but they are in a way because the votes on the right-hand side of the ballot, which go to determine what percentage of the total seats each party gets, determine the final share in terms of the percentage of votes that each party gets. That's how it works.

EVC doesn't work that way. EVC works by directly electing the proportional seats. That's the difference.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

For the problem you're describing, what I wanted to ask was that if you go to a system where half the seats are list seats as opposed to 30% or 40%, which is the number you've thrown out in your presentation—

[Richard Kidd]

When you say list seats, you're referring to proportional seats.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

That's right.

[Richard Kidd]

Okay.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

If half the seats are the list or non-geographic seats, then do you not eliminate the problem you're trying to address?

[Richard Kidd]

No. The problem I'm trying to address is that in first past the post, you have a party winning power, say, with 55% of the seats and only 39.5% of the vote. That's what I call disproportionate and not PR.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Well, first past the post does that, but MMP would not have produced that result in the last election. It would have had a different seat count. It would have been more proportionate, depending on which model you use when—

[Richard Kidd]

Oh, absolutely it would have been more proportionate.

Isn't there a disadvantage to that, though? The Liberals won 39.5% of the vote in the last election. If you had run it by some kind of an MMP system and that was the percentage of votes that they would have deserved, then they would have had 39.5% of the seats. Isn't that right?

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Yes. That was the point I was trying to make, actually.