Electoral Reform Committee on Oct. 4th, 2016

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

I'm fond of Mount Saint Vincent for many reasons, particularly for my friendship with Margaret Fulton.

I'm a big fan of consensus, as everyone around here knows. I'm like a broken record on how consensus decision-making could improve politics and democracy in Parliament. I'm wondering if I can't achieve consensus now, in my five minutes, between Professor Bickerton and Professor Dewar.

You said in your testimony, Professor Dewar, if I have this right, that politics is better with more accommodation and less partisanship. I'm firmly of the belief, as Professor Bickerton put forward from Alan Cairns' article, that first past the post encourages the worst form of behaviour from people in politics. I think all parliamentarians, or actually the ones just around this table, are essentially really good people, “people people”, and they want to work for our communities. But first past the post creates, as Professor Bickerton mentioned, “perverse partisan incentives to double down”.

Perhaps, Professor Bickerton, if you could attempt to persuade Professor Dewar that we're right—

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

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

—I will back off and cheer from the sidelines.

Partisan politics under first past the post is what creates the incentive for dog whistle politics, for wedge issues, instead of getting together and fixing things and working together, which is, I think, what Canadians want.

Over to you, Professor Bickerton. Give it your best shot.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[James Bickerton]

I didn't expect this, Ken.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[James Bickerton]

Well, I don't know; he heard my presentation. I suppose we could give your time over to how he would respond to my presentation.

I don't want to put age into the question here, but in my experience, the generation that came just before me is much more likely to be supportive of retaining the current system, and I think for very good reasons. They had a lot of life experience under that system, went through a lot of traumatic global events, and Canada actually fared very well in the end as a result of that. I think it would be the natural response to say that it really isn't broken, so why are we trying to fix something that isn't broken? That's a simplification of what Dr. Dewar was saying, but I think it is probably the commonly held perception by that generation.

I just think the polity has changed. The polity has changed quite dramatically. It's less deferential than it used to be and it's more demanding in terms of wanting politics to be done differently. I know that Professor Dewar said that we can change politics without changing the electoral system, but I'm neo-institutionalist in my approach. I believe that institutions shape political behaviour. I think we need to redesign our institutions if we want to redesign our political behaviour.

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

Are you persuaded?

[Kenneth Dewar]

I don't want to surprise you, but no.

I don't really want to talk about Senate reform, but there are other institutional reforms that could be made that would mitigate extreme partisanship. We won't get rid of partisanship no matter what system one has. That's what parties are about. They're about standing up for their own positions.

Tom Axworthy, who I believe testified before this committee, wrote a long paper about parliamentary reform for the Centre for the Study of Democracy and Diversity at Queen's University. It's about the House of Commons as well as the Senate. It's really an interesting document, because it extends beyond the walls of Parliament. He suggests, for example, that changes could be made in the committee system that perhaps would give greater power to chairs of committees—

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

That's a terrible idea.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Kenneth Dewar]

—and reduce the powers of vice-chairs.

I don't think the electoral system is the only way in to addressing problems of partisanship. I mean, it's interesting, isn't it? Really, my generation experienced a particular history, and there has been a very unsettled history in the last quarter century. It's very unsettled now. A famous political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, said that no politics is violence, or violence is no politics; it's not the extension of politics by other means.

I just lost my train of thought.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

I don't want to accumulate too much power in the position of the chair and give rise to an imperial chairmanship, but we'll go now to Ms. Sahota.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

I guess my question is along those lines, so you'll probably be able to sort through what you were thinking about.

What this committee is trying to do is provide Canadians with a system that has more benefits than flaws. You've kind of left us with a little bit of a cliffhanger, Professor Dewar, by saying that you weren't able to completely address the second part of your position.

One of the flaws with this system could be, as Professor Bickerton was saying, the undoing of undoing that occurs from government to government. Also, what we commonly hear from a lot of the open microphone sessions and people in our town halls is that their votes don't count, that the person they've been voting for their whole life never gets elected, or that they don't see themselves represented in the parties that are in power. That is probably the most common.

Then we also hear that coalition governments create better policies because of the collaborative atmosphere they create, which reduces the partisanship.

Could you comment on those things we're hearing, what your viewpoint is on that, and what the disadvantages or benefits from changing would be?

[Kenneth Dewar]

Is it unfair of me to use that question to finish the point I was going to make? I think it addresses the—

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

That's why I explained at the beginning that it's never too late to jump in.

[Kenneth Dewar]

I think I see the unsettlement that is very apparent in different parts of the world in the last five to 10 years as being in a longer period of unsettlement. That is, from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of neo-liberalism in the 1980s and into the 1990s, the traditional ideologies have become unstable, and there's a different discourse now. People might speak about class more than they did, but they don't speak about class. They speak about death, and they're concerned about gender and— There are all these other issues that have fed in that don't, as I understand them, fit into the kinds of boundaries of the politics of before, which defined the formation of government, and so on, in my time. If that means we are in a new era, and that's going to go on, then perhaps I should just give up and....

I think that's something that's actually going to settle out. Again, I think that with there being balances and trade-offs, coalition governments are the product of conciliation and accommodation, on the face of it. But coalition governments are also often sustained by a small party that represents relatively few voters, and it holds the balance of power. Then there's another election, and there's a slight adjustment of the numbers of votes, and so on, and who forms the government again maybe comes down to this small party. Maybe the government doesn't change very much.

There's a stability of politics. I know we're not talking about an Israeli system of voting, but Israel has had the same people in power for decades. I think the same can be said about Japan, though this borders on my knowledge. Also, all of that takes place behind closed doors.

It's true that, if you happen to vote for the Green Party, proportional representation will result in more than one member of Parliament being elected to the Greens. If we could be confident that every one of them would be as reasoned and balanced as Elizabeth May, that alone might be enough to switch my position. However, I don't think one can count on that. As I say, voters who vote for minority parties will be happier, but the end result of who forms the government and how it's maintained isn't necessarily going to be very clear to those voters.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

You have time for one last comment.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

That's okay.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

We'll go to Mr. Nater, please.

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

First, I do empathize with Professor Bickerton that his students' eyes glazed over. When I taught the introduction to political science course at King's University College, my students' eyes also glazed over. The way I got around that was by ordering pizza based on an electoral system. The first-past-the-post system resulted in pepperoni pizza. We tried single transferable vote on the B.C. model, but we just ran out of class time to actually order the pizza.

I kid you not. It was a lot of fun.

[A voice]

Did you try MMP?

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

We didn't try MMP. We just did the counting from it. We did have two days of pizza ordering based on an electoral system, so I do empathize with that.

I want to start with you, Professor Dewar, and some of the comments you made toward the end of your presentation on some of the drawbacks of an alternative system. You mentioned the proliferation of political parties, the challenge of MPs becoming representatives of parties rather than regional, and the reduction of ties to the riding.

We've had a fair bit of testimony on the reduction of ties. I'm not going to focus on that one. I'll focus on those two comments you made. On the proliferation of political parties, you were touching on that a little bit in response to Madam Sahota. I was wondering if you could expand on that, the proliferation of the party going beyond....

We know Duverger's law, how that typically says first past the post...small numbers...would see an increase.... How would that affect our political system? How would that affect our democracy, having a number of new parties? Some of them potentially might be fringe parties. I'm not talking about the Greens or the NDP, because I don't consider them fringe parties, but fringe parties beyond that would turn to the extreme. How would that affect that?

[Kenneth Dewar]

Jim would know better than I, but I think in the first election in New Zealand after proportional representation was introduced, there were 34 parties that ran—something like that—but not all of them achieved membership.

It isn't that one day we change and then the next day it's all going to change. Maybe I'm exaggerating my worries, but I think if I can put it another way, our experience with parties historically has been that they have performed nationalizing roles. I know not everybody agrees with that.

I think you had Kenneth Carty here early in your meetings, who argued this. I think also that one can broaden it, and I know that brokerage parties are supposed to be bad things—and I've criticized them myself—but brokerage parties have the merit of being open and bringing people together. I especially appreciate that today, when there are all sorts of other forces in society that are causing fragmentation, the Internet being the obvious one. Nobody reads the same newspaper anymore, and actually that's a good thing today in Halifax, because nobody's reading.... There are online blogs and various sources of news, where one reads for confirmation. So one reads and gets one's point of view confirmed, and I think that would aid this proliferation of parties I'm talking about.

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

The National Post this morning had an article about the Pirate Party potentially being in a position to win the election in Iceland. That's an interesting situation, probably the definition of where a fringe party might be in a position to do that.

I want to follow up a little bit on your second point about political parties. As we know, very few Canadians are actually members of political parties. There's a small minority, I know, from running for my nomination. We're talking about maybe 3% of the population.

Is there a challenge to the power being given to political parties in a sense? We talk about the dominance of the executive, as Professor Bickerton mentioned, but is there a challenge to it? Are we going to have a dominance of the political party, where there is even less of a democratic linkage in terms of that linkage to the voter, where people become representatives of the political party? Are we going to see a situation where people are even more likely to toe the party line than we see now in the Westminster system?