Electoral Reform Committee on Sept. 20th, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

I would concur, it's been very interesting. We had someone last night who was referring to a counting system, a system for counting votes, but I think, Mr. Kidd, yours is the first presentation we've heard from someone with an original model for us to consider outside, not fully outside, but somewhat outside the realm of the typical models that we hear about over and over. It was very interesting, and we're really glad you were able to come to committee.

Dr. Koop, it was really interesting to learn about the research you're doing. I hadn't heard of it. As Ms. Sahota said, it should be very interesting to read what comes out in your book. It will be interesting to see how you see our role as MPs and so forth, so thank you again.

We'll take a five-minute break and we'll come back with the next set of witnesses, and then we'll of course have our open mike session afterwards.

Thank you again.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

If everyone could take their seats, we'll get started with this second session.

We have with us Professor Bryan Schwartz, a law professor at the University of Manitoba. We have Gina Smoke, who is a national representative for Unifor, and Darren Gibson, who is the coordinator of political action membership mobilization for Unifor.

I assume you caught part of the last group that appeared. The way it works is that each of you would have five minutes to present and then there will be a round of questions. Each member gets five minutes to engage with the witnesses, which means both questions and answers within five minutes.

We'll start with Professor Schwartz, for five minutes.

[Professor Bryan Schwartz, Law Professor, University of Manitoba, As an Individual]

Thank you very much.

I'm a law professor at the University of Manitoba. I currently hold an endowed chair in international business and trade law. I've been doing that and practising law for about 35 years now. In the course of that, I did about 10 books on constitutional reform and institutional reform. There are two works that you might be interested in. One is “Valuing Canadians”. This is a study that I did for the Law Commission of Canada in 2003. The basic thrust of it was that it also ended up being recommended by the Law Commission of Canada in 2004.

I understand that part of the mandate is electronic voting. I did a study on that for the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada in 2013.

Both of these are available for free online, in both official languages. If anybody wants me to send them a copy, I'd be happy to.

What were the thrusts of the studies? “Valuing Canadians” argued that you could establish a reasonably objective framework for evaluating proposals. Now, it's absolutely true that there's no such thing as a perfect system; there are always trade-offs. The methodology with Valuing Canadians was to try to draw on international bodies and think tanks and see if we could identify some criteria that just about everybody would agree on. Then it was to evaluate five families of systems and make some recommendations. The analysis was intended to be objective.

The recommendations in “Valuing Canadians” concluded that the opinion was that there are two strong candidates: PR light, a very modest form of proportional representation adding to the existing system, or the first-past-the-post system. There was probably a slight nod in “Valuing Canadians” to PR light.

I can't summarize the conclusions on electronic voting in a few words, other than to say be very careful about cybersecurity. Electronic voting sounds great. I thought it sounded great—I was an enthusiast—but the more I looked at it, the more I was concerned about the implications to our democracy of cybersecurity issues and tampering.

I'm very grateful to have been invited here, because it's caused me to think about what I have thought since then. I have a couple of thoughts.

Things are not like they were in 2003: a couple of things have happened. One is, there have been proposals to do voting system reform in a whole lot of places, but none of them have gone forward. Now you might say there are systemic obstacles, but maybe there are some good reasons why they didn't go forward. We should think about that. Second, there isn't the same appetite, because a lot of the dysfunctions of 2003-04 have somehow been mitigated.

You think back to the era of people like me saying we have to do something, but a lot of the problems are less than they used to be. I'm thinking that parties adapted and voters adapted. Places that never had alternation have had alternation, for example, the permanent rule of the Conservative Party in Alberta.

We just had a regime change in my own province, Manitoba. The idea of the permanent government seems to have been mitigated. We don't have regional protest parties—the Reform or the Bloc, no puns intended. But voters have decided that they wanted to go more for national-oriented parties. So maybe, instead of changing the system to some extent, we adapted to it and have actually found within the system things that mitigate some of its worst features.

I have just one other thought, if I even have time for that.

Instinctively, when I think back on writing this book, I think now that, whatever rubric you put it under, I have to say after being an independent-spirited viewer of politics for 35 years, alternation is very valuable and very important, in my view. We tend to think, in real time, about everybody getting a piece of influence, right—the minority parties having a say—and that's important, but think about, through times, whether it is important that different parties assume office serially, that different teams get a turn to actually lead. I think that's an underestimated virtue of any political system, that different parties get a term. I can elaborate on why I think that's important. I think there are many objective and fundamental reasons why it's not only about voices for everyone while somebody's in charge. It's that different teams get a turn at being in charge.

I hope I didn't exceed my five minutes, but those are my thoughts.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

That's perfect.

We'll go now to Mr. Gibson, for five minutes.

[Darren Gibson, Coordinator, Political Action Membership Mobilization, Unifor]

Hi. My name is Darren Gibson. I'm the father of three girls, ages 4, 8, and 11. I live in Winnipeg in the riding of Elmwood—Transcona. I'm a union activist with a keen interest in political action and hold the elected position of Unifor political action chairperson. This work includes education, working on social and community issues, campaigns and solidarity, and participating in elections at all levels. In Unifor, we see all these components as part of our democratic engagement, and I wanted to share some thoughts with you today.

I'm here today because I believe electoral reform is the single most important issue to be addressed in Canadian democracy. If you, our elected representatives, fail to take this opportunity, it will be a long time before these conditions come around again.

I'm here to tell you that our membership is ready for change and expects me to lead that change.

Canada is one of the only western democracies still using first past the post. It's the same system we used in 1867 when we only had two political parties and a lot of people didn't have the right to vote.

One of the flaws with first past the post is that every vote does not count. In 2011, the Conservatives formed a majority government with 39% of the vote. Last fall, the Liberals were elected to a majority, but again the party only received 39%. No matter how you do the math, less than 40% does not equal a majority. Yet in our current voting system, that's exactly the result.

We need to adopt a fair system in which every vote counts, where there is equality in the vote, and ensure that every region has local representation. We want fewer reasons to vote strategically and more opportunity to vote for a hopeful progressive future. We want more reasons for young people and all those who have been alienated from politics to engage and participate.

A second flaw with first past the post is inequality in the electorate. Electoral reform is an equality issue. Under Canada's current voting system, every vote does not count. Every vote is not represented, and consequently, many people are choosing not to participate.

The largest demographics of those not participating in elections include young people, women, people of colour, and aboriginal people. The voices and needs of equity-seeking groups are vital to a strong democratic government. They are essential for true democracy.

There was a lot of talk about gender equality during the 2015 election. Now MPs have the opportunity to walk the walk by supporting Kennedy Stewart's private member's bill, Bill C-237, the candidate gender equity act. The bill is based on laws in other countries that have elected more women to office. It links political subsidies for political parties to gender equity measures and gives incentives to parties to run more women candidates, which will in turn move us towards gender parity in the House of Commons.

Our national convention in August of this year overwhelmingly endorsed electoral reform as a proportional system that allocates seats in our Parliament in a way that gives weight to every vote.

Unifor has deliberately avoided focusing on a detailed model to replace first past the post. However, we expect this all-party committee to reach a majority consensus and to recommend a proportional system that is understandable and explainable to our members and the community.

In our view, you have all the information on voting systems that is needed to fulfill our aspirations. We did not want to allow your partisan concerns to block a majority. We did not want a referendum or another process that would make proportional voting impossible at the next election.

In our view, the people of Canada spoke decisively at the federal election by electing a large majority of MPs who stated clearly that they were committed to electoral reform. Prime Minister Trudeau stated in the federal campaign that 2015 would be the last election under the current system. During the same campaign, when I was volunteering at numerous campaign offices in Winnipeg in the ridings of Elmwood—Transcona, Winnipeg Centre, and Kildonan—St. Paul and going door to door talking to voters, I understood that this promise must be upheld. The voters were discouraged. They weren't voting for their parties, who they felt would never win, or they simply weren't voting at all.

We're calling for a new electoral system in which we maintain a local representative, in which every vote counts, and in which our politicians are elected proportionally to the votes they receive.

Thank you for allowing me this honour of addressing the committee this afternoon.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you, Mr. Gibson.

We'll go now to Ms. Smoke.

[Gina Smoke, National Representative, Unifor]

Hi. My name is Gina Smoke. I'm a Unifor representative and of aboriginal descent. I'm here on behalf, I guess, of both Unifor and the aboriginal community.

I grew up on a reserve knowing what it's like to be a minority, having difficulties in trying to vote, and still seeing the same thing happening within our communities. I did not grow up being a political person. I think it was my mother who really pushed a lot of this upon me, learning how to put up a fight for our rights.

I, like Darren, worked in the various elections, and it was the first time for me to be out there knocking on doors. I worked in some of the lower-income, tougher areas of Winnipeg. The one thing I realized there is that we share a lot of similar issues when it comes to voting: not feeling that our votes counted, people not wanting to come out because of that feeling that they were under-represented. It took a lot of work explaining where I came from and how I felt about being out there and casting our own ballots.

I learned various things about how government works, not just provincially and federally, but on reserve. I grew up on one reserve with a hereditary chief and married into one that was electoral and so elected. The things that I see in getting involved with unions and learning about local executives and unions is that everybody wants the same thing: for our voices to be heard, to feel represented, no matter who you are.

I became president of my local within CTV. I was there for 19 years, and it took me a long time to stand up and want to put my voice forward. Part of it is that I have two kids of my own; I raised them by myself. You want them to have the same voice as everybody else and not go through the same things that I did on the reserve.

Unfortunately, there are still a lot of changes that need to be made. Because of all these things that I've been through myself, I learned when I was the president of my local that every department within our company needed a voice, because they felt that if it was all for one department, nobody was going to care about the needs of that department. As the president, I made sure that our committees were made up from separate departments, and when we went to bargaining, it was the same thing.

I'm probably way more simplistic than some of these complicated analyses and everything. I think the government should be made up of equal voices within the government; that we shouldn't have majorities; that we should be able to all work together to get our voices out there. It's so basic to me. It's too complicated for nothing.

I think they need to make it much easier for the aboriginal communities, especially the northern ones; it's way harder for them to get out to vote. Why do we have to make it so complicated? We know who they are in these communities. Why do we have to come up with all these...? There are a lot of elders who can't speak English or read English. They don't drive, so why would they have a driver's licence? It's the same even in the community I grew up in, and it's not that far from here.

I just think there has to be a better way, and we all need to work together to make it happen.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you for your testimony and insight.

Mr. Aldag will start the round, please, for five minutes.

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

Thanks to our witnesses, and welcome to the panel we have today. I'd like to thank the Unifor presenters for the work you do in the electoral systems. It's great to see the involvement. I have had the opportunity to meet with many of your members in my time as a member of Parliament. Congratulations on your continued work in this important area.

I'm going to begin with some comments for Professor Schwartz.

On the bus this morning I was able to read through “Valuing Canadians”, the document. I'm not an expert on the content, but there's some really great material in there. I'd actually like to start by seeing if you would be willing to officially submit it to our committee, and that way we'd have it to draw from. I think there's some great information there.

[Prof. Bryan Schwartz]

Yes, I have copies in my trunk for everyone. I just didn't know what the official process was in terms of page limits and official submissions.

By the way, it's “Valoriser les Canadiens” on the other side.

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

Wonderful. With that, there are a couple of things.

One of the themes I've taken to the town halls I've done, and to the witnesses who come before our committee, is to take a step back and talk about values, and which values should be guiding us moving forward. I was really impressed to see that you drew on some information in the report on Canadian values. I think it was related to some constitutional work. Then we're able to take electoral reform principles and apply those to the values. There's some great material that I think can guide us moving forward.

The first question I have is this, and you started talking about this in your comments. Is the report still valid? There have been some changes in society, but in the recommendations you made, I think that PR light is really the preferred version that you put out there. Would you say that's still a valid recommendation?

[Prof. Bryan Schwartz]

I would set the framework of analysis of identifying these things. In retrospect, the one thing I would add is, however you fit it in, the point I tried to make in my opening, which is the importance of alternation among different parties through time. The second point is on what has caused me to rethink. I haven't come to definitive conclusions on everything. I'd want to do the same exercise before I came down definitively on anything. One of my books on constitutional reform is called Still Thinking.

What's fresh fodder for analysis? One is that the reform movement didn't happen. It was studied in Quebec. It was studied in B.C., put to a referendum. It was studied in Ontario, put to a referendum and lost. P.E.I. is currently considering it.

By the way, another question I can answer is on what I think about plebiscites. The answer is I think they're necessary in order to do this reform.

Sorry?

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

I didn't hear if you said they are or aren't.

[Prof. Bryan Schwartz]

They are, in my view. They're a moral necessity. They're not a legal necessity, but they're a moral necessity in my view.

That's something that's changed, too, in terms of the extent to which plebiscites have become common in the British Canadian tradition in terms of approving fundamental reform.

I asked myself, why didn't it happen? My view, again, is we should be thinking about it from an Olympian view. What's a system that will last a century or two? All of us tend to think in terms of the immediate. We're always influenced by what's going on right now.

I'm writing, back in 2003, we had one party rule for a time in New Brunswick, no opposition members. We had provinces that hadn't changed party stripe in decades. We had the strong regional protest parties and not viable alternatives to two or three main parties. A lot of those dysfunctions seem to be less common now. Is that good luck or has something happened?

My guess, my inference so far, is something happened, that in a way the parties and Canadians looked at some of the dysfunction and to some extent fixed it themselves.

In Saskatchewan you had a uniting of the right-of-centre party. It was the same at the federal level in Canada, so there was a viable opposition to the Liberal Party of Canada. To some extent, working within the system, we've managed to mitigate some of the worst features of first past the post. It has many positive features and some undoubtedly negative features, but to some extent, we mitigated them.

Also, there's a lot of open government initiatives that are happening. By the way, I'm a fan of the open government partnership. I'm a fan of a lot of the open government initiatives of the current government, and some of those mitigate some of the potentially worse effects of first past the post. I think we can't be stuck in a time warp of 2003-04. There were all these studies, all this movement. We have to think about why it didn't happen. Maybe that's significant and maybe there's a reason for it. Maybe there was a good reason for it, and I'm thinking that there were, in retrospect, some good reasons why it didn't happen.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

We'll go to Mr. Reid now.

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

Professor Schwartz, I'll start with you. Given the short time we have, it may be that I'll only be able to interact with you as opposed to the other witnesses, for which I apologize. It's just the time issue that drives this.

You made a comment that has not been said very widely in our hearings. I have a suspicion if we'd been doing this at the time of Confederation it would have been heard much more: the “alternation is important” idea. Back in those days, when parties were, to a large degree, non-ideological, and particularly before the rise of the various labour parties and socialism that really transformed the party system both here and in Britain, Australia, and so on, I think there was an expectation that you ought—it was your responsibility—to join either party A or party B, party red or party blue, and that they ought to form a majority. The expectation was, for every government there was a mirror or shadow government; they're loyal to the Queen and the Constitution which will replace it.

I think what's really happened here is that over time we have had to revise our views simply because the multi-party system is clearly a stable feature of our system. The actual parties may alternate or change, but the multi-party system.... Due to the fact that we now have a multi-party system as opposed to a political culture that says you ought to be in party A or party B, it's your job to be capable of forming a majority, do you feel the “alternation is important” idea applies to the multi-party reality that we have today?

[Prof. Bryan Schwartz]

The mistake that people make is they say, “Well, Italy was really bad because they changed prime ministers every two weeks.” But do you know what? It was too stable. It was always the same coalition that it was picking a prime minister from, so they didn't have a genuine alternation of fresh ideas and fresh people and fresh voices. Any time you have more than two choices, you have inevitable, mathematically provable problems with choosing which one is the majority preference. Of course, fresh thinking is needed when we move into a standard multi-party system in Canada. I don't think it was working very well for a long time, in the period in which I originally wrote this book. It seems to be working better now for some of the reasons I mentioned. It's actually not just good luck. I think there have been some significant adaptations.

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

This is in Italy, right?

[Prof. Bryan Schwartz]

Yes, exactly. In Italy there's been more change among ideologically different parties. But let me just say something about the comparative method generally, which is the same thing that's said about cybersecurity: be very careful, if I could respectfully say so. It's so easy to say, “They did this in New Zealand”, and so on. Well, that's not a federal state. Or they say, “They did this in England”. It has a curious kind of federalism with the European Union and Scotland and so on.

I'm a great believer in not overestimating the power of abstract reason to predict what's actually going to happen, and learning from experience. The way I thought it would roll out when I wrote this book was some province would try something, and at the federal level we could learn from that provincial experiment, but it did not happen. Studying other things is what I've been doing a lot of for the past 30 years, but it's also just reinforced my assertion of being very cautious. Is the federal level in Canada the right place to experiment with a fundamentally different system? Other things being equal, I would rather it was tried out at some provincial level. Let's see how it actually works in a Canadian context, rather than being too quick to say it worked in Italy or New Zealand, or whatever.

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

Right. It's the notion of the provinces as the laboratories of democracy.

[Prof. Bryan Schwartz]

Absolutely.

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

However, that's not one of the options we can engineer on this committee.

You mentioned you thought that a plebiscite was necessary. Your use of that word makes me think of the Prince Edward Island plebiscite that's under way right now. They use the term “plebiscite” as opposed to “referendum” in P.E.I. to this day.

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

They're attempting to engage in a preferential ballot rather than choosing one option versus the status quo. Do you have any thoughts as to the merits of what they're doing there, the model they're using—P.E.I. is not the only place that has tried this—or one of the other preferential referenda that have existed?

[Prof. Bryan Schwartz]

I won't comment specifically on P.E.I., because I'd have to study it soberly before I would form an opinion.

There are many different forms of multiple preference ballots. There are forms in which you can do that with proportional representation, PR light or the full PR, or a single transferable ballot. Many people have talked about AV, because it's simple; it's the minimal adaptation to our existing system.

At page 56, or page 61 en français, there's a quote from Winston Churchill about that, which I have to admit I'm rather attracted to, which is—let me put it gently—not a great idea. The problem with AV, as Churchill says, is that it puts the most weight on the most worthless ballots of the least popular parties.

Why does the second choice of a small party count more than everybody else's second choice? It doesn't actually keep proportionality, and it has a lot of other problems, but I can't get past that problem.

In terms of the language of “plebiscite” versus “referendum”, I think technically one is binding and one is not, but to me it's not a legal question anyway. Legally you can do a lot of stuff without putting it to a popular vote. I see, since the Charlottetown Accord round, that there is now a morality of consent in Canada such that, if you're going to make big changes, the question should be put directly to the people in a vote.

May I say one other thing, quickly?

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

You may, yes, very quickly, please. What you're saying is very interesting .