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.