Electoral Reform Committee on Oct. 4th, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

That's right, yes.

[Aubrey Fricker]

Okay. Here are the key ones.

Our government was evolved to provide us with representation in two forms. The first is a body to express our societal values, and the second is a body to express our interests. Historically, humanity was organized geographically, and a country was a composite of domains, so both our values and our interests needed geographic representation.

Representing societal values was achieved by elections within a constituency. Our values need selected representatives and a meeting place for them to have discussions. All citizens must join in the selecting of that person. There should be a sanction attached for not participating. There should be an ongoing healthy dialogue and rapport between citizens and their representative. It means that citizens must focus on the qualities of the person whom they will choose and not on a party or leader.

It's clear to me that the system that will most encourage this is not first past the post nor proportional representation, but is preferential voting. If we have to rank each of the candidates, then we're going to spend more time thinking about them. I can advance no better structure for achieving that than geographic constituencies.

In summary, please give us preferential voting by geographic constituency for the House, and nomination by the interest organizations with the most subscribers across Canada for the Senate.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you very much.

Go ahead, Mr. Sokolov, for two minutes.

[Daniel Sokolov, As an Individual]

Good evening. Welcome to Nova Scotia. Thanks for coming here.

My name is Daniel Sokolov, and I've been an election officer many times, for the last three elections as a deputy returning officer. I wanted to offer you something from the front lines. I was not high ranking; I was actually dealing with all the voters.

I think that proportional representation is the way to go. But whatever way you go, keep it simple.

I heard the gentleman before talking about other voting systems in which you rank candidates. My experience from the front line is that for certain segments of the electorate, doing that would be too complicated. For people who are educated or for people who have studied election systems for a while, the meaning of simple may be very different. I don't mean any disrespect to anyone, but it is amazing what you encounter at the polls; and those are the people who actually want to come, who take the effort to put on clothes and go out and make a public statement, “Here I am. I want to vote”.

[A voice]

They put on clothes?

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Daniel Sokolov]

Well, they do here in Nova Scotia.

I think that the ranking has its academic advantages definitely, but I think it's just too complicated for certain people. It would overwhelm and frustrate some of them, so please keep it simple.

The second thing I want to touch on has to do with my professional side. I've been in IT, information technology, for about 15 years. There are many great applications for IT and the Internet, but voting is not one of them, so I urge you to stay away from electronic voting. There are companies that invite you to nice dinners and that tout their systems. We have an election here in Halifax that uses that. Personally, I think it's a disaster. It leads to lower voter turnout. You have probably also heard about the many problems with its security, identification of voters, and outside influence.

I also want to touch on two very different things that are not actually related to technology, and those are things that you can't solve and that e-voting undermines. One is trust in the voting system, and the other thing is the ceremonial aspect of voting. All important things in our lives involve a ceremony: when we get baptized or not, when we finish school, when we get elected, when we get a degree, when we get married. All these things are ceremonies. Going out to vote is a ceremony that underscores the importance of voting. If you do it on your phone while you're on the loo, like liking someone on Facebook, I don't think that's the way our political system should go.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

Go ahead, please, Mr. MacGillivray.

[Francis MacGillivray, As an Individual]

Thank you for listening.

It was appropriate that I walked by the Nova Scotia Legislature on the way here today, just a block away, because that's the place where representative government started in Canada. It's also the first place for responsible government outside of Britain. Nova Scotia is a place where representative government started, and I'd like to make the argument that proportional representation would effectively erode or destroy representational government.

Representational government is about representing people, not parties. The House of Commons is the house of commoners; it's not a house of parties. It may amount to that somewhat in practice, but that's not something we want to push forward any more.

Governments govern and MPs represent constituents, but the parties' raison d'être is power. We know a government is doing a good job when it has good governance. An MP is doing his or her job when he or she provides good representation. But a party is doing a good job when it's working towards power.

This is basically a complaint about the party system and how giving seats that are just going to represent parties is a bad thing. MPs' votes are whipped. Extreme retaliation faces an MP who votes against his or her party. We know MP Bill Casey is a local hero because he voted against a party in power, against a money bill. I'd argue he's a hero, not because he voted against an unpopular party or was supporting Nova Scotia but I think he's a local hero because he represented himself and not the party. He went against the party.

Free votes are a rare thing. That's because of the party system. Imagine if every vote were a free vote. The only MP who can really have a free vote is an independent MP.

I could go on. Parties move to the political centre as they get closer to power, because that's the objective of the party system. Look at the surreal situation in the United States, where Republicans who don't necessarily like their leader are going to hold their nose and vote anyway because they support their party. It's all about the party.

The antagonistic nature of the House, I would also argue, is based on the party system.

Everybody has their pet arguments as to what's wrong with politics. My argument is that it's the party system. I note that a lot of you people are members of parties. Like-minded people will get together and talk about things that are important to them and move things forward, so we'll always have the party system.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you. That's a fresh perspective on the issue. We haven't heard too much on that.

[Francis MacGillivray]

In summary, I think that to give the parties a member of Parliament who would vote for them and not their constituents would be the wrong move.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thanks very much.

Mr. Chris Maxwell, go ahead.

[Chris Maxwell, As an Individual]

To start, I think first past the post leads to distortions and a significant disconnect between voter intention and results. It could also lead to strategic voting, which creates a second level of distortion between stated preference and actual preference.

I believe most people are voting for ideas rather than people, even though we have the formal voting for the person. However, I'm also not willing to give up on the possibility of calling my MP. I would like a system that does have some sort of MP who is mine, even if there's one or more of them. In terms of simplicity, I do still like the idea of a ranked ballot. It's possible that maybe, just with an implementation that an X means one and nobody else, that's an adequate addressing of the actual boots-on-the-ground issue. It is complicated.

I also want to talk about mandatory voting, Internet voting, and young people who are of voting age. With mandatory voting, I think it just papers over the problem. If we're concerned about people not coming out to vote, I think it's that they're more disengaged as opposed to lacking an incentive to show up to the polls. I'd prefer if we didn't have people walking into a voting booth, blindfolded, playing “pin the tail on the ballot”.

As an IT person, I would like to repeat the concerns about Internet voting. We have seen the experience with voting machines below the border. They're programmed to trick the voter into choosing against their actual preference. The straight-up reporting of inaccurate results....

How much time do I have?

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

You have another few seconds. You just made your point about Internet voting.

[Chris Maxwell]

Yes. In terms of ID requirements, we've already brought in better ID requirements. Now I can just pick up about 25 voting cards from the lobby of my apartment building and....

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

Mr. Alan Ruffman, go ahead, please.

[Alan Ruffman, As an Individual]

Francis, I have to be impressed by your memory. You were bang on.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Alan Ruffman]

I do remember Clifford's intense interest, and yours. The American scavengers, however, got the better of us. Canada chose not to defend the wreck, even though it ended up inside our juridical limit under Law of the Sea.

I'll speak very briefly about geography. Geography does matter, and in Canada, size matters. In effect, the issue I want to lay before you is that certain MPs have a whole lot more environment to be concerned with. If we consider that the environment of Canada is important, and will become increasingly important, whether it's preservation of species, preservation of enough fresh water for everyone, or ocean species, we have to think about environment.

Now, how the hell do you represent environment or the amount of coastline or fresh water in some sort of voting system? None of the polar bears that are getting wiped out on the west coast of Hudson's Bay, and none of the mainland moose that are just a little bit north of us, have a vote or even know that it's going on, but their livelihood and their survival as species depend upon a large number of MPs acting in concert to preserve their environment.

I'll leave that with you. I don't have a solution for it, but I will point out that just north of here, they're arguing about striped bass. The striped bass are in the Shubenacadie River, which is the border between Colchester and East Hants. Why the hell is the river a border? It's because people couldn't cross borders at one time, so we made the rivers the borders for constituencies. Now we have bridges and a lot of other ways of going over those boundaries.

Those are just a few thoughts.

Thanks very much for coming.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you very much, Dr. Ruffman.

Go ahead, Ms. Dawson-Murphy.

[Hannah Dawson-Murphy, As an Individual]

Hi, everyone. Thank you for coming to Halifax and taking the time to listen to Canadians. However, I and many others feel that this is not enough to justify changing the way we have been voting since Confederation.

We've heard that there have been over 150 town halls in Canada by members of Parliament. I attended two, one in my riding of West Nova, and also the one in Kings—Hants where I attend Acadia University. Both of these town halls had no more than 30 people at them, and one of them only had 10. Other attendees, along with myself, who don't see eye to eye with our members of Parliament in those ridings, felt they were not heard or really respected while giving our opinions.

I feel that a referendum would give every single person in this country a say in the matter. It's extremely important, in my point of view, that we hold a referendum and give every single person a say in the system that this committee chooses.

Again, I want to thank you all for coming to Atlantic Canada and hearing my concerns, along with everybody else's concerns. I really hope you all work in a non-partisan way to support having a referendum.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you very much.

But first we'll have Mr. Zurawski.

[Richard Zurawski, As an Individual]

Thank you very much for taking the time to have me here, and thank you very much for taking the time to be here.

I'm extremely interested in what goes on in the environment and what happens to our planet. If anything, in the last 10 years, the preceding government has shown me that first past the post gives us a non-secular government with dogmatic approaches, which actually causes such great regression that our environment is threatened. Our scientists were muzzled, vested interests had a toehold in our way of government, and neo-liberal perspectives and inadvertent totalitarianism gained hold in Canada. I don't see that as being a good thing.

What I would like to see is a form of proportional representation, because it does have the potential to prevent this type of government from gaining hold again, and it does prevent secularity from working its way into the government. What I'm intensely interested in is resolving some of the great problems facing us today related to the environment, climate change, species depletion, and the great extinctions that are happening around us.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

Mr. McMillan, the mike is yours for two minutes.

[Matthew McMillan, As an Individual]

I'm sorry, I'm not the most polished public speaker, but I think I have some valid points to make.

First of all, I'd like to say that I do support proportional representation. However, besides that, I'm worried that we might be threatening the advances made with proportional representation if we also go ahead and allow electronic voting or Internet voting, or even electronic vote counting.

I was very disappointed to hear Marc Mayrand suggest that we should have electronic vote counting in the future. Recently, the supreme court of Germany decided that electronic vote counting was against their constitution because of the threats to the transparent election process. I think it's very important to have transparency in our electoral processes. I really hope that you recommend to the government not to go ahead with any form of electronic voting.

That's probably two minutes, is it?