Electoral Reform Committee on Sept. 30th, 2016

[Matt DeCourcey, Liberal, Fredericton, NB]

Is the real need not for the citizen or the electorate to know the calculation that is taking place on how the ballot gets counted but rather what their vote will mean? In the Condorcet model, the weighted model that you spoke of, you effectively tell the elector that each candidate is preferred to all the other candidates in that riding. It's not a preferential ballot. It doesn't increase the seat magnitude in the district, but it does, in that case, deliver a candidate who is preferred to all other candidates by the greatest number of electors.

Is it important no matter what system of balloting you use that we allow the citizen to know what it means as opposed to how it is calculated?

[David Wasylciw]

Yes. I think what it means and where it's going or what it has done is important. I also think there has to be some place given to people looking at a ballot and saying, “Okay, this is what I'm doing”, especially when it matters if you put a second choice down; whereas if you don't put a second choice down, it may actually give more weight to your top candidate or your second candidate. There are a lot of implications from putting the extra choices down, and people have to understand that part of it and know what they're choosing to do or not do.

[Matt DeCourcey, Liberal, Fredericton, NB]

Yes, that's good advice.

That's four minutes and 59 seconds, by my count, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

You bet.

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

Gold star.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Gold star.

All right.

Mr. Deltell, please, you have the floor.

[Gérard Deltell, Conservative, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Gentlemen, it's a real pleasure for me to talk to you and listen to you. I'm from Quebec and I deeply appreciate being here. It will be last my comment this week. I deeply appreciate working with all of you. We've had a lot of fun and lots of seriousness, too.

Sherry, for the record, I really appreciate what you said a few minutes ago.

Gentlemen, I think we all recognize that the current system is anything but perfect and that there is a lot of distortion. We also recognize that there is no perfect system. If we change a bad system for another not-so-good system that is a real issue. The question is, are we ready to go there, and who are we to to decide?

Alexander—I will call you by your first name—when you talked about all the people who testified before our committee, the schooled people at our meetings, you said that they represent a very small minority and segment of the population, but they do not represent the average Canadian who is simply just trying to get by.

Don't you think the best way to know exactly what the average Canadian thinks is to ask the average Canadian? The best way to achieve the feeling and the mood of Canadians is to have a referendum, as we had in three provinces, as we saw in New Zealand, which had two referenda before and another after the new system was implemented, and as was suggested by the president of Elections Canada, who said a few days ago that if we cannot reach 75% support in the House of Commons, we should have a referendum. What is your position on that?

[Alexander Lambrecht]

Are you asking whether or not we should have a referendum?

[Gérard Deltell, Conservative, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

If we change the electoral system.

[Alexander Lambrecht]

Nothing is perfect in this world. It's a matter of how you look at everything. When we look at the results of first past the post, we understand what it means and we understand to a fault how you can exploit that system in your own interest. With a system like proportional representation, which has been used in many countries around the world and is starting to pick up in our own country, I think we need to stop looking for faults in everything and start learning from other people's mistakes as well as our own, look to places where things have worked, and not to spend 20 years doing consultations and studies on whether this is the right fit for whatever country we're talking about.

The electoral system in Canada needs to change. It needs to be more representational and proportional of Canadians, and it needs to get more people engaged, even if that means changing the system to get Canadians to have more confidence in the system. It can be explained to them and shown that it is a safe and secure system that is unexploitable unless it is the will of the voters to give 51% or more of the vote to a specific party or candidates to elect a majority government.

We don't have a room full of mothers and fathers and other people here. The people that we do have here are here for various reasons. I'm sure that we have some family people in this room right now. I have a son. I have a partner, and I have my son's family whom I support in various ways, but I don't represent all of Canada. I represent me and what makes me myself. Until we have people who are in poverty, people who are vulnerable, and homeless people coming in off the streets, only then will I say that we have heard from Canadians.

[Gérard Deltell, Conservative, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

David, what are your thoughts about that?

[David Wasylciw]

The simple answer to who represents the average Canadian is you. As much as you had different people presenting to the committee and different thoughts from across Canada, MPs represent Canadians. Like or dislike the way our voting system works, our MPs, whoever they happen to be, represent us. Whether you voted Green, Conservative, Liberal, or for anybody else, your MP is your MP, and they represent you.

I do strongly think that any vote on changing the electoral system ought to be a free vote in the House. I think it ought be reflective of what MPs are thinking and what they're getting from their ridings. I don't dislike the idea of maybe defaulting back to a referendum if there's not a supermajority of MPs. I would suggest, though, that a referendum probably means not much is going to change, just looking at the results elsewhere. I'm excited to see what happens in P.E.I. next month.

Ultimately, we have a representative democracy, and you're there to represent us. If it keeps coming back to us all the time, it just get expensive.

[Gérard Deltell, Conservative, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

On another point, very quickly, you said that we need to have a picture of the candidate on the ballot. What do you think of the suggestion that people have made to take out the name of the political party on the ballot and have only the name of the candidate with his picture?

[David Wasylciw]

I don't think it's a bad thing.

To be honest, I've been involved in territorial politics mostly because there aren't parties and because it's a consensus model. I think that's pretty neat. People can actually get in and try to do something and represent themselves and constituents. I don't think parties need to be the be-all and end-all, and certainly, in recent years, their importance of their strength has grown. I don't think it's a bad idea.

[Gérard Deltell, Conservative, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

All right. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Ms. Sahota.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Actually, I'd like to go on from that question. We've heard a lot from people who have stated that oftentimes they don't know who the local member is until after the election. Then they get to know who the local member is, but at the time of going to the polling station, they may only affiliate their vote to a party. In terms of moving towards some of these MMP systems, it's very party driven. You're voting for a party. The party is listed everywhere.

Going off that question, if we were to remove the party's name, let's say, from beside the candidate's name, would that lead to more confusion? At times now, I'm also finding in some demographics that there is some illiteracy, or that they don't know the language that the ballot is in very well. That symbol tends to be the marker to identify who they might be voting for, because they can't read the English language or the French language. What are your thoughts on that?

[David Wasylciw]

It certainly could present other challenges. I think that sometimes it's just easy to pick a party to vote for, and it doesn't really matter what the MP is saying. You're not going to worry about your candidate because they're saying whatever is being said in Ottawa by the party leader as they go around.

Perhaps that sort of system would lend more weight to what a particular candidate has to say or what they're thinking. If we were in a system with more power for MPs, it would be a bigger factor, frankly, in terms of what your MP candidate would be saying and what happens in Ottawa.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

I appreciated your comments about the language challenge here. I was just saying to my colleague that I don't understand why we can't just have.... You said there are 11 languages here. Why can't we just have ballots in all those languages? When you get to a polling station, you can request the language that you want to see your ballot in.

I don't think it would increase printing costs all that much, because you would be printing less in each language. It seems simple to me. Anyway, it is a thought for me to take away with this committee. In different regions that may have these particular issues with aboriginal communities, we should be looking at doing that. What do you think?

[David Wasylciw]

An important note to that, though, is that some of the languages aren't necessarily written languages. Many of them are in forms of written language, but not necessarily all of them. It wouldn't be an issue with every language, but it's a factor in some.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

I guess we can only do what we can do, right? For the written ones, we'd do that, and maybe the picture idea is a great one to take away from this discussion as well.

Education came up quite a lot. We've heard that from a lot of people. I think that another one of the main reasons we don't see as much public participation in elections, or even in forums like this one, in consultations, is due to not being able to get the word out and not having a good education system at the school level in terms of teaching governance and politics. I think that's definitely something we need to look towards to increase voter participation.

We also talked about incremental changes, and these are some ideas to perhaps make incremental changes to our system. What other incremental changes do you think we can make that wouldn't be drastic changes?

[David Wasylciw]

Many of them, I think, don't just have to do with the electoral system. I know your committee is limited to the electoral system; however, I think that a lot of these issues are multi-faceted—what happens in the House and the way the House works. There is the idea of a stronger role for MPs, the idea of taking the parties out of it, the idea of giving MPs more say on broad policy, the idea of moving to the Internet—perhaps Internet voting on the day of—as well as changing the way we do advanced voting and advanced polling as we create more and more opportunities. We are getting away from some of the original purpose of that, which was just to provide an alternative, but it's pushing campaigns earlier. We are doing a number of things, everything from changing the ballot to education, more open forums, and more ability to connect with candidates when they are running. I think that some of these little pieces, even when mixed with a wholesale change, can still do quite a bit.

There are a number of things. Even during campaigns, it's funny how much basic education you are doing: what an MP does, what an MLA does, how it actually works, why you are voting for them, and what they do that actually impacts you in your day-to-day life. People miss out on a lot of these things and think that everyone runs off to Ottawa and disappears, and occasionally taxes change, and that's about it. There are a lot of factors in the middle. I think a lot of it is education. A lot of it may be in the mechanics of voting, and how easy we make that, getting rid of any barriers around that, but also making it not just about convenience but also about the importance of civic duty.

I am a big fan of the voting holiday, making election day a really big event and having Elections Canada-driven parties or whatever else.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

I have a question on elections here. Do you not have translators available at the polling stations? Rather than having ballots written in different languages, are translators available?

[David Wasylciw]

I can't speak to the situation in the communities. It would be an Elections Canada thing. I'm not sure. Maybe somebody in—

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

In certain ridings, there is translation available. I was also thinking that for those who don't have a written language, that could be something—