Electoral Reform Committee on Oct. 4th, 2016

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

Mr. Falvey may or may not want to answer this question. We were looking at a study out of Elections Manitoba that was asking non-voters, people who didn't vote in their previous provincial election, why not, and what would change their habit, i.e., would they vote if...? Half of the people who didn't vote said they would vote under a proportional system, one in which their vote went towards electing somebody somewhere. That motivation of voice or power is the strongest motivation, more than what day the voting is held and whether it's online or not.

That's just a comment, and I'm open to hearing your reactions to it.

Perhaps Mr. Majka can go first, and then Mr. Risser.

[Christopher Majka]

Yes, it's a very good point. There has been some excellent work by Frank Graves at EKOS that has looked at this issue of motivation. It's clearly important, and it's clearly more important the younger the age demographic of the people you're looking at.

Certainly my work in advocacy kind of bridges the gap between the academic perspective that you heard earlier today from the two political scientists here, or historians, and activists. That's a very salient issue. I'm getting a little long in the tooth and gray in the hair these days, but particularly some of my younger colleagues find the kind of frustrations that many people experience as a result of the first-past-the-post system really troubling to the point that they're dissuaded from political engagement. That, I think, is a serious issue. We see that Elections Canada has been tracking youth turnout since the year 2000, and over that time period, the youth turnout has been about half of what the regular turnout has been.

I think it's tremendously important in that context to look at electoral reform as a way not only of maintaining a healthy democracy but of really re-engaging those people, and not only young people—

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you very much.

Go ahead, Ms. May.

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

When Blake Richards was asking the question, he said something about not having one witness who has said that there's a perfect system, and it hit me that we did. We had one witness who said that—if you remember too, Sherry. We had Sean Graham in the Edmonton hearings who invented dual member proportional, which Matt did a brilliant job of summarizing to the last panel. It was brilliant. I was impressed.

I don't know how many of you were here when Matt was describing the dual member proportional, because he did it just right, but he said the region would be Atlantic Canada. I did pursue it with him afterwards. Let me just summarize it again.

His system was that we pair ridings. You'd elect two MPs. The first person would be elected on the current system, and the second person in that riding would be elected, essentially, under your system. Then the proportionality was by region. What irked Matt a bit, I think, was that Atlantic Canada was a region. But I pursued it with Sean Graham afterwards, and he said that with his system, by clustering rather large regions, you get down to only 3% of votes not being effective votes. But if you were to create smaller regions, such as provincial boundaries, it only creates up to 10% not effective votes.

It's one of the ones that I'm interested in. I'm obviously interested in any proportional voting system that fits the Canadian context, that respects rural and remote ridings, and that as much as possible avoids clustering ridings or having to have massive redistribution efforts that are costly.

Keeping the system familiar is, I think, what you've both tried to do. I appreciate that Mr. Falvey is more involved with having created the system, perhaps, but can't speak to it as well today, but you're both a good team.

I want to ask you whether you would see that as being an interesting system, because it's quite similar to yours, but I think if people get their first-past-the-post choice as one MP within a cluster of two ridings, that's still really local and still quite proportionate, if you've looked at that.

I want to ask Christopher Majka if he's looked at that as well, because it has similarities to MMP, but without having to have the list part. It's a bit of a hybrid for Canada, but quite adaptable to our current reality.

[Matt Risser]

The first thing I'd say is that in my opening remarks I did talk about these four things that can be changed to achieve electoral reform. I am familiar with dual member proportional, and Sean Graham and I think it's a perfectly acceptable system, as is any other system that achieves proportionality. Personally I like list PR the best, straight up, but I know I'm in the minority in Canada on that. If you look at these four criteria, that might give you an effective set of criteria to judge different systems. Ours is the only one that I'm familiar with that only changes one, but there are a number that can achieve proportionality with arguably only changing two. There's the dual member, the Baden-Württemberg, which I know has been raised a lot in the committee, and nearest runner-up MMP. Arguably you don't have to change the ballot—well, you don't have to change the ballot for any MMP system—and you wouldn't necessarily have to change the nature of MPs, arguably, because they're still highly localized.

All I would say to that is, you know, we're fine with any system. I think SMDPR deserves its day in court, as it were, but that might be a good way for you to judge alternatives, in terms of how much they change or how easy they will be to accept in the Canadian experience.

Regarding SMDPR, I should say too that the constitutional requirement, as far as I know, is only that provinces have a specific number of seats, right? It's a bit murky in terms of votes crossing boundaries to determine who gets elected in other provinces, but you could do SMDPR the same way, but that could lead to regionalization, so we recommended a more regional way.

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

Mr. Majka, do you have any comments? I should just admit that we are old friends. Christopher, do you have any comments?

[Christopher Majka]

Yes. I think there's an important balancing act in all of these discussions. Certainly, this committee is on the cutting edge of that, and I applaud your attempt. The balancing act is finding an electoral system that expresses well the political will and political convictions in the country—and in my view, various proportional approaches are the way to doing that—and Elizabeth, what you just mentioned, which is the comprehensibility of a system.

I happen to have a degree in mathematics, so formulae and complex ways of calculating votes and so forth are not dissuading to me, but I understand that it's an important selling job from the standpoint of parliamentarians to come across with a system that won't make people just tear their hair out and won't look completely opaque. That's really the cusp of the system.

For example, systems like MMP have certain disadvantages, but they seem very clear and comprehensible: you vote for a candidate; you vote for a party, and there are a couple of things you fill out. You can create larger districts with it, but it's not such an incredibly arcane approach that many Canadians might have a real problem in assimilating it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

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

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

The initial part of my questions will be for Mr. Risser and Mr. Falvey.

We had a few questions regarding this yesterday and the other day, too. As we are talking about this, I'm thinking about a different element of this now. We've been talking a lot about getting women to run. I have to say, as my colleague Sherry says often, I wasn't even thinking about how we cast ballots, how we don't cast ballots, or whether there's an alternative way when making my decision. One thing I was thinking about is what this campaign was going to look like. Previously, there had been some nasty campaign battles in my riding, and you think before running about whether you want to put your family through that.

We've been trying to figure out ways to create more collaborative government and decrease that toxicity. But to me, as I'm imagining the scenario of this system, it seems as if that toxicity would all be funnelled into the campaign portion of it, because you're no longer running against other candidates from other parties, but you're also running against your own candidates from your own party. Maybe a larger party might be able to deal with that, but give an example of smaller parties. How would they handle that kind of inner competition with each other? We went to Elizabeth May's riding, and she is very popular in Victoria. Say that we have to find Green candidates to run in the rest of Victoria, and essentially they'd be trying to get their percentage up higher than Elizabeth's. I think that would be hard to do. How would you convince them to run there? Would the party really increase in numbers, or would you just end up having not a lot people interested in participating in it?

[Matt Risser]

This is an argument that gets made against a lot of PR systems—open list, STV, etc.—that there's party fracturing, because you're running against members of your own party. All the research I've seen, and that's by no means exhaustive, says that it's really not that big a deal in those systems.

SMDPR actually prevents it, because you're running against people in your own party but not directly. You're running indirectly. If I'm the local candidate in a specific riding, and all the party votes are grouped, I'm not running against you, and I actually benefit by your doing well. Everybody is trying to do better than the next person, but there's no situation I can envision in which suppressing the votes of somebody else is going to benefit you.

We looked at this, and one of the things we settled on, too, was to rank candidates based on the percentage of the electorate, because that does two things. One, it disincentivizes voter suppression. If you did it by percentages of the vote in each riding, then you would incentivize some candidates to suppress the votes of others. Two, it allows for variable riding size. But all the incentives under SMDPR are for you to try to get your individual vote turnout as high as possible, and also to try to get your party's vote across the region as high as possible. There's no internal competition in that way, because if you're trying to drive down the votes of other candidates in your party in other ridings, you're actually making it harder for yourself to get elected. Right?

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

That's a good point, actually. I think you could think of it in both ways. Even the way the system runs now, I had people approaching me at times saying, “It's great how you guys are all a team. You're really focused on that team spirit in this election.” They would argue for that. Then there would be some old-school thinkers saying, “Oh, at the end of the day, you're still all in competition.”

It doesn't have to be that way. We don't have to think that way. The better all the people do in all the different ridings, the better the party does and the more seats you gain. Essentially we are a team. But I feel like there still would be a bit of a block because, yes, you want your colleagues to do well, but you don't want them to do better than you. You want to get that seat. In the system we currently have or in some of the other systems that have been proposed, I don't think that's necessarily the case.

[Denis Falvey]

You actually do want them to do better than you, because you get more seats that way. The more you drive up the vote percentage for your party, the more seats you're allotted. If your colleagues do better, there are more seats available for you to fill.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Of course the party would do better, but at the end of the day, I think the nature of a lot of people is to not always think about how much better off their party is in the long run. Oftentimes they think of individual motivations. I don't know; I hope that is the scenario. It is interesting. At any rate, it was just an aspect I hadn't thought about before. I thought I'd throw it out there to see whether or not it was a valid thought of mine.

I have a question for Mr. Majka, if I have more time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

You don't, actually. That was an interesting exchange. It was a very good point, I thought.

There's something I don't understand, so just to follow up on Ms. Sahota's point—

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

Chair, I was going to follow up on that when it was my turn. I have the same line of questioning.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Okay. Sure. But mine is more a point of clarification.

You said that the members of your party in the region doing well increases your chances as well. Could you explain that to me?

[Matt Risser]

The more votes in each region that your party gets, the more seats it's likely to get. Right?

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Right.

[Matt Risser]

They're allotted proportionally. By driving that up, you increase your own chances for election, because we rank each candidate in the local ridings to fill the seats.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Okay, thank you.

We'll go to Mr. Nater now.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

I might start with a quick question for clarification.

In response to Ms. Sahota's question, you mentioned something about looking at potentially the percentage of the electorate versus the percentage of the vote. Is that actually proposed in your model?

[Matt Risser]

Yes.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

It is. So it's a percentage of the electorate.

[Matt Risser]

It's not necessary, but we've given you a preferred model, and that includes it, yes.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

As a follow-up to that, often we see certain communities, certain demographics, who traditionally don't show up to vote, or don't show up to vote in higher numbers. Do you see a concern there with how that might disenfranchise certain communities who may not traditionally have higher voter turnout?