Electoral Reform Committee on Oct. 4th, 2016

[Denis Falvey]

Maybe I'll give you an example. I wrote it out in one of the documents.

If you had a region consisting of 10 ridings—and we call districts and ridings the same thing—and the Green Party had 10% in each of the 10 ridings, they wouldn't elect anybody under our current system, but they would have one guaranteed seat under this system, SMDPR. Obviously, that seat would be a losing plurality, because 10% is not going to win under our current system. But that's how you decide how many seats they're going to get, based on how many votes they got in the region. Which person gets the seat depends on how the party's individual candidates are ranked within the party. Obviously, the top candidate gets the first shot at it.

In the riding I'm in, South Shore—St. Margarets, in the last election, the Liberal and the Conservative both ranked highly on their respective lists. Obviously, they can't both represent the same riding—at least not under this system that we designed—and the Liberal had the highest number of votes locally, so she would have won.

[John Aldag, Liberal, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

In that case, the Conservative, as you said, wouldn't be parachuted in somewhere, so it maintains the local connection.

[Denis Falvey]

No, that Conservative is out of it, but he would be replaced by some other Conservative in his own riding.

[John Aldag, Liberal, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

It makes a lot more sense. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you, Mr. Aldag.

Go ahead, Mr. MacGregor.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

I'm going to direct my questions to Mr. Risser and Mr. Falvey.

Under the rules that this committee is operating by, the second part of the mandate is one of the ones I'm interested in, especially where it talks about offering opportunities for inclusion of under-represented groups in the political process. That's very important for me because I hail from Vancouver Island, out in British Columbia. My riding is home to the largest first nation band in British Columbia. When you look at Canada's first nations and, indeed, many minorities, you'll see that the current look of our Parliament does not really accurately reflect under-represented groups.

I really appreciate the work that you've done in developing this system. I know starting anything from scratch and building it up into something is very hard.

You basically are taking the same first-past-the-post system in how you get the candidates but then rejigging the rules afterwards.

I wonder if you could both comment on the problem of under-represented groups in Canada. Would your system alleviate that, do you think? Could you offer some comments on that?

[Matt Risser]

First things first. I think we have to distinguish between what some people might call descriptive representation, meaning people like women and minorities and such in the House, and for lack of a better term, substantive representation, meaning that the views of minorities and women and such are better represented in policy and decision-making.

That also tends to get to this issue of fairness. When we talk about wasted votes, we should really distinguish between input fairness and output fairness. Canada has input fairness—nobody disputes that; every vote is counted fairly—but output fairness is that every vote counts fairly. I would say any system that provides equal voice for votes is going to provide greater diversity of substantive representation in our political system.

One comment we do get for SMDPR is whether there is a risk that it won't provide descriptive representation in that you're still running in the local ridings in the same way. I think there are two counter-arguments to that, which do seem a little counterintuitive. One is that by incentivizing parties to reach out at the local level no matter how well they've done in the past—you've always had an incentive to improve your voter percentage—you have to reach out to a broad range of groups, so you might want a candidate who is more diverse. I know Tony Hodgson used the male, pale, and stale line.

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

[Inaudible—Editor]

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Matt Risser]

Sorry.

The other thing is that, by not having to have every candidate obtain a plurality to win and by focusing more on parties as teams at the regional level, parties have a little more flexibility, I would argue, probably than they do under the current system, where the only thing that matters is the plurality vote at the riding level.

Denis, is there anything you want to say?

[Denis Falvey]

No, that was perfect.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Mr. Majka, I'll turn to you, sir, in the same vein.

I know that one thing is very clear: Canadians really want to have that geographic link to their member of Parliament. The question then is how we make that a bit fairer.

If you look at a mixed member proportional system, or indeed any proportional system, and you go to the issue of lists, how do you see the best system working: a closed list, which would allow parties to maybe put forward more minorities, or an open list where voters can actually have that choice of the actual person they want?

Do you want to go into that further?

[Christopher Majka]

This is an interesting trade-off there, and I very much agree with you that I think there are some real advantages to having a geographic linkage to representation. We have a very large and diverse country, and there is importance, I think, in having a geographically based opportunity to express that diversity. Within Canada we know we have distinctive cultures throughout the country, so those are very important things to consider.

In terms of the closed versus open criterion that you were mentioning, I'm a little agnostic in some sense about this. It's a bit six of one and half a dozen of another in terms of the trade-offs. All in all, possibly, closed lists are a better option, if we entrust parties to provide a wealth of representation and really good candidates that could fit in that category, and presumably within parties there's a certain amount of democratic discussion and debate in terms of how you form those kinds of lists and who should be prioritized and how. Even though that may be on an intra-party level, it nevertheless reflects democratic processes within the country.

I don't feel strongly one way or the other, but the geographical basis is a key distinction.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

We'll go now to Monsieur Rayes.

[Alain Rayes, Conservative, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Majka, you said in your presentation that if the voting system were replaced by some type of proportional system, there would perforce be an increase in voter turnout, which is one of the objectives of the committee, I believe.

That said, I would like to know the basis for that statement. I'll explain why.

Professor André Blais, from the Université de Montréal, gave a presentation at the House of Commons on the various voting systems. I believe he was accompanied by Ms. Antonia Maioni, from McGill University. For your information, in Quebec it is thought that Mr. Blais is probably the professor who has done the most research on proportional voting systems. We asked him if proportional voting systems led to a higher participation rate, and he answered that nothing pointed to that. He added that in the countries that used such systems, the increase or decrease in voter turnout was around 3%.

He stated that in fact, this type of system often increases the number of parties, which instead causes a decline in voter participation. The most striking example he gave was New Zealand. It is one of the few countries to have gone from a system like ours to a proportional system. It's a rather unusual case. And the voter turnout there has declined by 10% in 10 years.

I'd like to know the basis for your statement, or perception. The researchers could include that information in their report.

[Christopher Majka]

These are excellent questions. I can direct you to a document that's available on the Fair Vote Canada site. It's an extensive study, a meta study, as it were, done by Arend Lijphart, who looked at a whole series of metrics related to what happens when you introduce systems of proportional representation. One whole section of that is on voter turnout, in which he looks at a variety of states and a variety of time periods—elections—under which elections were conducted.

In any event, the summary of that is, with these controls in place, consensus democracies, in other words, ones that are running proportional representation systems, have approximately 7.5 percentage points higher turnout than majoritarian governments. That's a meta study of turnout in a number of jurisdictions.

The second part of the question about the small parties and the fragmentation of parties is also a very important one. In the previous panel there was some discussion about Israel being the classic illustration of that. In Israel, of course, there's a number of unique situations, including that even smaller parties are able to form coalitions, even though there is a threshold, I believe, of 3.25% in terms of representation. The coalitions then run. You can have a coalition of four or five different parties, and if the coalition receives more votes than the threshold, then each of those very, very small parties that might represent 1% or even less than that, end up having voices in the Knesset.

This leads to problematic outcomes, and I think that would not be a system that would be at all suitable in Canada.

[Alain Rayes, Conservative, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

Since we spoke about local representation several times, I am not going to go over that again. I am simply waiting for someone to convince me on proportionality.

One expert who spoke, not on the tour, but during the consultations in Ottawa, made a point I found interesting. I think he is the only one to have mentioned this. He cautioned us to be prudent when we talk about better representation of the votes, and to make a distinction between parliamentary representation and representation within government.

I'll explain what I mean. In various proportional models, when attempting to balance things with closed or open lists, the number of seats relates to the percentage of the national vote. For instance, the party that garnered the highest percentage of the vote, let's say 45%, and forms an alliance with a smaller party that obtained 7% or 8% of the vote, then has the majority of seats and takes power. However, a political party that obtained 35% of the vote might not be represented in the government, which ultimately makes the decisions.

I will summarize. That expert was making a distinction between parliamentary representation, that is the number of seats in Parliament, and representation within government. He advised us that if we are really aiming for representation within government, the vocabulary we use when we explain that is perhaps not adequate.

I'd like to hear your comments on that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

That is an interesting question, but you've already used up six minutes of your speaking time.

Mr. Majka, could you keep it to 10 seconds?

[Christopher Majka]

Very good.

This is an issue that faces all situations where coalition governments arise. You can get strange bedfellows and unusual political alliances. Sometimes one might wonder how just that is. In the end, though, it is an expression of a democracy.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you. I'm sorry, but we have to move on.

Go ahead, Ms. Romanado.

[Sherry Romanado, Liberal, Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC]

I'd like to thank our three panellists for being here today.

To the members of the audience, thank you so much for being here. It is my first time in Halifax, and it's a delight to be here.

I just want to get some clarity on your proposal. My colleague talked about the difficulty in recruiting candidates. How would your system impact people who possibly would want to run while knowing that, (a), you may win but you may lose, and (b), if you, heaven forbid, want to run where there is a stronghold, the likelihood of your getting elected is still very slim? For instance, if you are a Green Party candidate and you want to run in Alberta, the likelihood of you winning, even in your system, is very slim.

Trying to convince someone to run in a stronghold is hard enough without telling them, “You might actually win. You might get the most amount of votes, but because of the regionality of it, we'll take that win away.”

Could you elaborate on that?

[Matt Risser]

I wouldn't put it in those terms probably, but okay. The first thing I would say to somebody is that under this system, campaigns would probably be more collegial, simply because you're basically competing in a different way. You're not really out to suppress anybody's vote or beat anybody else. Really, what you're doing is trying to maybe send a positive message to the riding to up your own vote totals.

On the other part of the question, Denis, do you have any thoughts? I confess that I'm stumped.

[Denis Falvey]

Well, first of all, you know that any vote that's cast for you will count, which is a benefit. That is to say, it will count to support whatever partisan group you belong to. So you're not precluded, if you were running....

Let me back up. We don't know what would happen in Alberta, because it's always been under first past the post. Once you change that fundamental rule, things change.

[Sherry Romanado, Liberal, Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC]

Okay, but in your system....

For instance, we have strongholds. We all know there are certain strongholds in the country. Some have switched. For instance, Central Nova has historically been a Conservative riding, and in the last election it went to the Liberals. We heard from one citizen, I believe either in Vancouver or Victoria, who stood up and gave us testimony that her child is sad because their candidate never has a chance to win. Every time an election comes around, the child asks, “Mommy, did we win?” and she has to tell her child, no, Hedy Fry won, because she's been there....

Of course we love her to death, but how would you say to somebody who would want to run against an incumbent who has been there for years in a stronghold that they have a shot? Imagine the voters who are in that stronghold who have been hoping, saying this time their vote will count. Well, no, it actually won't count, because the likelihood of your candidate getting elected is still slim at the end of the day.

My flip point to this is with regard to the people who are in that riding who will vote for somebody who is not the stronghold incumbent. If you were to put it against the same current system, they still won't count. Then in fact you're actually strengthening parties, which is what we've heard as a complaint from some people who say the parties have too much power.

In your model, you're actually giving more power to the party and less to the individual candidate. The individual candidate may actually lose, but whatever votes they got went to the central party. If I wanted somebody in my riding to win who had no chance of winning but I still voted for them, the party got my vote, but in my riding itself, I didn't get my candidate. My candidate didn't win.

Wouldn't the same argument apply that we've been hearing about first past the post? I'm playing devil's advocate here.

[Matt Risser]

You've made essentially three points, and there are three answers.

We looked at a single vote proportional system to try to triangulate how this might work in Canada. We don't have one here. You're lucky, as the local candidate, if you get above 40% of the vote, let alone above 50%. Once you switch the incentive of the voting system and people have an incentive to go out and vote for the candidate of their choice, knowing that their vote does still count at a regional level—the vote might not count insofar as electing somebody in their local riding, but at the regional level their vote goes to elect someone—then I think you'll see strongholds to a large extent, as we understand them in a first-past-the-post system, obliterated. We tend to impose or transpose what we're used to onto what would be a new system. Everybody's vote is counted in that way.

I forget what your third point was.