Electoral Reform Committee on Sept. 23rd, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Welcome to the 29th meeting of the Special Committee on Electoral Reform. This is the fourth day of our cross-Canada tour, aimed at consulting Canadians about changing the federal voting system.

What a lovely day in Joliette! And what a lovely city! We were very impressed as we entered the city by bus. The downtown area is truly magnificent. It is a cultural hub here in Quebec; the Festival de Lanaudière is an example of that.

It's been a pleasure to have Mr. Ste-Marie with us during the last four days. He also joins us regularly when the committee meets in Ottawa.

We will be welcoming three groups of witnesses today in Joliette. This will be followed by a public comments period, in which members of the public will have the opportunity to take the microphone and share their viewpoints on electoral reform.

Here is a brief overview of how we will work. Each witness will have 10 minutes to testify—that is, to present their ideas and perspectives on electoral reform. The testimonies will be followed by a set of questions from the members seated around the table. Each member will have the chance to make a statement and discuss with the witnesses for five minutes. This includes the questions and the answers. We will then move on to another member, so that each member can talk with the witnesses.

We will begin with Professor Csaba Nikolenyi.

I should note that there are headsets for access to the interpreters. Even if you don't need an interpreter, you can use the earpiece simply to hear the discussion better. That's what I do in the House, where one cannot hear a thing because of the deficient acoustics.

Professor Nikolenyi, you have the floor for 10 minutes.

[Csaba Nikolenyi, Professor, Department of Political Science, Concordia University, As an Individual]

First of all, thank you very much for having me today and giving me the opportunity to share a few ideas about electoral reform, what I have to say with respect to the five principles guiding the mandate of this committee, and hopefully the choice of an electoral system alternative for the country.

I want to reiterate those five principles: effectiveness and legitimacy, to reduce distortions in electoral outcomes; engagement, to foster greater participation; accessibility and inclusiveness, to make sure no undue complexity is introduced in the electoral process; integrity; and enforced and continued attachment to local representation.

I want to start by saying that I will argue that principle number four should be treated separately. No electoral system alternative that we've been looking at, and certainly that I have surveyed, actually can directly, as an inherent matter of the electoral rules, address and treat electoral integrity.... There are alternative ways, administrative or legislative, that I think would be better considered to promote that.

With respect to the main electoral system alternatives, as you no doubt know, electoral systems fall into major families, proportional on the one hand and majoritarian/plurality electoral systems on the other. The advantage of the former, of course, is that they promote greater participation, and we know—

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Sorry to interrupt.

First of all, it's important not to talk too fast, as this can prevent the interpreters from keeping up. I am not saying that you, in particular, would do this. Rather, I am making a general comment, to all the witnesses, that the interpreters can have a difficult time when the pace is quick.

I just want to remind everyone that we'll be following the usual rules that parliamentary committees use on Parliament Hill. Unfortunately, we cannot permit photographs or filming. That's the rule in Parliament.

Go ahead, Mr. Nikolenyi, and sorry for the interruption.

[Csaba Nikolenyi]

Yes, I will slow down a bit.

I won't repeat what I said, but what I do want to pick up on is the important distinction between what the two main electoral system families do.

Proportional electoral systems of any kind, and there are many different ways of achieving proportionality, will create greater participation by way of greater electoral turnout. In other words, if that's an important consideration for our electorate to have, to have greater electoral participation, mandatory voting may not be a necessary alternative to resort to. Proportional electoral systems will reduce the number of wasted votes in the electoral process and will lead to, holding everything as equal, greater electoral participation.

Of course, proportional systems do this at the cost of weakening government. Single party majorities will be gone, for all intents and purposes, if you have proportional electoral systems. Countries—Canada will be unlikely to be an exception—that embark on a proportional electoral system will have some type of coalition structure, as the name of the governance game. That's the cost.

Majority electoral systems work in exactly the reverse. They tend to promote and lead to strong single party governments, typically. Of course, they achieve that at the cost of a greater number of wasted votes in the electoral process. Unless electoral competition is tight, which typically gives voters an incentive to turn out in larger numbers, electoral participation and turnout gets lower.

What I would like to do is pay quick attention to three electoral system alternatives, two of which have been around particularly in recent discussions in the media and in general. One is the alternative vote. Another one is a particular version of the mixed electoral system. The third, which gets a little bit less attention perhaps in this round of discussions is the single transferable vote. I'm going to make the argument, with the exception of integrity which I will treat separately, that the single transferable vote system seems to be meeting the other four principles somewhat better than the other two electoral system alternatives. Then I will close the presentation with a pitch, if you will, or at least with a call or an argument in favour of political or electoral integrity legislation, which could be conceived as a compendium to electoral reform.

I want to say a few words about the alternative vote. As you know, the alternative vote is a preferential vote system, which would, of course, be very easy for Canada and Canadians to get used to, because it preserves many of the features of our current electoral system. Specifically, it continues local representation. The constituency feature of the system remains in place. There continues to be one winner per district.

However, it's important to note that the alternative vote is not a proportional electoral system. It's characterized and defined by a district magnitude of one, which means there is one winner per district. If you have one winner per district, you cannot be proportional, because the winner takes all. You cannot divide the one seat among multiple contenders, so it is not a proportional system.

Because it's not a proportional system, it is unlikely to lead to greater participation, greater turnout. It's important to note, of course, that voters would have more choice than they currently have. Currently, voters have a categorical choice, which of course the preference ordering would alleviate. If you look at the literature and if you look at the findings, countries that use AV, and there are not many around, don't tend to have a greater turnout than we have.

Mixed member systems often come across as a very intuitively appealing alternative, because they promise the best of both worlds. A mixed system, bringing together a majority/plurality electoral system with some kind of a proportional component or tier in the legislature, seems to be offering both stable, efficient government, on the one hand, and greater participation through proportionality.

However, electoral reformers need to be very careful about mixed member systems. Mixed member systems come in two main variants. Depending on how you mix those two components, depending on how many proportional seats you have in the legislature, how you allow the proportional and the majoritarian tiers of the system to cross-fertilize and cross-contaminate, you may end up with very unintended consequences.

I also do want to say that while at the turn of the millennium, mixed systems were often considered as the electoral system choice for the next century, if you look around, many of those mixed systems are now gone. It's not a stable electoral system choice. I'm happy to go into the details if there is any interest

Germany seems to be the only one that has had that system on the books for a long time, pretty much since the end of the Second World War, both nationally and at the subnational level. New Zealand switched to the German-style mixed member proportional system, but even New Zealand is seriously considering replacing it, as the referendum a few years ago would show.

Mixed member systems clearly introduce a far greater complexity. Depending on how you design the system, it may ask voters to vote twice, once for a party and once for a candidate. The idea of ticket splitting and cross-party voting may be much more confusing than what we are used to today. Participation would be greater, and if you designed the mixed member system well, then distortions in the electoral process would be reduced.

I have a point about the mixed member system and how it really works. The functioning of the technical design of the system is very sensitive and that requires a lot of technical expertise and attention.

The single transferable vote requires none. The single transferable vote is known in the Anglo-Saxon world, and it is for good reason known as the Anglo-Saxon PR. Ireland, Malta, upper house Australia, it's well known in the Anglo-Saxon world. It preserves local representation. It's complex to administer but fabulously easy to use. It's not more complex for the voter than the alternative vote would be. It would be more difficult for the electoral administrators to actually calculate the votes and take care of the administration of the vote transfers.

STV does lead to greater participation, we also know, largely because it's proportional. It's important to remember that unlike the alternative vote, STV is proportional. It has multi-member districts. It has, therefore, more than one winner per district. The more you increase the number of candidates who can win per district, the more proportional STV can get.

I want to close by saying that if you want to treat electoral integrity as part of this exercise to change Canada's electoral system, I think it would be prudent to take a look at earlier efforts to bring in electoral political integrity legislation that would penalize or at least discourage floor crossing in the House. I say that because when a number of countries changed electoral systems—New Zealand is a very important example—they actually suffered.... When you change electoral systems, the dynamics in parliament change; the nature of governance versus opposition changes; coalition politics is all too rapid, and floor crossing may become too attractive for some of our elected representatives.

New Zealand learned the hard way by introducing later on a political integrity law to penalize defections. It was on the books for five years, which gave enough time for New Zealand's representatives to get used to party discipline cohesion once again under the new system, and under the sunset clause it could expire.

I think that may be something also for our leaders to consider.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

I forgot to mention that you're at the department of political science at Concordia University.

Mr. Breslaw, you have the floor for 10 minutes.

[Jon Breslaw, Professor Emeritus of Economics, Concordia University, As an Individual]

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Quebec, and thank you very much for your invitation.

This commission has been given the mandate of recommending a voting system that both incorporates proportional representation and maintains local representation in a non-complex manner, yet all the many systems that have been proposed to this commission involve unacceptable trade-offs between these two criteria.

Let's take two examples. In the party list methodology, one votes for the party, not the candidate. While achieving proportional representation, many ridings are assigned candidates from a different riding or a different party instead of the candidate the majority wanted. That's an unacceptably high cost for proportional representation.

The second popular contender is the MMP methodology, in which one has two classes of representatives, constituent and list. The list members provide the necessary seats to approximate proportional representation. But the cost here, according to Professor Massicotte, whom you know, is either to reduce the number of constituent members from 338 to somewhere between 160 and 200, or to increase the number of seats to somewhere between 500 and 675. The cost of achieving PR in this context is either a much lower level of representation, or a much larger, more expensive bloated House of Commons. Neither is going to be a political blockbuster; in fact, there would be quite the converse.

Canadians simply don't like these alternative systems. B.C. rejected STV by 61% in 2009. Ontario rejected party list by 63% in 2007. P.E.I. rejected MMP by 63% in 2005. They just don't like it.

So where do we go from here? Winter is coming. December 1 is getting close.

There is a huge number of these methodologies, but ultimately, they are all ad hoc and they all have unacceptable costs, and they all fall into the same trap. The concept of requiring that the number of seats held by a party matches the percentage of votes that is received by that party is not the appropriate metric. The relevant metric is that the voting power of a party in the House matches the popular vote that party received. If a party receives 40% of the vote, then its voting power in the House, its clout, has to be 40%.

This can be easily achieved by simply mandating a weighted vote. If the Conservatives have 50% of the seats and 40% of the vote, then each member of the Conservative Party is given a weight of 0.8 when voting. The vote in each party is simply the percentage of the party vote divided by the percentage of the party seats: 40 over 50 is 0.8.

If the Conservative Party votes as a bloc, it has 40% of the vote, 0.8 times 50%, which exactly matches the 40% it got in a popular vote. If the Green Party receives 5% of the seats and 10% of the votes, then it would have a weight of 2, for each member of the Green Party. This I call fractional representation. It's first past the post with weighted voting in the House: instant, painless, proportional representation.

As for precedents, in Quebec we have 11 agglomeration councils, regional councils, in which each municipality has a weight proportional to the population of the municipality.

The Council of the European Union similarly uses weights, where the weight is proportional to the size of each member state. The IMF and the World Bank—they're significant, aren't they?—have weights, and those weights are proportional to each member's contribution. Of course, in every public company, when you vote in a proxy vote, you have a weight that's proportional to the number of shares you hold.

Weighted voting is something that we are all familiar with, and there's nothing unusual about it. How you assign the weights is simply a matter of what your criteria is. Our criteria here is proportional representation.

The advantages are clear. It is well understood, since there is no change required from the existing electoral system. It's familiar, since proxy voting occurs for every company. It provides a one-to-one relationship between a riding and its elected representatives. It provides exact proportional representation at the party level. It does not require any new administrative structure. It can be implemented immediately and it is far and away the most cost-effective method of achieving proportional representation.

Let me go through a couple of details and then we can take it from there.

Who forms the government? Government is formed in any system by that party which has the most clout. Under our current one, it's the party with the most seats. Under this one, its the party with the highest proportion of the popular vote. Minority governments would form coalitions, as they do today.

Is change complicated? No. At a general election, the weights are ascertained in the way I've described for each party. Those weights are then assigned to each riding and are fixed until the next general election. If there's a by-election, the weights stay the same for that riding. If a member decides to cross the aisle or become an independent, again, the weight is fixed and doesn't provide any incentive for such a move. The weights change once every four years.

Regarding free votes, the government can declare that it will treat a particular item, excluding the budget, as a free vote, and defeat does not amount to a vote of non-confidence. If all parties permit a free vote, then it's no longer a party vote; it's a unitary vote, and that would be appropriate. You can't have some parties having unitary votes and some parties having weighted votes. That's illogical. A free vote with unitary voting would only be permitted if all the chief whips unanimously agreed.

Constitutionality is a good question. Democratic rights are covered by sections 3, 4, and 5 of the charter. Section 3 gives every citizen the right to vote and doesn't change under this system. Subsection 4(2), which permits the continuation of the House of Commons beyond five years, would require a unitary vote. There's no constitutional right to have a vote counted in a certain way, so there's no provision that will make fractional representation unconstitutional.

Every PR system has a threshold. Typically, a threshold would be a minimum percentage of votes, say 5%. If a party receives more than 5%, more than the threshold, and does not have a seat, then a compensatory seat is provided. However, irrespective of the threshold, a party gains representation if it gathers at least one seat.

Let me summarize.

The concept of requiring that the number of seats held by a party match the percentage vote received by that party is not the relevant metric. What is important in proportional representation is that the voting power of a party matches the vote received. A fractional representation system does exactly this. In a simple and direct manner, it maintains the current, well understood system with local representation, without any additional complexity, and at no extra cost. Since it maintains the current electoral system, it does not create dissent, neither from the public who generally don't like change, nor from MPs fearful of losing their seats under the new system. It's politically acceptable.

Ultimately, the recommendations of this committee, if they're to have any impact at all, must be such that consensus is assured.

Each party is going to look to protect its own partisan interests, so anything radical will be rejected out of hand, or at least require a referendum which, based on past history, will also be rejected. By making a small incremental change through a weighted vote, fractional representation presents the best chance of ensuring the consensus that is necessary to make any change to Canada's federal election process, certainly within a realistic time frame.

May I propose to you that fractional representation which is an incisive, intuitive, and innovative solution that satisfies all five principles of your mandate be seriously considered as a viable alternative federal voting system for Canada.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you very much.

That was very interesting. You injected a brand new idea into our deliberations. I had seen reference to it in writing, but it hasn't been mentioned yet.

[Jon Breslaw]

James Wilson will be testifying before you in Fredericton on the same idea.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Right. I think that's where I first heard of it.

We will begin this question period with Mr. Aldag, who has the floor for five minutes.

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

I'd like to begin by thanking our witnesses for coming today. As was mentioned, we've heard some very different and new ideas, so thank you for that.

I'd also like to thank the community members for coming out and joining us. I look forward to the discussion we'll be having later on today.

Mr. Breslaw, I'd like to start with you.

Really quickly, does the system you've described meet our government's commitment that we campaigned on of making 2015 the last election using first past the post? My understanding is that's the system that would still be used, and I'm wondering if that actually meets or honours that commitment.

[Jon Breslaw]

Yes. When the Liberal Party said they're going to change first past the post, what they meant—it's semantics—is the current system, first past the post with unitary voting. I thought about that, too.

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

It seems as though it's the same system, and just the weighting is different.

Another question came to mind as you were talking. We have a member who is no longer part of our caucus and is now sitting next to Ms. May in the House as an independent. What would that vote be worth?

[Jon Breslaw]

Independents come from a party where the party line is there is no party. When I thought about this, it seemed to me that if an independent were to win, then he or she would get a vote, like every other party where you agglomerate all the independents as a party. That would be my solution. In other discussions, sometimes it's suggested they have a vote of one. But I think about independents as, really, members of the party that says you're on your own. It is a party of sorts, even if the party doesn't exist.

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

I'm trying to figure out if I have a weighted vote in the House as a member of the Liberals, we run with.... I'm going to use the number of 40%. So I'd have a 0.4, or some other thing. What's the disincentive for me to leave the party and become an independent to up the value of my vote?

[Jon Breslaw]

No, you don't. That's the whole beauty of it.

The votes are fixed at the time of the general election. On going across the aisle, you're still representing your same riding and you're still fixed with your same vote, so you get no advantage from crossing the aisle.

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

That clarifies that. I really was struggling with how that would work.

[Jon Breslaw]

You are your own party.

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

On the issue of floor crossing, again, this is something, the idea of legislation.... Professor, could you give me an idea what that kind of legislation...? It takes away some independence from members of Parliament to say they can't cross the floor. There may be instances where that seems like the right thing to do. How does that kind of legislation work?

[Csaba Nikolenyi]

Thank you for the question. The answer depends on the kind of electoral system you have in place. Let me give you two alternatives.

One is an example with first past the post. The example is India, part of the same electoral system, heritage, and political institutional heritage that Canada also inherited as part of the Westminster family. The Indian integrity law, or part of the Indian constitution, simply requires.... It doesn't take away the freedom of the member of the lower house or the upper house to cross the floor, but if a member leaves the party on the ticket he or she got elected on, there has to be a by-election. For an independent, it doesn't say that. That's really important. The freedom of movement is not taken away; it simply carries the cost of defending or re-defending your turf in your new colour as a member of another party, or an independent, depending on how you want to fight in the by-election.

Another case would be Portugal, which is closed list proportional representation. It is a system I didn't address, but it's certainly on the menu. The constitution simply forbids it. If you are elected, because the voting is on clear party lines, you can't leave. If you want to leave the party on the list of which you got elected, you have to relinquish your seat. That's it. Then the next person on the list who didn't get elected gets promoted.

Things get to be more complex in other parts of the world. To keep it a little more manageable, I just wanted to give you the two ranges, if you will: pure PR and first past the post, and how they work with anti-floor-crossing legislation.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

Mr. Rayes, you have five minutes.

[Alain Rayes, Conservative, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Hello. I'd like to thank everyone who has travelled to Joliette.

This is a lovely town, Mr. Ste-Marie. I was just telling my colleagues that I got married in Joliette, in a church that's been converted into a library. I definitely plan to take a picture of that library after the meeting.

Mr. Breslaw, I have two questions for you.

I used to be in municipal politics. There are systems that resemble that, but this is the first time I've heard of a system like that for a federal government, or even a provincial government.

I want to make sure I understand your model correctly. Which party would form the government, the party that got the most votes, or the party that got the most seats? In certain cases, one party might get more votes but fewer seats, or vice-versa.

[Jon Breslaw]

The party with the most votes, the party that has the weight, is the party that becomes the government.

[Alain Rayes, Conservative, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

So, concretely, a party with fewer seats in the House of Commons could form the government, because of your calculation system, which gives more weight during votes.

[Jon Breslaw]

Not at all. The party with the most weight would be the party that got the most votes.

If your party has 60% of the vote with only 40% of the seats, it becomes

the government, because it would have more weight than the other parties.

[Alain Rayes, Conservative, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

Got it.

I'd like to get a good grasp of the calculation system you spoke about.

Currently, in the House, the Liberal Party, like the Conservatives earlier, has a majority of seats, with 39% of the popular vote. Under your system, the Liberals would have the same number of seats as they do now, but when the time comes to vote on motions, bills or other matters, their votes would be worth 39%. They would therefore have to form some kind of partnership or consensus with the rest of the House to get their bills adopted. Is that right?