Electoral Reform Committee on Oct. 4th, 2016

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

Unless we really want to.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

In my humble opinion, when I heard it, I thought the same thing, so in the interest of factual, historical accuracy, I let that one go.

That said, I'll keep your point in mind, Mr. Cullen, for the future.

[William Zimmerman, As an Individual]

I think the fact is wrong. I think there were two referenda prior to the adoption.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

That's what we just said, yes.

[William Zimmerman]

There were two prior and one after.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Right. Okay.

Mr. Zimmerman, you have two minutes, please.

[William Zimmerman]

I would hypothesize that one of the biggest electoral reforms ever to happen in this country was giving women the vote in 1918. It doubled the number of people voting in the next election. In that next election, we ended a 50-year period in Canada of essentially a two party system, where we alternated between parties. That was the first election, in 1921, in which a viable third option was presented. Since then we have seen that develop into more and more parties. How many parties were there in the last election? There were probably 20 actual parties. Not just three, four, or five, but almost 20 parties had candidates running.

I would suggest that one of the reasons this happened is that with women beginning to vote, we ceased to have battles purely for dominance in elections. We actually had people who came forward wanting to advance other causes and improve the way the country worked. It wasn't just, “You're in and we're out.”

I asked somebody in a fairly high position in a political party in this province, while I was covering a meeting in Halifax for CBC, if they could explain the real difference between the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party. His answer was this: “They're in and we're out.” The fact is that if elections are simply a battle for dominance, then the two party system and first past the post works, but when we start talking about more complex ideas, we need to have a more complex electoral system. I would argue that proportional representation is an essential part of that.

I'm not supposed to ask you questions, but how many of you are familiar with the book Tragedy in the Commons? I think it's very important to realize that there are multiple functions of a member of Parliament. Very often, members from the backbench have found their sole expression in terms of doing constituency work. That's a valuable thing, and that's one of the reasons we want to have local representation. I go to my MP periodically and talk to him about what I think should be happening, and I get a blank stare because it doesn't correspond with what he wants to happen. I don't feel I'm being adequately represented, and I think it's important for us to be adequately represented.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you very much.

Go ahead, Mr. Howard Epstein.

[Howard Epstein, As an Individual]

Thank you very much. As you know, of course, you're dealing with a complex and multi-faceted exercise to strengthen democratic institutions, of which the voting system is one very important aspect.

I'm a retired lawyer. I am also retired from teaching law part-time at Dalhousie University's law school, but probably more directly relevant to your quest is the fact that I have been elected seven times in central Halifax, twice to city council and five times as a provincial MLA. My party is the NDP. I'm not here on behalf of the provincial party, let alone the federal party, which has its own representatives.

Given my electoral experience, I have benefited from single member plurality voting. I have, however, no strong attachment to it. I support moving to mixed member proportional representation in some form. The central reason is that citizens have more communities of interest than their geographic location. Single member plurality voting does not account for that, whereas mixed member proportional representation does.

If we move to a different system, we're likely to have a more diverse and therefore more representative House of Commons. At the same time, MPs need to be accountable to citizens, and a geographic tie is an efficient and easily understood way to achieve that. Hence, MMPR combines party affiliation with a geographical link.

I want to offer two examples of the general problem with the existing system.

In the Nova Scotia provincial election of 1945, of the 30 seats in the legislature, 28 were won by the Liberal Party, and two were won by the CCF in very feisty ridings in Cape Breton. The point is that the Conservative Party, with some 30% or 40% of the vote, I believe, won zero seats.

The other more recent example, of course, is the complete exclusion of any party except the Liberals in Atlantic Canada. Of the criticisms that are sometimes directed towards proportional representation, the chief one seems to be that it tends to produce minority governments. Having sat through a number of minority governments, I have no problem with them. They can, in fact, be quite flexible.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you very much.

Go ahead, Ms. Nan McFadgen.

[Nan McFadgen, As an Individual]

My name is Nan McFadgen and I am the president of CUPE Nova Scotia. CUPE Nova Scotia represents more than 18,000 front-line public sector workers in education, health care, elder care, child care, municipal government, community services, transportation, and post-secondary education. I want to thank the committee for the opportunity to speak.

I feel that Canada's current electoral system of first past the post needs to change. We can't continue to have political parties get a majority of seats when they only get a minority of the votes. Too many people feel that their vote doesn't count and that their opinions don't matter. Fewer and fewer people are getting out to vote. I don't see this as being good for our democracy.

We support a move to proportional representation. Proportional representation would ensure that the proportion of seats the party gets in the House of Commons is about the same as the proportion of the votes it received. This to me seems fair. Many countries, as many have said, already have proportional representation. These include Scotland, Wales, New Zealand, and Germany.

A new system needs to keep a connection to our local MPs. People need to feel that someone represents them and their community. Mixed member proportional representation would make sure we keep a connection to an MP like we have now and a fair proportion of overall seats. It would mean one ballot and two votes. One vote would go to elect an MP and the other vote would go to elect a party.

We feel mixed member proportional representation is the best solution to encourage greater democratic participation by voters and a fair result at the polls.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thanks very much.

We'll hear from Marlene Wells.

[Marlene Wells, As an Individual]

My name is Marlene Wells. I came here today from Stellarton in Pictou County, Nova Scotia.

The first-past-the-post system was designed and adopted a bit haphazardly before there was even reference to political parties. When we started voting, it was a simple “us against them” system designed by honourable men who represented their constituents. Since that time, we have evolved into more complex people who have diverging views on most issues, but we have a common goal to do better for our electorate.

Everything else in our society has evolved. Women have the right to vote. LGBTQ people have marital equality. We get news in real time through sources like Twitter. In municipal elections this year I can vote by Internet or by telephone. I can communicate with my family all over the country in real time, face to face. We also have people living in space. All of these things are life-changing events for the betterment of our Canadian values, representing all of our Canadian values.

With 19 political parties registered in Canada representing the entirety of Canadian values, shouldn't all of the votes for all of those parties count in an election, and the resulting Parliament be elected for the people by the people? Proportional representation is the only way we can ensure that every vote counts.

The evolution of the Canadian polity requires an evolution of our electoral system. Now is the time, and you have the baton.

I have been working very hard to get people out to your committee meetings over the past couple of months, through phone calls, Twitter, and email. Along the way, I've been asking people to thank you for your service. I am humbled to stand before you today and thank you in person. Thank you for taking on this mammoth task. Thank you for enduring your gruelling schedule. Thank you for criss-crossing our amazing country and listening to people like me. Thank you from the bottom of my political junkie heart.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you for your kind words. Thank you very much.

Mr. Stephen Chafe, go ahead.

[Stephen Chafe, As an Individual]

I want to keep my comment fairly brief. Thank you for letting me speak tonight.

There was mention earlier of no perfect system. I would disagree. I would say there is a sixth option to what has been discussed here.

I would probably have liked to make a larger presentation to the audience and the group here at the moment, but I didn't really come prepared for that today. I came to ask a question.

Over the course of these discussions has there been any consideration for the idea of an interactive democracy in this country? We are talking a lot about proportional representation, but there are other options from a democratic point of view that don't seem to have been considered or put on the table.

One idea I had is called the 30-30-30 system, but I won't go into the details of it right now. Suffice it to say, it would leave the system as it is now, but insert a layer in between the voters and the existing parliamentary system whereby voters could influence what their individual representatives vote for through micro-referendums. This would get around some of the issues of partisan politics as well as a few other things that were mentioned here today and are considered roadblocks to the whole process.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

I would encourage you, if you could put your thoughts down in less than 3,000 words—

[Stephen Chafe]

I can definitely do that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

You can send it to the committee. It will be translated and put on the website. Anyone can do this, of course. Also, there is an electronic questionnaire on the website. Friday is the deadline for submitting a brief, as I suggested, and for answering the electronic questionnaire, but it's only Monday so there's still time. Oh, it's Tuesday. It's true that we have been travelling quite a bit. It's Tuesday, but there are still three days left to do that.

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

If it's Halifax, it must be Tuesday.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Yes.

I would encourage you to do that, Mr. Chafe.

[Stephen Chafe]

Thank you very much, sir.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Is Mark Cunningham here?

[A voice]

He had to leave.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

He had to leave. Okay.

Go ahead, Ms. Suzanne MacNeil.

[Suzanne MacNeil, As an Individual]

Thank you so much.

My name is Suzanne MacNeil. I'm president of the Halifax-Dartmouth and District Labour Council, representing 25,000 unionized workers across all sectors and in multiple unions across the Halifax regional municipality.

I'm here to put in a word for some system of proportional representation as we consider electoral reform. The bottom line that I want to bring from our workers is that the system we have now needs change. We inherited first past the post from colonial Britain. A few things have changed in our country since 1867.

We would suggest that we're not necessarily married to any one system or another of proportional representation. We do have a number of good things to say about the mixed member representation, but our main point here is that no party should be able to win a majority of seats without a majority of votes.

The second point is that any electoral reform must include some system of proportionality. In a number of the discussions about electoral reform across this country, we've also heard about alternative voting or ranked balloting. Our concern is that this could actually compound some of the problems we have with our current system of first past the post. We would urge the committee to consider that as something that's not desirable.

The other thing I want to emphasize is that as district labour councils, we do a lot of grassroots work in our community. One of the biggest things we hear workers and their families and citizens in general say about the voting process is that they're worried that they're going to waste their vote. There's a really big psychological disincentive toward voting for someone who you think won't get in. Or there might be strategic considerations. Oftentimes we try to argue with people that, no, it is their democratic right to vote for who they want, but our system still really provides a counter to that argument that we try to make.

I would draw your attention to the results of our last election, in which nine million votes did not contribute to electing someone. That's nine million wasted votes. That's the population of the prairie provinces and the Atlantic combined.

Thanks.