Electoral Reform Committee on Sept. 28th, 2016

[Mario Canseco, Vice President, Public Affairs, Insights West, As an Individual]

Thank you for inviting me to this session.

I have worked as a public opinion researcher for the past 13 years, first as an observer and collator of publicly available surveys at the University of British Columbia, and starting in 2007, as a pollster who has conducted research in more than 20 different countries. I've been with Insights West for the past three years, finding new approaches and ways to review how people think and how they vote.

I stand before you as an individual who is keenly interested in the topic of electoral reform. In many ways, my interest in public policy began in my childhood home. My father Morelos Canseco González served in the senate of Mexico as an elected representative from the state of Tamaulipas from 1976 to 1982. My father travelled to many places, including Canada, to take part in interparliamentary meetings.

From a very young age, conversations at the dinner table revolved around politics, participation, and elections. It is that curiosity about the way problems can be solved that ultimately led me to become an electoral researcher and forecaster.

This committee was appointed to identify and conduct a study of viable alternative voting systems to replace the first-past-the-post system, and examine mandatory voting and online voting.

My company, Insights West, has been looking at some of these issues over the past year, and asked Canadians about them again this month so I could share the findings with you this afternoon.

The results I will quote are based on an online study conducted from September 14 to September 16, 2016, among a representative sample of 1,021 Canadian adults. The data has been statistically weighted according to Canadian census figures for age, gender, and region. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.1%.

Let us begin. In spite of the many discussions that have taken place on electoral reform, it must be acknowledged that the majority of Canadians, 64% in our latest survey, claim to be satisfied with the system that we currently have in place to elect the members of the House of Commons.

The highest level of animosity towards the first-past-the-post system is observed here in British Columbia, where 30% of residents claim to be dissatisfied with the status quo, a higher proportion than the Canadian average of 22%.

In our research, we have tested three different systems that could be implemented in the future for federal elections. By far the most popular of the three is party list proportional representation, which is supported by 49% of Canadians. The level of agreement is lower for single transferable votes at 40%, and the mixed member PR system at 31%.

Proportional representation does better than the other systems because it is particularly simple to explain, with a level of support that reaches 60% among Canadians, ages 18 to 34, and 56% in the province of Quebec.

It is fair to say that younger Canadians are far more likely to endorse a change, any change in our electoral system than their counterparts age 35 and over. Younger Canadians tend to be more open to voting outside of the two dominant parties that, under one name or another, have formed every federal government in our country's history.

A new system that may reward supporters of the so-called minor parties is definitely appealing to voters who currently feel that their vote is wasted unless they cast it in favour of either of the two candidates who are more likely to emerge victorious in a specific constituency.

Still, while some Canadians find PR attractive, others simply do not like it. One of the reasons cited by the three in 10 Canadians who disagree with adopting—

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

I'm sorry, Mr. Canseco, could you just slow down a little bit for the interpreters?

[Mario Canseco]

Gladly.

One of the reasons cited by the three in 10 Canadians who disagree with adopting PR for federal elections is the perception that the sense of connection they currently have with their elected MP will be lost. It is complex, at least at this early stage, for some Canadians to forgo the idea of having a local MP they can vote for in a direct manner in favour of supporting a list.

Regardless of which system is ultimately adopted, 68% of Canadians believe a referendum is required to settle the issue of electoral reform. This majority of Canadians encompasses both genders, all age groups, every region, and supporters of the three main political parties currently represented in the House of Commons.

The call for a referendum is not unique to a particular party. Recent changes to electoral systems have been put to a vote in other countries, and most recently in the United Kingdom in May 2011 when 68% of voters rejected a move to the alternative vote system in a referendum that was plagued by an abysmal turnout of 42% of eligible voters. Canadians are asking to be part of this decision, and meetings like this one help. While many want to have a say in the discussion that will affect the way we elect our federal government, we still see a high level of undecided citizens when it comes to some of the systems that could be adopted.

On the issue of mandatory voting, other countries contemplate either fines or community service for registered voters who decide not to cast their ballots. We asked Canadians to ponder two different scenarios to compel all registered voters to participate in federal elections. Canadians, to put it mildly, were not amused, with 67% disagreeing with the notion of compelling eligible voters who do not cast a ballot to pay a $200 fine and 64% disagreeing with forcing non-voters to perform 25 hours of community service if they failed to exercise the voting franchise.

When the tables were turned and Canadians were asked if voters who do cast their ballots should each be eligible for a $200 tax rebate, 69% agreed with this notion.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

What a surprise. That's shocking.

[Mario Canseco]

It would seem that Canadians would prefer to reward those who cast a ballot rather than punish those who do not.

The third component of our research is online voting. Other countries allow citizens to cast ballots through the Internet. In the Baltic state of Estonia more than one in five votes cast in the 2011 parliamentary election was cast online. Voter turnout in Estonia has been higher than 60% in the three elections that have allowed Internet voting. Canada and Estonia are strikingly different in both area and population, but the Estonian experiment shows that there are ways to make online voting work—

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

Mr. Canseco, can we jump to Mr. Jewell, and then we'll have questions for you. Based on your text, I think that's a good jumping-off point because you covered a lot of issues that are important to the committee. There'll be time for questions to flesh out those issues.

Mr. Jewell, please.

[P. Jeffery Jewell, As an Individual]

Mr. Chair, and other members of the ERRE committee, thank you for this opportunity.

My presentation is entitled “PPR 123: Perfect Proportional Representation”, the ideal electoral system for the digital age.

Briefly, PPR one, two, three is as easy as one, two, three. Voters run the same riding system on the ballot. The voters choose their top three candidates, one, two, three. The votes are processed according to alternative vote, the same system Australia has used for almost a century. It does not need computers to do that. The difference comes in Parliament, because no first-place vote is ever thrown away. Every first-place vote is held in trust by an elected representative of the party of the voter's first-place vote and cast with every vote in Parliament, thereby giving you perfect proportional representation.

I note that Professor Russell, in his address to you, said that in his opinion the first principle should be enhancing the capacity of elections to produce a House of Commons that represents the political preferences of the people. With PPR one, two, three, we carry the votes of the citizens—the honest, uncoerced, first-place vote—into Parliament with every vote in Parliament.

Now, many experts have told you that there's no perfect voting system, and I'm calling this perfect proportional representation rather conspicuously to draw attention to it and ask you to judge whether this achieves that or not. What I can say is that all existing voting systems have many well-known and serious defects, and by now, this committee must be very well aware of them. The only logical conclusion should be to look for a better alternative.

I got to that point myself in 2004, following very closely the work of the B.C. Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform. With my strong background in mathematics and systems analysis, I thought I should be able to make a contribution to the whole process. I first tried to invent a better system on my own and ended up reinventing the Borda count.

Then I went into serious research to see what other people had, and I found a real gem, which was my eureka moment. It was a proposal to the Citizens' Assembly called “The Seven Cent Solution: Vote Proportional Representation”, by Mr. John Kennedy of Burnaby. The key idea is the one that I've just outlined, that the body of elected representatives holds in trust all of the citizens' votes, the first-choice votes only, which are cast by proxy on their behalf with every vote in Parliament.

Each elected representative is entrusted with first-place votes. First-place votes for the losing candidates are retained by the party and reassigned to an elected representative. Some accommodation is required to avoid wasting votes on independent candidates in unrepresented parties.

Proxy voting is something we all know as the standard in corporate shareholder democracy, but in a political democracy, the way to think of it is that every adult citizen is an owner entitled to exactly one equal voting share to be entrusted in the representative. What we have now, by contrast, is that we count the votes; the winners are elected, and they go to Parliament. How many votes do they have? They have one: their own. All the citizens' votes are thrown away.

The conclusion that I want to make to you is that truly democratic representative government cannot be achieved simply by changing how the citizens vote. Truly democratic representative government can only be achieved by changing both how the citizens vote and how the Parliament votes.

PPR one, two, three, which eliminates strategic voting and wasted votes, is based on the alternative vote, thereby ensuring that every elected representative has true democratic legitimacy by being the candidate supported by a majority of the electors.

Then, in Parliament, we have true democratic legitimacy and absolute equitability through the voting power of each party being exactly equal to and derived from all of the first-place votes of citizens. Using the alternative vote ensures that the first-place vote is uncoerced and therefore an honest vote.

So, please, don't do anymore looking backward to previous centuries to look for the best way to do voting in the digital age.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you very much, Mr. Jewell.

We'll go to the first questioner, Ms. Sahota, for five minutes.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Thank you to all our panellists who are here today. I think today has been a great day of panels. We've heard very diverse opinions from person to person, and we enjoy that.

I will start with you, Mr. Jewell.

First of all, I'd like to thank you and your lovely wife, Diana, for visiting me in Brampton and presenting me with your PPR system, perfect proportional representation, as I think you're calling it.

I think we could benefit, though, from further explanation of the system. I think we've heard it also called weighted voting. Is that true? Is that a reference you've heard? Under your system would the weight of each individual MP's vote change in the House of Commons? Is that a correct representation?

[P. Jeffery Jewell]

I wouldn't like to refer to it as a weighted vote, although mathematically you could consider it as such. As I've tried to explain, the rationale for it is that you are not voting your own single vote. You're voting all of the votes that have been entrusted to you, and that is true for all of the members, and everyone's vote is entrusted to somebody.

So, yes, you could say that's a weighted vote, and indeed, there's even a stronger reason for thinking that it might be considered in that way, because one of the issues with respect to the matter is that it could be that there are constitutional issues where some provinces may be guaranteed a certain number of seats. My solution to that one is to derive the equivalent seat total that each member would hold in trust by using the total vote and doing a simple calculation, to say so many votes is equal to so many seats. We're talking, of course, about fractional seats. And so, within Parliament itself, you would need computers to keep score of either the citizens' votes or the equivalent seat total votes instead.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Have you looked at a specific example that you could give us, a simulation maybe from your riding or your region?

[P. Jeffery Jewell]

The first thing to know is that this proposal is strictly neutral and scrupulously fair to all voters, all parties, and all candidates, because it goes right back to the citizens' votes and because it's using only their uncoerced vote, which doesn't exist today. I think the Broadbent report said something like 40% of the votes are strategic votes. Who knows what those people really would have preferred to do?

I did do one number, as an example. With the Green Party having only one elected member, it became fairly easy to figure out. According to the last election, the number of votes that the Green Party got would be the equivalent of about 12 seats, so when Ms. May would vote in Parliament, she would have about 12 seats.

The people who are never representatives would probably have about three-quarters of a seat. They have less than one since they would be overrepresented in Parliament because of the distortions of first past the post, which of course would not exist in the system I'm proposing.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Jewell. That cleared up some of my questions. I admire your dedication to electoral reform. You and your wife have been watching every single one of our committee meetings. I have to say that's more dedication than we expect from the average person, but you're not an average couple, I guess. So, thank you for that.

Do I have a little bit more time, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

You have 25 seconds.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Mr. Canseco, how did you do your polling? What kind of a space do you have to poll? What kind of a technique do you use?

[Mario Canseco]

We conduct most of the surveys at Insights West through an online panel, which we operate. The idea is to recreate the representation of the country based on census targets. In the same way that the telephone pollsters of the 1980s and 1990s would rely on the phonebook, which we can't do anymore because there are many Canadians who have decided not to have a landline, what we have is essentially a large pool of Canadians who we can contact, based on the census targets, to conduct our surveys.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Reid, please.

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

Thank you to all the panellists. You've all been very interesting. Unfortunately, I have to focus on only one of you because you have widely different subject matter.

Mr. Canseco, I wonder if I could focus on you. You conducted, to the best of my knowledge, two polls, one in February and one that was released at the end of June, in which I think you asked the same question and got more or less the same results. There didn't seem to be much movement. I'm looking at the June 28 results. In response to the question about a referendum at that time, looking at the nationwide number, 41% said there definitely should be a nationwide referendum before we change the system; 27% said probably it should be put to a nationwide referendum for a total of 68; 13% said probably a vote in the House of Commons is enough, and then only 5% said definitely a vote in the House of Commons is enough.

Have you seen any indication since that time that those numbers have shifted? Actually, the same thing applies to the question about preferences regarding proportional STV and so on.

[Mario Canseco]

Thank you for the question.

The number hasn't changed. The survey we conducted this month continues to show two-thirds of Canadians suggesting that this should be put to a referendum. The numbers are fairly similar for the three systems that we tested, particularly around half of Canadians saying that they would favour proportional representation, and a little bit of a clearer divide on the other two systems. The things that we added for this particular survey were the questions on mandatory voting and also questions on online voting. But it's not something that has shifted dramatically.

One of the most beautiful things about our industry is that you are able to track things over time, and this is an issue where it has consistently been at roughly the same level, given the margin of error that we operate under.

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

Then you have some numbers that have not been made public that are more recent.

[Mario Canseco]

Yes, they will be on our website tonight. They are the numbers that I quoted earlier today.

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

Thank you very much.

[Mario Canseco]

And thank you for visiting our website.

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

Actually, I guess I'm visiting an old part of your website because I got the June 28 one. I'm on your website, but the wrong part of your website.

Seeing as I'm here, it's www.insightswest.com for what that's worth.

My party has been pushing for a referendum, as I think everybody knows. That's news to Nathan, but Nathan will know that I've regarded it as very important that a referendum has to be on something, obviously, so that is the status quo versus some alternative. To make it a realistic test of the Canadian will, I think you have it against the best alternative versions that are out there, the ones that have the best chance of succeeding. There's no point in trying to get out some kind of caricatured version that is unlikely to achieve support. So there is a best version, I believe, of multi-member proportional and a best version of STV.

I want to ask this question. This may be outside your expertise, but is it your view that if we attempted to have a referendum in which there were more than one alternative option on the ballot, as they're doing in Prince Edward Island right now, instead of just status quo versus MMP or status quo versus STV, that would increase the likelihood that Canadians would feel comfortable looking at another option?

[Mario Canseco]

If we were to have a referendum that included several options plus the alternative, plus another thing, plus what we have right now, it would be essentially a first-past-the-post election.