Electoral Reform Committee on Sept. 30th, 2016

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Wasylciw, you raised several issues or aspects of our democracy and electoral system that are very interesting. You said at one point that it is important to give MPs more power and perhaps more influence and independence from their political parties. You are not convinced that any one voting system or another can change anything in that respect. You are right, in fact. A proportional voting system is not designed to increase a member's independence or power, but rather to reflect the voters' choices more faithfully. It is nevertheless a good objective to elect more independent MPs who have more power.

This committee's mandate is to turn to the future and examine the options available to us to replace the present system, which is a single-member plurality system. You raised a number of points, but I did not hear you clearly say which changes should be made to our voting system.

[David Wasylciw]

That's very true.

Looking at different ways of voting, one of the issues I find with some of the MMP systems is the party lists and the strength it gives the parties. I think from having done a fair bit of research here looking at ranked and different ways of STV and those things, one of the most interesting systems was the weighted ranking of voting. With the standard ranking, by voting, you can disproportionately negatively impact your preferred candidate, where as weighted systems seem to avoid most of that, and you give somebody a four and somebody a three and add it up and the one with the top points wins the riding.

The really big challenge with that is just understanding how it works. I think one of the problems with a lot of these systems is on actual voting day. Somebody going into vote should understand that what they're doing, how they vote, and what they mark off equates to an MP. I think that system causes a lot of challenges for people in understanding how that works. That's not to say I don't think Canadians can get there, because I certainly think we can educate people and people can figure it out. Sometimes we like to say that it's too hard, so let's not do it. To me, that's one of the preferred systems because it does have a balance in the majority and the person who wins got a majority of votes in a particular riding, which is the ideal, but it's complex. My concern would be implementing a very complex system.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you, Mr. Boulerice.

Monsieur Ste-Marie.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good evening, gentlemen. Thank you for your presentations. They are the last presentations we will hear this week, and I must say the level has been very high. Bravo and thank you.

I have several questions. We will see how many I can ask in the five minutes allotted to me. I will begin with Mr. Wasylciw and then Mr. Lambrecht can supplement the answers.

In the present system, the member from the Northwest Territories wears at least two hats: he must toe the line of the party with which he is affiliated and he must defend the interests of the Northwest Territories. That person speaks on your behalf in the Parliament of Canada.

Which of the two hats do you think the present MP and previous MPs have worn most? Do you feel the local MP transcends the party line in order to defend his people first or, on the contrary, does he toe the party line and represent his party's values here?

[David Wasylciw]

Historically, at least across the last number of MPs, I'd say there's been a fair bit of representation of the north rather than just the party line. The challenge still though is that it's one voice. It's one vote in the House. It's one vote to win. Maybe they've been allowed a little extra leeway in talking about it because it's easy to get out there and say it, but it's still only one vote. Sometimes the results don't always equate to what we were hoping for or what they've been able to raise, but I think they've effectively at least raised issues of the north.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Mr. Lambrecht, do you have the same impression?

[Alexander Lambrecht]

I would have to agree with David that previous MPs have done the best they possibly can to represent the interests of the Northwest Territories, but I think often the party line drowns out their voice. When you work in politics, you have to make friends, and you don't make friends by going against the party line when you're a part of a party. That is the best way to politically assassinate yourself. For northern MPs, it's this constant double-edged sword that you are damned if you do and damned if you don't, and they do their best to represent their jurisdiction to the people who live in that northern jurisdiction, but I think often the power of the party just doesn't enable them to do what is right by their people.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Mr. Wasylciw, you discussed the difficulties inherent in representing an immense territory, including those related to means of communication, that is to say air travel, roads, infrastructure and Internet access. This committee will not solve those problems, but people talk to us about those issues in virtually all rural districts. Internet access in the country is somewhat like the electrification that took place there in another era. Today we need high-quality Internet service in order to take part in society. Let me say that again to ensure it is well noted. We hear this in all rural areas, and I imagine that those problems are greater here by a factor of 10. Thank you for telling us about that.

Mr. Lambrecht, I have a few questions for you concerning your labour association. You said you represent 10,000 workers in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. Does that include Yukon?

[Alexander Lambrecht]

No, it is not because Yukon has its own Federation of Labour. The reason the NTFL covers both Nunavut and the Northwest Territories is that it has existed since 1980, 19 years prior to the beginning of Nunavut's existence in 1999.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

All right, thank you.

Mr. Lambrecht, what is the approximate percentage of aboriginal, first nations, and Inuit persons among the members you represent?

In addition, are many of your members mobile? In other words, do they come and work here for a few years and then return to the south?

[Alexander Lambrecht]

Our membership is diverse. I don't have exact numbers for the demographics that make up our membership, but when you walk around any of the communities, you realize how diverse the communities are. In Yellowknife alone, I swear there is somebody from every single country in the world and even some that no longer exist. That's the way Yellowknife looks, and Iqaluit and Whitehorse are very similar. If you go to the outlying communities, they also have people from all around the world. I imagine that in the NWT we have almost 50%, if not more, of indigenous peoples. I would say that our membership has a high representation of indigenous peoples, as well as every other diversity under the sun.

As far as people travelling to and from the territories goes, we have diamond mines that employ a large segment of our population and a large segment of those workers travel from outside the territory.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Do you know whether it is difficult for people who move often to register on a voters list in this district?

[Alexander Lambrecht]

I'm not aware of any widespread issues. I am aware that there have been issues with things like residency times, registration, and getting documentation, especially for people who have immigrated to Canada. Obviously, there are challenges. We need to find mechanisms that enable people to vote, and ensure that identity verification can be done in a way that still enables people to vote.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

We'll go to Ms. May now, please.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Thank you to the witnesses. I want to acknowledge that we are on the traditional territories of the Dene and Dogrib first nations and many more. Mahsi cho for the welcome here in Yellowknife.

I wanted to explore some of the things that came up in both witnesses' comments. I don't want to generalize, but I think Mr. Lambrecht was much more willing than Mr. Wasylciw to say that a change to our voting system would change the culture of politics. I saw the two of you on different sides of that divide.

I want to make an observation and then ask for both of you to comment. I stand more with Mr. Lambrecht only because I've been in politics for 10 years, and it never occurred to me that one of the problems with first past the post was that it rewards cutthroat, nasty politics and punishes co-operation.

I don't think first past the post by itself has reduced the amount of co-operation and collaboration that we used to see in politics, because I worked for the Government of Canada in the minister of the environment's office in the mid-1980s. We had the same voting system, but we had much more co-operation.

On top of the things that have occurred that relate to the way first past the post rewards hyper-partisanship has been a trend toward unending campaigning. The election ends, but the spin doctors aren't let go so that they can go someplace to get relationship training and to try to become full human beings again. They actually keep working to destroy any thought of goodwill. That's all relayed in Susan Delacourt's book, Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them, this notion of targeted, sectoral.... If you know that all you need to do is get 35% of the vote across Canada and you need to get out your base, then what you want to find is the wedge issue, or what's now called dog-whistle politics.

I would say to my friend Sherry that you can't generalize from one woman's experience. I've spent a lot of time on the phone trying to talk women into running, and one of the reasons they don't want to is it strikes them that the atmosphere of politics is toxic.

Those are my observations. I ask both of our witnesses if that affects their thoughts about how our political culture is impacted or not impacted by our voting system.

[Alexander Lambrecht]

You know what? As somebody who is young—and I probably look much younger than I am; for the record, I'm 31, but everyone thinks I'm in my young twenties—I personally am disgusted with politics, the environment, what it's about. It's more adversarial. It's about fighting each other. It's about making people look bad, which is not what I was raised to believe or how to treat people.

From my experiences down in the States with bullying, it's horrible. It's one of the reasons I moved back up here, because I grew up here, because I don't have that environment, because people of the north and in Canada just don't seem to be that superficial or that vain. Politics has become almost this showboat: how can we make the other candidate look as bad as we possibly can to get people to distrust them; how can we get people to disassociate in their minds that this is a trustworthy person?

The amount of negative psychology that goes into campaigns that has seeped in from American politics is absolutely disgusting. The psychologists and the doctors who work within the other side of the spectrum to deceive, to manipulate, and to change people's minds use psychological tactics. I won't go into detail about it, but it's disgusting. Is that the kind of example that we want to set for our youth?

When we look at the U.S. and we look at the negative attack ads against Trump, they come out saying, “Is this somebody that we want our children to look up to?” As elected MPs, however you decided to run your campaign, if you run a negative campaign against other candidates, well, is that how you want your children and the youth of today to do their campaigns? Or do you want to promote a culture of working together and collaboration that is based upon the principles, the foundations of some of the very first people who walked on the land that we know as Canada. The reason that they survived for as long as they have in such remote, desolate conditions is that they worked together, simply put.

[David Wasylciw]

I'll just answer in a few words because there's not a whole lot of time.

I think that you're right. There have been a lot of changes in the last number of years. I don't think it's necessarily just tied to the voting system. I don't think people don't go out and vote solely because it's first past the post and if it was PR, they'd definitely show up. I don't think that PR would necessarily make Parliament work better. I think the issues are tied together. I think people aren't always happy with the way politics works, but I don't necessarily think the voting system's going to fix that all the time. There are other factors to it, I think, that need to be applied.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Definitely.

I'm probably out of time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Go ahead. Everyone else has gone over time tonight.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I always thought we should have proportional representation, even before I went into politics. I didn't even join a political party until I was 52. I was involved in issues, but not partisan politics, and it really did surprise me once I got into partisan politics to realize that, if you were to say something out loud such as, “Oh, I think that other party has a good idea”, it would be interpreted as something for which you should be punished because obviously, you don't know how to play the game. Media hates it when people want to co-operate with each other, but voters love it. A voting system that lets you say....

One of the reasons that first past the post punishes that is that, if you're in the parties that are approximate to each other on the political spectrum.... If you were a Reformer when Reform split away from the Progressive Conservatives, you would really not want to give Reform any credit for anything because your base might bleed off to vote strategically for the Progressive Conservatives. Similarly, I find there's a lot of competition, which I really dislike, between the parties like the Greens and the NDP, about, well, if it's this party, you're going to lose your vote because they're going to vote strategically. If you knew that wasn't a factor, and maybe I'm being naive, I think that would change the discourse to be much more civil.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

We'll have to go now to Mr. DeCourcey, please.

Sorry, I treat that as a comment.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

That's fine. You let me go over time. We're working together.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

We are. We are.

[Matt DeCourcey, Liberal, Fredericton, NB]

Mr. Chair, despite the liberties taken by my colleagues around this table, I can assure you I will continue to serve as a shining example of how someone can remain within their allotted time here.

I joke. It's the end of a long week.

I am not so cynical about our ability to overcome the toxicity that people feel politics has descended into. I feel as though I came out of a positive campaign, and Ms. May will know the respect with which I hold the candidate for the Green Party who ran against me in the Fredericton riding. We had vigorous debates throughout the campaign, but we share a mutual respect for one another. I think it's as much a matter of political will and the style of leadership that you undertake as a politician, as a group of politicians, that can play a significant role in helping move people past the way they feel about politics in general right now.

I think that speaks as much to some of the disengagement and the reason that people don't go out and vote. It's not always that they feel their vote won't count. It's that they feel it doesn't matter because it won't change things anyway, because politics and politicians are all the same. I think there has been some conflation of those two arguments throughout testimony over the last number of months. I'm not saying that some people don't feel that their vote doesn't count. I think it's a valid argument, but I think the two things get conflated every once in a while.

Mr. Lambrecht, while you were delivering your testimony, I was at the back of the room, but just to clarify, it's not the committee who will be presenting legislation in April. It's the intent of the government to put forth their legislation. You're right. We have until December 1, and maybe that was a slip-up but I heard you say “committee”. So I just wanted to make sure that was clear on the record.

When you were speaking of incremental change, I first thought of the preferential ballot, and then you got into the idea of literacy challenges around the way that people would understand casting their ballots, and I was thinking about whether that was a literacy challenge or a comprehension challenge. Either way, it's an educational challenge. I then thought that would logically lead one to think, as well, of the challenges inherent in an STV ballot, a single transferable vote ballot. Are there other literacy or education-related challenges that you see on any of the other ballots that could potentially form part of an electoral reform recommendation?

[David Wasylciw]

I think those challenges exist in every system, beyond the simple make one mark, and even that is sometimes challenging, based on spoiled ballots. I think any of the systems that involve numbering, involve ordering or overall weighting.... Systems that don't involve a weight but simply have, to some degree, the mixed member...with a single vote for a candidate, a vote for a party, probably take away some of those issues. It still creates them because you're voting in two separate blocks and making sure people understand that separation.

Either way, I hope that your recommendations include a healthy amount of budget for Elections Canada to do a lot of education, much more than they've ever done before, and that's probably going to have to be sustained, not just in the next election but in a few elections going forward.