Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the members of the committee for inviting me to speak this afternoon. I'm honoured to be here.
My presentation is in two parts: first, a question, and second, in the written part of my submission, I've expanded on the brief I submitted earlier. In both parts I will find myself departing from the consensus to which Professor Bickerton referred.
My question is the following: What is the problem that electoral reform is designed to fix? It is a basic question that comes before questions of detail and implementation. I expect you've heard it asked before as you've moved day after day across the country. Judging by the critics of our current voting system and by the terms of reference of this committee, the problem lies with democracy. The current single member plurality system is undemocratic, or at least seriously deficient in its democratic qualities. I want to suggest that our problem in Canada is not with our democracy but with our politics.
“What is the difference”, you may ask, “aren't they related?” Yes, of course they are, and the origins of both can be traced to ancient Greece, but they are not the same thing. Democracy is a condition, a system, a state of things, whereas politics is an art, the “art of the possible”, to quote a famous book by Canadian political scientist James Eayrs. It is a thing in itself, not a subsidiary aspect of something else, such as democracy. This is also true of liberty and representative government. They too are things in themselves and are not necessarily aspects of democracy.
Politics is not practised in all systems. It is not practised in dictatorships, for example, or tyrannies, or absolute monarchies, or oligarchies, because the essence of politics is that it accepts the existence of different truths and therefore of the need for conciliation and deliberation. It's not the best means of achieving a pure ideal untouched by compromise, if that's what you're after, nor of pursuing one's own interests regardless of the interests of others. It's messy, even grubby. Politics in this sense is at the foundation of our public life. Really, it's a precondition of democracy.
Somehow we have managed to lose sight of this in recent years. Instead of seeing politics as one of the most honourable of human activities, many people regard it as a necessary evil, or even an unnecessary evil. On the one hand, many seem to think of politics purely in terms of partisanship. On the other hand, many regard politics, politicians, and government as problems in themselves. They turn to various forms of anti-politics. People speak of “mere politics”, implying that other activities, business being a prime example, are far more important. We see an extreme form of this in the current presidential election in the United States, where the rejection of politics and the civility it entails is made explicit at a high level in a way I've not seen on this continent in my lifetime.
Happily, civility has not disappeared from Canadian public life. I'm not sure why this is so. It may have something to do with culture. Canadians are so nice; when we are not apologizing to people, we are thanking them. It also has to do with our history. We never broke sharply with the mother country, as did the American colonies, creating something entirely new that thereafter could be used to justify various positions that claim to speak for the people. Instead, Canada evolved from colony to independent nationhood. Even this we did in so muddled a manner that even yet we continue to have ties in the form of a common monarch, whose children can evoke the kinds of sentiment that politicians could wish for, as we have seen in the past 10 days.
The continued existence of a monarch also means that in our democracy it is difficult to speak unreservedly of popular sovereignty. The crown is part of our Constitution. Arguably, in Canada, it would be more accurate to speak of parliamentary sovereignty rather than popular sovereignty, but this too has been limited since 1982 by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As Canadian historian William Kilbourn once wrote that Canadians are “a people of the law rather than the prophets.”
Whatever the explanation, civility continues to be highly regarded in our public life, but we should not think we are immune to the American disease. Occasional popular eruptions and overheated expressions of partisanship attest to this. I'm not sure I have any remedy to offer—and we might return to it in the question period—but I think cynicism about politics is a greater threat than cynicism about democracy.
There are other avenues than the electoral system to pursue in search of remedies for the political malaise. An example is the approach to Senate reform recently put forward by former senators Michael Kirby and Hugh Segal in a report for the Public Policy Forum. Kirby and Segal seek to give new life to the original conception of the Senate as an institution of sober second thought that constrains the actions of a majoritarian government. At the same time, they would place limits on the constraints since the Senate is an unelected body.
One way or another, it seems to me that we need to find ways of reviving a genuine politics, a politics that is primarily concerned with negotiation, persuasion, and accommodation, and less with partisanship. Political parties at their best serve as intermediaries between the public and government, a form of civil society, educating and leading their members and, in turn, communicating the preferences and concerns of their members to the legislature and the wider public. Far from being mere weapons of partisanship, they are critical instruments for bringing together men and women of varying views, with the end of arriving at policies and decisions that benefit society as a whole.
Another way of putting all this is to suggest that the committee direct its attention away from the practical consequences of various possible reforms of the electoral system and towards the ends which reform is intended to achieve. The committee's mandate is to study viable alternate voting systems, but the five principles set out in the resolution passed by Parliament could also be directed to a study of political practice. At the very least, I hope you will consider the wider context within which the electoral system operates.
In the second part of my presentation, which as I mentioned earlier is an expansion of the brief I sent in, I set out three ways in which I think proportional representation might make things worse than the way things are now. However, I have to stop there, because my time is up.
Thank you.