Electoral Reform Committee on Oct. 5th, 2016

[Robert Ring]

I don't think it would take a few weeks for it to come in, but as you said, it could be a day or two, or it could even come in one night. Right away they'd know the results of half the ridings, and then as the polls closed in one province it could be finalized how many provincial members were elected and how many points were being transferred to the Atlantic region. I think it would be kind of exciting to see it step by step, and the transferring up, and then combining the points in each riding to see how many members were elected to represent the various regions. The polls would have to close all across the country before the last tier is done, the national region, so the results would come in bit by bit and more slowly, and Canadians might have to wait until the next day or two.

I do have the answer to the question from Mr. Scarpaleggia.

I just totalled it up, and of those 32 members, there were 20 Liberals, six Conservatives, five NDP, and one Green.

The remaining two members would be elected to the national region, and they would come from Atlantic Canada. What ends up happening is that each riding would elect two members: one member represents the riding, and the other member represents a larger region. Based on the points transferred from the Atlantic region to the national region, it would likely be an NDP member, and then the last one could be a Liberal, Conservative, or Green. That would depend on the points pooled.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you. That's very interesting.

We'll go to Mr. Cullen now, please.

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

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses for being here. Thanks to the public who have come by. We'll have some open mike time as well, for those who have thoughts that you'd like to share with us.

It's good to be in St. John's today. The Atlantic provinces have come up quite bit, in terms of looking at different systems and their effect.

Thank you very much, Mr. Ring, for not only coming up with a mode, but then trying to walk through what it would actually look like. I'm a maps person. I need to see the thing physically.

Real quick, each party would run two candidates. The ridings would be joined together. I'm assuming for some of the larger rural ridings, you'd also make two rural ones into one riding. Is that right?

[Robert Ring]

Yes.

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

One member is being directly elected. That's the result.

I'm looking for what the voter is going to see. They're going to see one member directly elected and one get elected through a proportional result by region.

[Robert Ring]

Yes, but that depends—

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

Region would be the province of Newfoundland and Labrador.

[Robert Ring]

Yes, the second member could represent Newfoundland and Labrador; it could be Atlantic Canada or national. However, in the riding, there would be two members in total.

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

So in St. John's–Mount Pearl, you'd have two MPs. It would be one riding: one proportional, one directly elected.

[Robert Ring]

Yes.

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

That's helpful.

Professor Bittner, thank you as well. You both said that we need to identify the problem, which we've spent a fair amount of time doing, because if you don't do that first....

And thank you for mentioning Kennedy Stewart's bill about changing the way that parties are reimbursed from the public. If you don't seek a better and more diverse field of candidates.... You can choose to do that under his bill, but you don't get as much money back from the public. Follow the money, as they say. It's a great incentive for parties. Because there is no electoral system—well, there are some electoral systems out there that really push....

We had a big change in this last election, yet we only saw a 1% gain in the number of women in Parliament. That ranks Canada as 64th in the world in terms of the number of women who sit in our national legislature, which is not what I think most Canadians would have expected or even know about. I find when I relate that Iraq and South Sudan and Afghanistan are doing better in terms of getting women into parliament, most Canadians don't believe me. However, Google confirms it.

I have a question around these trade-offs.

You talked about empowerment of local voices versus local MPs. We have proportional systems, and Mr. Ring has one here, but there are many others, as you know, that still have a local MP. I don't know if I'd see that necessarily as having to choose.

[Amanda Bittner]

You don't have to make a choice between those two things. Sorry, I totally interrupted you.

Often we tend to see those two things as being in opposition to one another, but certainly Mr. Ring's suggestion, and other mixed systems, could achieve some of those similar goals.

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

I'm looking at voices expressed in two ways.

One is the voice of the voter going into the ballot box and having that voice reflected in Parliament. I think that leads to some of those people being reflected in Parliament—the question you raised earlier—but also that sense of “I have some power here.” Voting, as one witness told us, is mostly an irrational act. One vote very rarely ever turns the tide of an election, yet collectively we know it matters.

However, how do we know and feel that it matters if, as in the last election, 9.2 million votes out of the 18 million votes that were cast elected nobody, were just an expression of something else? That's one thing I'd like you to address.

The second thing is—and this has often happened in Canada—what happens where entire regions, major metropolitan groups, are shut out entirely from government, or opposition, or sometimes both, which is a remarkable feat. You have entire groups of Canadians, like with the last Conservative government—Atlantic Canada, or Newfoundland, for example, or the entire cities of Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, for the most part—or you don't have voices in opposition.... I think those both need attention.

Our system sometimes drives us to where.... There are no opposition voices coming from Atlantic Canada right now. That matters for the country, but also for people who happen to not ascribe to the current government's ideas. This is what we're trying to solve.

Do you have any research or evidence around proportional systems or other systems, other than SMP, first past the post, that can help a country like Canada make sure there is regional representation in both opposition and government, as well as increasing the power of individual voters when they go to the ballot box, to know that their vote is going to matter?

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Fairly briefly, if you can

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

I'm sorry, it was a long question.

[Amanda Bittner]

Super briefly, no small task there.

I would say that probably the easiest way to look at this would be doing something similar to Robert's suggestion in that you have ridings where you add proportionality into the mix. You still have a clear regional representative however you choose to elect, whether it's by a system like his, some kind of mixed system, and so on.

The biggest issue, though—this is where the trade-off between that voice that you're speaking about and having a local rep becomes more tangible—is that, unless you grow the size of the legislature, which a lot of folks don't want to do, you end up with larger ridings where a person who represents me here comes from the other end of the island, let's say, or Labrador.

There are a lot of folks who argue that's not desirable. Personally, I'm not that big on regional representation. I think that we are exalting regional diversity over other forms of diversity, and I would actually rather see us prioritize other forms of quotas because that's what the system really does, it provides quotas for regions. We're saying that's the most important source of representation, which I don't think is actually a priority in the same way as I think that other forms of representation are.

Again, that goes to that issue of values, choices, and priorities. You could certainly achieve a local representative along with this larger voice that you speak of, this desire to not have wasted votes if you had a system change. That doesn't guarantee my other bigger priority, though, which is this issue of what kinds of people are getting elected. So, for me, that's the most important issue, and system change could lead to that, but not necessarily. That's where the tension is.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you very much.

Ms. May.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses. I'm one of the lucky MPs, having been in Cape Breton for much of my life. I was not a stranger to Newfoundland and Labrador, and it's great to be back. I think in all my time visiting St. John's, this is the best day I've ever seen. It's spectacular, so I'm feeling very lucky.

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

It's always like this.

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

Yes. It's just that they bring in the fog and the mist for tourists just for effect. Anyway, it's fantastic, and thank you for being here today.

I want to address a few of my questions to Robert Ring. Before I do that I wanted to mention to my friend John about the questions you put to Mr. Ring about lag times. It's easy to think that the PR systems are harder to count, but Australia's system, of course, is the majoritarian alternative vote system, not PR. And, of course, one of our more famous recent examples of a long lag time was first past the post hanging chads in the U.S.

Shawn Fraser, who had been at the University of Alberta—and there are some bright students at university coming up with great voting system ideas—came up with dual member proportional and, when asked how long that counting would take, he said 60 seconds, because he developed the mathematical calculations and the computer program to do it all.

But then your system is different because it has this overlay of the national region. So, before I ask you the next question, have you looked at the dual member proportional system in your research at Memorial? Did you look at the University of Alberta example from Mr. Fraser?

[Robert Ring]

When did that example come out?

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

It has been a couple of years now. It's actually one of the ones on the ballot in the P.E.I. plebiscite. The P.E.I. government picked up on it. It's a lot like yours, but let me go into places where I think it's different.

How many MPs in total do you have at the end of the day, or do you add in order to make your system work with two members per riding?

[Robert Ring]

There are a few that are added, just say, for the territories. They end up getting double. Labrador gets another one, because there has to be an even number per province in this system. So, if the province currently has an odd number of representatives, it would be divided by two and rounded up. So, Nova Scotia would have 12 instead of 11, and Newfoundland would have eight instead of seven, and that extra member is for Labrador, because I think it would be important to Labrador to ensure that they have their own riding as well.

To be fair to the north, they would remain as single-member ridings as well, because there would be two members elected in each riding. That would effectively double the representation of the north, but if you're looking at, say, six members out of 340-something, I don't think that's such a big deal.

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

I'm going to change my question. You've also referred to the national region. Is the national region another group of seats as well as the doubling to make sure that, say, the three territorial MPs are paired so that your system will work with two per riding, or am I misunderstanding the national region?

[Robert Ring]

The national region is all the leftover points that didn't reach the 50 mark in the smaller regions. They get transferred up, and it's only at that region where any rounding occurs. If you didn't reach 50 points, if you got 49 points, it would be transferred to the next region, but in the last region there would have to be some rounding. This is why this system is more proportional than other mixed systems because other mixed systems will round at the first top-up region.