Thank you.
Megan.
Evidence of meeting #32 for Electoral Reform in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was votes.
Evidence of meeting #32 for Electoral Reform in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was votes.
2:20 p.m.
Graduate student, Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, As an Individual
My concern with the committee making a proposal on the electoral system, setting this up by fall 2017, and then trying to engage the public is that the public won't have been involved in the decision on the electoral system. It will only be the committee members and whoever has been able to come to town halls or has gone through the online consultation process.
It is important to have broad public engagement on the decision.
2:20 p.m.
Green
Elizabeth May Green Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC
On the idea of a national citizens' assembly, we had before us yesterday, in Victoria, Diana Byford and Craig Henschel. Both of them were in the B.C. Ctizens' Assembly. Extrapolating from the number of people they had in B.C., they figured 676 people would be a national citizens' assembly, but that's fewer people than have already appeared and come to the public meetings of this committee.
Engaging the population of Canada, in a sense, is called representative democracy and responsible government, and that has to do with something called Parliament, which we've been elected to. What number of people would be enough to say that we've talked to the people of Canada?
2:25 p.m.
Graduate student, Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, As an Individual
The problem with the representation right now is that you're engaging a specific subset of Canadians. You're engaging a specific demographic group.
People who go to town halls are probably feeling passionate about this issue. They're probably largely PR people, because they feel passionate about it. They haven't been able to engage a broader representative group of Canadians. Maybe it's not so much about numbers as it is about engaging a more representative cover, and that's what a citizens' assembly would give us.
2:25 p.m.
Liberal
John Aldag Liberal Cloverdale—Langley City, BC
Thanks to everyone, our witnesses for today and members of the audience. As the member of Parliament who is probably closest to where we're located—my riding is Cloverdale—Langley City—I wanted to thank all the audience members for coming out. I look forward to hearing from you as we get into the open-mike session today.
We've heard in some of the testimony about the great work that was done in B.C. with the citizens' assembly, and the two of you have talked specifically to that. Yesterday, we had two of the participants from the B.C. Citizens' Assembly speak to us. I would like to get your thoughts on the practicalities of taking that model to a national scale.
The B.C. model, as was mentioned, had gender parity, because there was a man and a woman randomly selected from each riding. To do that in Canada, with 338 ridings, we'd be looking at 676 participants. There are cost implications, time implications, and travel implications. I like the idea of trying to get some sort of consensus, whatever that looks like and whatever the threshold for agreement is. It's a large number.
Ms. Dias and Mr. Moscrop, maybe the two of you could comment on that. Have you looked at the success of the B.C. Citizens' Assembly, and if that could be applied on a national scale? One of the women who was before us said that if she was asked to do what she was asked to do for the province on a national level, then she would say no, simply because of the travel commitment.
Ms. Dias, have you looked at the benefits and how that could apply to the national stage?
2:25 p.m.
Graduate student, Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, As an Individual
I've talked to people who have suggested we could. We're not wedded to the B.C. Citizens' Assembly model, right? I think it worked well in B.C. The general principle of the citizens' assembly is appropriate for this issue and it would work well.
There are different ways to try to deal with this. It doesn't necessarily need to be every single riding represented. Maybe we could talk about regions. We could do something like that.
There have also been suggestions about holding citizens' assemblies in each province. Instead of having a national one, what if we had 10 provincial ones and one for the territories? There are different ways to get at this that wouldn't require over 600 people converging on Ottawa.
2:25 p.m.
Liberal
John Aldag Liberal Cloverdale—Langley City, BC
You think that would give us the kind of legitimacy of representation to be able to say at the end of it that yes, this is a legitimate process.
2:25 p.m.
Graduate student, Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, As an Individual
Yes, I think so. I think it would represent a much more diverse group of Canadians. It would give them a much more robust education on this issue than they're getting currently.
2:25 p.m.
Liberal
2:25 p.m.
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, As an Individual
I think if you extrapolate from British Columbia, you end up at over 600, but if you say that you don't really need 600 people to get a representative group of Canadians, you could probably do it with half of that, right? I do think breaking it down by region makes sense, even breaking it down by province. The riding level might be too specific for something like this. It would require too many people. We could probably do it with 300 people, depending on how you did the math. At the end of the day, you want to represent this group of Canadians, and that's actually as much a math equation as anything else. Maybe Mario can talk about this later. I have no idea.
What it does allow you to do as you get slightly bigger numbers, say for instance 300, is you can start to select by gender, you can start to select by ethnicity, you can even start to select by partisanship if you want. You can have a representative body, because you're not going to get it with a town hall. There's a huge selection bias because people are opting into it based on their pre-existing passion for the issue.
I'm a PR advocate and one of the first people to say they're not even close to representative. These are PR folks who are turning out to push PR. I happen to think most of them are right, but they're not representative.
2:25 p.m.
Liberal
John Aldag Liberal Cloverdale—Langley City, BC
As British Columbians, we know that the Rockies do a great job of protecting us from crazy ideas coming from Ottawa.
We had the citizens' assembly and it gave us a solution that was made for B.C., but when I look at it, the citizens' assembly essentially failed. We had the best minds. We had this sample of British Columbians. It went to a referendum. Is this really the best solution? If we go through the same process, if we go to a referendum with the solution that may come out through a citizens' assembly, are we destined to fail, or were there other factors at play in B.C. that resulted in no change?
Mr. Moscrop, I'll ask you.
2:30 p.m.
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, As an Individual
I'm from Ontario, but I've been here for six years and I'm starting to understand western alienation a bit. Each year I come out a little more western alienated. The referendum was a success. The B.C. Citizens' Assembly was a success. The Government of British Columbia failed the people of British Columbia by setting an unnecessarily high and arbitrary threshold for passing electoral reform at 60%. The result was that 57.7% of people said yes. You would need one fan, which I appreciate. Thanks, Mom.
If 50% was enough for Britain to leave the EU, it's enough to choose an electoral system.
2:30 p.m.
Liberal
2:30 p.m.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
I want to start with a brief comment and then turn to the citizens' assembly and the self-selection issue. That's all I can fit into five minutes.
The problem with the issue of rushing versus delaying.... The key point of view for us, as a committee, is that we actually have a mandate that tells us to design a system for 2019. That's what we have to work with, unless we say in our report that we are rejecting part of our mandate, that our mandate isn't practical. But as it stands, our mandate says we are to try to design a system for 2019. This involves all kinds of problems, one of which is by this time it would be literally impossible to have a citizens' assembly that is set up and makes recommendations, simply because it may very well make a recommendation that involves a redistribution and a redistribution takes 24 months. We don't have the time any more. We might have had time if we had started it a year ago, right after the election, but that's just a practical matter we're dealing with. I simply throw that out.
Having said that, I want to turn to the issue of a citizens' assembly and the very large numbers we are talking about. If we apply a very mechanistic version of the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly nationally—two members from each riding, one male, one female—you get 600-and-whatever members. The obvious way of cutting this in half—and I don't think this creates a problem that anybody would regard as unreasonable—is to say gender equity but every second riding has a male and every second riding has a female. Problem resolved.
I actually think you'd want to have some other equity considerations in there. I think it would be important to have a certain number of people who speak non-official languages as their first language, to deal with our very large and diverse immigrant population. Anyway, I'm simply throwing that out.
I do want to say something regarding self-selection. I think this is really important. We've had open-mike testimony which in no way reflects what poll results tell us about what Canadians think. At the open-mike session last night, I think it was about 5:1 people standing up and saying they were opposed to a referendum, please no referendum. Every poll I've seen indicates that no matter how the question is asked, somewhere from 55% to 73% of Canadians want a referendum, and those who were opposed, either strongly or mildly opposed to a referendum, amount to less than 20%; yet we find 5:1. This suggests a severe self-selection bias in who's coming here.
Having said that, I'll mention that I got up and walked around and counted the people in the room here, to make the point that in Canada's most diverse city, a city which I believe has just under or just over a 50% non-white population, out of 60 people in the audience—and I counted—five are not white, and the age demographic is also not typical of the age profile of the city. That's not to be disrespectful—with my board of directors in my riding association, there is a similar problem—but it is to say that we have a self-selection problem here that leads to witness testimony that doesn't work. Open-mike testimony simply does not reflect where non-activists on this issue stand. This will be a massive problem when we come to compile this stuff later on. We'll have a non-representative sample, a wildly non-representative sample.
Having said all of that, I actually want to go back to the citizens' assembly argument I raised earlier. What do you think of the idea of having a citizens' assembly that lowers the number by doing some kind of measure such as I suggested? Would that seem like a reasonable way of approaching things?
That is for you, Mr. Moscrop.
2:30 p.m.
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, As an Individual
Yes, absolutely. It's a great compromise and it would do it. What is it; 338 works pretty well for the House of Commons, and I think it would work pretty well for a national citizens' assembly as well. You want the number to be high enough to be representative, but to sort of echo what Ms. May was suggesting, you don't want it so high that it's unworkable, because with 676 people, I don't know how you would do it. So that is a nice compromise. You might even be able to do it with less than that. Again, that's a question to work on with statisticians as well, especially if you want to build in the representativeness that you were talking about earlier.
2:35 p.m.
Conservative
Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON
Very briefly, on public education you give a little bit of an indication about the kinds of things that need to happen. In British Columbia, from the outside it looked to me like it was a very good attempt to publicize. Also, the citizens of the B.C. Citizens' Assembly went out and did some work on their own, but in addition to what they did, were there any measures they missed out that would be necessary to ensure the maximum level of information to an informed electorate? Does that come to your mind?
2:35 p.m.
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, As an Individual
Well, the times have changed a little bit. I think of this: Twitter, Facebook, social media writ large, Instagram and Snapchat are really useful tools for enhancing a substantive process. They shouldn't be your primary tool. This shouldn't be the thing you are doing. They should be complementary to something more substantive. British Columbia wouldn't have had the benefit of those things 11 years ago, certainly not to the extent we do now. You certainly could now, but also have more door-to-door canvassing. There's a lot you can do.
The problem isn't technique. The problem is money, usually, and time. It's classic. It's a resource problem. You're going to have to spend a lot of money and you'll need a lot of people going door to door. You'll need a lot of people tweeting, a lot of people reaching out. If you're willing to spend the money, lots of folks will tell you how to spend it properly in order to reach the public, but you have to be willing to spend it and you have to be willing to take the time to do so.
September 28th, 2016 / 2:35 p.m.
Liberal
Sherry Romanado Liberal Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC
I have to admit it's true. The acoustics in here are not too great.
Thank you so much to our panellists and to the citizens of Vancouver for coming out in big numbers.
I want to touch on something that you've alluded to, Ms. Dias and Mr. Moscrop. You've talked a little bit about engagement, but specifically education. We've seen through the various stops on this tour, and I've seen in various town halls that there is a one-sided group that is showing up at these town halls. It's great. I love the fact that people are engaged and they want to come here, but my concern is about the education component. What is our current system? What does it look like? What are the pros? What are the cons? What are the possibilities that we could consider to improve our system? We have a couple of little boo-boos in our system that can be addressed by a new alternative voting system, that can be addressed by the specific tactics that we decide to deploy. Given the fact that we have a large educational component that we need to look at, what are your thoughts?
Professor Moscrop, you mentioned doing door to door. Quite honestly, as my colleague Mr. Reid mentioned, we have a finite time to get this done and I don't think going door to door to try to educate people is going to be feasible. I read your article in 2014 about our lizard brains, so I'm not quite sure if our lizard brains will be able to understand whatever we propose door to door.
Anyway, I just wanted to get your thoughts on how we can convey the options that we've put forward and let Canadians decide. Could you give me some feedback on your thoughts on educating Canadians in such a way that they understand the good, the bad, and the ugly?
Ms. Dias and then the other two.
2:35 p.m.
Graduate student, Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, As an Individual
Again, I think that a citizens' assembly is uniquely posed to do that. I think town halls are not really capable to do that . You have two hours to get through the topic very quickly. I think more accessible materials need to be available to Canadians. Right now we have the Library of Parliament graphs and information, which is great, but if you don't know that exists, if you're not the kind of person to do that, you're not going to have that material available. There have been different civic organizations that have come out with reports. Those are also great but again, if you're not the type of person who's connected to this issue, those won't reach you.
I think the committee has to come up with a more aggressive or robust campaign that also tells Canadians why they should spend their time reading about electoral systems, why they should care about how votes are counted or things like that, and makes the implications that these are the outcomes we are trying to get and these are the values we care about. This is why we're doing this process at all.
I also think it means going to places like schools and universities and high schools and talking to youth. I think Dave said it, online materials are great as a supplement but I don't think they should take away from going to places where people are to engage them.
2:40 p.m.
Liberal
Sherry Romanado Liberal Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC
On that note, before the two other witnesses answer, do you think it is the role of Elections Canada to do this?
2:40 p.m.
Graduate student, Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, As an Individual
I'm not sure. I think Elections Canada could be uniquely posed as a non-partisan group to be able to do this, but I'm not sure it's within its specific mandate.
2:40 p.m.
Liberal
Sherry Romanado Liberal Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC
I'm going to flip that on its head. Every time I go to a town hall or I go to something, we always seem to have a presenter, just one, who's from one side of the debate, and that person will educate the crowd on how fabulous that specific system is but not always give them the good, the bad, and the ugly. My concern is by having people with specific stakes in the decision educating, they're not going to provide well-rounded information. That's why I was suggesting perhaps maybe Elections Canada would be best positioned to be non-partisan in it and actually give Canadians all the information, and what the ramifications of the costs will be in any reform that we do. That way they can make an educated decision.
2:40 p.m.
Graduate student, Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, As an Individual
Yes, I think if Elections Canada was given the money and the resources to do that.... I think Elections Canada should be involved in things like get-out-the-vote campaigns, things like that, so that seems reasonable, yes.
