Thank you very much.
I'm honoured to be here today on behalf of the P.E.I. Advisory Council on the Status of Women. The advisory council is an arm's-length provincial government agency made up of members from across Prince Edward Island appointed to the council by the provincial government.
The provincial government strives to ensure that the appointments reflect diversity. Current members include women of a variety of ages, abilities, and backgrounds. We have members who are newcomers to Canada and to Prince Edward Island; and women who are part of the LGBTQ community, the francophone community, and indigenous communities.
The advisory council has a legislated mandate to advise the provincial government and to provide education to the general public on issues that affect the status of Prince Edward Island women. The under-representation of women at all levels of government is an issue that profoundly affects the status of women.
For more than 10 years, the advisory council has had a position in favour of proportional representation as an electoral system. We are persuaded by evidence from around the world that jurisdictions that use proportional representation systems tend to elect more women to their Parliaments for a variety of reasons. We advocated for proportional representation during Prince Edward Island's 2005 plebiscite. Today, in 2016, we are working very hard as part of the P.E.I. coalition for proportional representation to encourage Islanders to vote for proportional representation in the plebiscite that begins at the end of this month.
Because our mandate is provincial, when we talk about electoral reform, it's primarily in the context of electoral reform for Prince Edward Island. Our analysis is focused on the five electoral options that will be listed on the Prince Edward Island electoral reform plebiscite ballot, but I hope you will find these have some relevance for the federal discussion.
Along with the P.E.I. Coalition for Women in Government, from whom you'll hear in their own right this evening, we recently did some gender and diversity analysis—what is sometimes called GBA+ at the federal level—of the five electoral options for Prince Edward Island to determine which options support women's equality and greater diversity. We've provided copies of our full report entitled “A Preference for Equality” as a reference document.
The five ballot options on the P.E.I. plebiscite ballot include three winner-take-all options. These are the first-past-the-post system, first past the post plus leaders, and preferential voting as part of a winner-take-all system. There are two proportional representation electoral systems. These are dual-member proportional, which is a new mixed proportional system you'll hear more about later today, and mixed member proportional, which I think you've heard plenty about.
The model of mixed member proportional that's being proposed for P.E.I. is based on two-thirds of the seats being elected at the district level and one-third of seats elected from province-wide lists in an open-list model, where voters, not parties, directly choose the top candidates from that list. I made that distinction because it does have relevance to our analysis.
Our analysis of gender and diversity factors demonstrates, we believe, that proportional representation options have some distinct advantages in promoting some factors that are really important to us, with an increase in the number of women elected being the first and most important factor. The number of women elected under the first-past-the-post system has been stagnant or decreasing in P.E.I., and electoral systems worldwide that use PR elect an average of 8% more women.
We looked at the likelihood of more women, more diverse women, and more diverse candidates being elected from smaller parties, because smaller parties, the third and fourth parties in Prince Edward Island, have tended to nominate more women, more diverse women, and more diverse candidates overall, except as leaders.
The note about leaders is important because one of the options on the ballot—first past the post plus leaders—would almost certainly result in seats in the legislature for some third and fourth parties, but only for leaders. We've only had four female party leaders in P.E.I. history, among all the parties.
Promoting an increase in collaborative processes is another value according to which we assessed the options. Some women have described combative legislatures as a barrier to running for office, and some systems increase the likelihood of collaboration because they often result in a coalition being needed to advance the political agenda.
We next looked at promoting a decrease in negative campaigning because an electoral system that reduces the rewards of a personal or partisan attack in campaigning could be supportive of women. We know that negative campaigning is frequently influenced by biases about gender, race, class, ability, and other diversity factors. It should be noted that our analysis suggests that preferential voting would also have a positive affect on negative campaigning because it would reduce the rewards. Anyone seeking someone's second, third, or fourth ranking, if not their first ranking, doesn't want to run down opponents.
Those were the advantages we saw in proportional representation. Our further analysis suggested some specific advantages for mixed member systems as a result of the changes that would happen in the nomination processes. I can answer questions about those later.
As part of our analysis we also put together a quiz for Islanders to help them match their democratic values with the systems that are on offer in Prince Edward Island. Over 450 people have taken that quiz and the results so far are that 87% of respondents have stated a preference for democratic values that align best with one of the two proportional representation options that are on the P.E.I. plebiscite.