Thank you very much for inviting me to speak to the committee.
Given the limited time I have to speak, I'll confine my remarks to two of the principles that define the committee's mandate, those related to effectiveness and legitimacy, and those related to local representation and accountability.
The first of these principles, effectiveness and legitimacy, mandates that the committee identify measures that increase Canadians' confidence that their “democratic will” as expressed by their votes is fairly reflected in electoral outcomes. An implicit assumption underpinning this principle is that the electorate considered collectively has some coherent democratic will.
A good deal of work in a branch of academia called social choice theory tells us that this assumption is overly simplistic. In any moderately complex electoral environment—think of one in which voters must choose over more than two options in more than two policy dimensions, say, three parties competing on social policy and economic policy—we know that it's unlikely, indeed it's verging on impossible, that there exists some singular monolithic majority. As a consequence, it's very difficult to say what is the democratic will of an electorate, and whether such a will accords or does not accord with a particular election result held under a given system or not.
The second of these principles, local representation, mandates that the committee identify measures that ensure or support accountability. I guess in the context of modern parliamentary government, accountability can operate on two levels, and it does so simultaneously: the individual MP's accountability to his or her constituents on the one hand, and the governing party or coalition's accountability to the electorate at large via Parliament on the other. My sense is that the motion implicitly prioritizes the first of these types of accountability because the wording is terrible.
Regardless, scholars are agreed that accountability requires that the electorate be able to identify the act responsible for political decisions and outcomes, and that it can effectively sanction that act, should it wish to.
In this regard, the issue of dual candidacy under a mixed system is worth some attention. It's clear that dual candidacy, whereby a candidate can run in a district and on a list simultaneously, dilutes the candidate's accountability to the local constituency. There may be offsetting merits in dual candidacy; however, my point is just that the issue deserves discussion with respect to this principle of accountability.
The second type of electoral accountability, government accountability, has been misconceived. It's often put in terms of the stability of the government. We'll hear the old saw that under first past the post, elections are more stable than in governments elected under proportional representation. The problem here is not cherry-picking the experiences of this country or that country; rather, it's that there's no optimal level of stability.
You can have too little stability, and you can have too much stability. A much better metric is to consider what we would technically call the monotonicity of the electoral system. That is to say, is there a positive relationship between shifts in votes and shifts in legislative power? Certainly, the converse of this, that if a government, for example, lost votes and gained power, we would find perverse.
I've looked at the relationship between shifts in electoral votes and shifts in power, and there's good news and bad news. The good news is that regardless of the electoral system we looked at, there is among advanced industrial democracies a positive relationship between shifts in votes and shifts in power. It's very clear that majoritarian systems outperform proportional systems on this metric in the sense that responsiveness or monotonicity of the electoral system declines by about 50% under any form of proportional representation.
Again, that's one of many values that one may wish to consider and trade off against, but that's what the data says.
Thanks.