Evidence of meeting #38 for Electoral Reform in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was pei.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Leonard Russell  Chair, Commission on P.E.I.’s Electoral Future
Jordan Brown  Chair, Legislative Assembly of Prince Edward Island, Special Legislative Committee on Democratic Renewal
Jane Ledwell  Executive Director, P.E.I. Advisory Council on the Status of Women
Marcia Carroll  Executive Director, PEI Council of People with Disabilities
Marie Burge  Member, Cooper Institute
George Hunter  As an Individual
Brenda Oslawsky  As an Individual
Mary Cowper-Smith  As an Individual
Sylvia Poirier  As an Individual
Judy Shaw  As an Individual
Donna Dingwell  As an Individual
Lewis Newman  As an Individual
Darcie Lanthier  As an Individual
Josh Underhay  As an Individual
Leo Cheverie  As an Individual
Anna Keenan  As an Individual
Dawn Wilson  Executive Director, PEI Coalition for Women in Government
Don Desserud  Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Prince Edward Island, As an Individual
Peter Bevan-Baker  As an Individual
Eleanor Reddin  As an Individual
Lucy Morkunas  As an Individual
Teresa Doyle  As an Individual
Philip Brown  As an Individual
Ron MacMillan  As an Individual
Peter Kizoff  As an Individual
Patrick Reid  As an Individual

1:35 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

Welcome to the 38th meeting of the Special Committee on Electoral Reform.

It's a great pleasure to be here in Charlottetown on such a beautiful day and in such a beautiful setting to discuss the issue of electoral reform with individuals who, in a sense, have been paving the way because of their involvement in implementing the idea here in Prince Edward Island. I feel like we're at an industry event where we're exchanging best practices and experiences with our counterparts.

This is a wonderful opportunity for the committee to learn so much from both of you.

The way we proceed is each witness has 10 minutes to present. Then we have one full round of questioning where each member of the committee gets to engage with the witness for about five minutes, and that includes the questions and the answers. If you feel that, because we're over time, you weren't able to fully express your idea, you may of course continue on a thought the next time you have the microphone. There shouldn't be any worries about that or any problems with respect to not getting everything in.

We'll start with the first witness, Mr. Leonard Russell, chair of the Commission on P.E.I.'s Electoral Future. You have 10 minutes, please, sir.

1:35 p.m.

Leonard Russell Chair, Commission on P.E.I.’s Electoral Future

Thank you very much.

I need to say first that my wife thanks you for getting me out of the house.

1:35 p.m.

Voices

Oh, oh!

1:35 p.m.

Chair, Commission on P.E.I.’s Electoral Future

Leonard Russell

It has been 11 years since I chaired the electoral reform commission. It took some scratching and digging to try to bring forward some memories so that I could sit next to someone who is working on something currently. Let me give you a little background.

The electoral future commission that I chaired filed a report in 2005. The P.E.I. legislature had been lukewarm or hot on the topic of electoral reform for a number of years. In April 2002, there was a report on proportional representation, which was provided to the legislature from the then chief electoral officer of the province. It was a survey document. The legislature at that time got to read about or look at a range of voting alternatives that might be available to them.

In December 2003, as a follow-up to that, the legislature named former chief justice Norman Carruthers to look a little more intensely at the options that had been presented earlier by Mr. Wigginton. He provided another survey report, but he tightened it. In it he recommended to the legislature that they pursue mixed member proportional.

In the fall of 2004, the legislature, on the strength of that report, passed a motion to create the Commission on P.E.I.'s Electoral Future. In January 2005, that commission was put in place. It was an eight-person commission. The legislature attempted to ensure that it was a cross-section of the province, and that political parties were represented.

In the fall of 2005, our group presented its report. Our task was a narrow one. The two prior to us had a broader task; ours was narrow. The legislature had already accepted mixed member proportional. We were asked to devise an educational program that would explain to the public the difference between first past the post and mixed member proportional. We were to prepare an educational package. We were to recommend the wording of a plebiscite question, and we were put on a very tight timeline.

There were posters, pamphlets, radio and TV, and some 20 small groups in addition to a dozen planned meetings that we held across the province to try to ensure that we got out to as many people as possible.

There was some push-back to what we were doing. Obviously, some people thought we were promoting mixed member proportional, and folks had an objection to that, for whatever reason, when, indeed, what we were attempting to do was show that mixed member proportional held up against first past the post, which we kind of assumed most people had a handle on, but maybe they didn't.

Our role, then, was simply to prepare folks for the plebiscite that was to come. We devised a question. The question of the day was: Should Prince Edward Island change to the mixed member proportional system as presented by the Commission on P.E.I.'s Electoral Future? There was a plebiscite on November 28, 2005. There were 32,361 ballots cast, and 63.58% of the good ballots said no.

I might just say that, after 11 years, it would be almost impossible to find a number of copies of each of the things that we used. I do have a final report in both English and French. I have a copy, if needed, of the Norman Carruthers work and the one that came from the chief electoral officer, and so on.

Maybe I'll just stop there.

1:40 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

Thank you very much, Mr. Russell, for that history of the issue here in Prince Edward Island.

We'll go now to Mr. Brown for 10 minutes.

1:40 p.m.

Jordan Brown Chair, Legislative Assembly of Prince Edward Island, Special Legislative Committee on Democratic Renewal

Thank you very much, and welcome to Charlottetown. We arranged the nice weather just for you, and this room perhaps as well.

Our clerk provided materials which I understand you have, or will have, on your iPads. I have a print copy here. They include the Carruthers report, which I would really commend to you folks. It's like a textbook on electoral reform. It has a lot of the laws that were relevant at that time, which have not changed that much since. It has some history and some background, and different systems that are used throughout the world for consideration. It also has some demographic information relevant to Prince Edward Island, which is perhaps not as useful, but may offer some good context. Our two interim reports are in there. Leonard's report is in there as well.

I hope those will provide you with some context. My speaking notes are there. I'm not going to follow them slavishly because I only have 10 minutes, and there are probably 20 minutes' worth or more of notes there. Leonard has covered some of the material already.

I would add a bit of context to what Leonard said. There is actually a fairly in-depth legal background as to how Prince Edward Island ended up considering democratic renewal. In the early 1990s, as Mr. Russell indicated, a number of different electoral commissions were struck. They had mostly to do with the way we were represented, or the boundaries within which we were represented. At the time, we had dual-member ridings that were based on an old Catholic/Protestant system that went back hundreds of years. There was a review of that taking place.

As a result of some changes stemming from that, in the early 1990s, a gentleman named Donald MacKinnon sued the Government of Prince Edward Island, indicating that he felt he was under-represented as a resident of what I think was then called Sherwood or Parkdale, which is an urban area. He felt that he had half the representation some of the more rural constituents had as related to the number of people per MLA on a percentage basis. As it turned out, it went through a trial level decision and an appeal. He was successful.

As a result of that, thresholds were then put in place. There was some of that going on across the country at the time. You'll see in former chief justice Carruthers' report that there was some Supreme Court of Canada case law on that kind of thing developing at the time. There is some interesting context that comes out of that.

I'll skip over Mr. Russell's report and take it to the present day. After the 2005 plebiscite, it was widely thought that the appetite hadn't been satisfied in terms of consideration of electoral reform on Prince Edward Island. There were a number of what I will call sore spots with the 2005 plebiscite. Some thought that the option that was there was overly complex. Perhaps there weren't enough polling stations set up for folks to go vote at, and there was only one day to vote. There were some different things like that.

I guess the landscape from that time forward changed fairly significantly too. To give a bit of context on that, in the last seven elections on Prince Edward Island we have had five legislatures in which there has been a fairly big imbalance in terms of government versus opposition. I will not go through them one by one, but we've had two occasions out of those seven where we've had one member oppositions. That's likely a unique thing to Prince Edward Island, at least in a Canadian setting. We've also had three occasions where there have been between three and five opposition members, which creates problems. You can imagine what it would do if there were only one opposition member to serve on a committee or in the legislature, and so on.

That spurred on the conversation that maybe this isn't the ideal way to do things. In addition to that there was what was felt to be a shift of power back and forth between the two main parties of Prince Edward Island, which have effectively been in power since our beginning of time, if you will.

I think, over the course of our history, there have only been five MLAs elected who weren't either a Conservative or a Liberal. In recent memory—I would include research going back a bit—I think you could go back probably 75 years and there would be two: the current leader of the third party, who is on our committee, and an NDP member in the late 1990s.

In the last election, both the NDP and the Green Party had around 10% of popular support. All four parties vying in the election made campaign promises to deal with some kind of electoral reform. Out of that, in the spring of 2015 after we were elected, the premier presented a white paper on democratic renewal in the legislature, essentially outlining the issues and starting the discourse in relation to them. He committed to move forward with a plebiscite on democratic renewal sometime within very short order after that.

Our committee was struck before the end of that sitting. We're a four member committee now because one of our members has recently resigned, but we started out as a five member committee and did our work that way. There are two government members on the committee: me and the Honourable Paula Biggar. Previously, there was also Janice Sherry. There is also the leader of the third party, Peter Bevan-Baker, and there is Sidney MacEwen. We represent all three parties that are represented in the legislature.

Our mandate was to guide engagement stemming from the white paper on democratic renewal. From there, we got our feet under ourselves and learned a bit about the different systems that might be possible and the kinds of things we should be looking at.

We set out to do a public engagement process through the fall of 2015. We went to as many different communities across Prince Edward Island as we could and seeking input from Islanders as to the kinds of things we should be looking at. What we heard out of that was that there are certain principles we should be trying to glean from the presentations that were made to us.

We had presentations in relation to a number of different systems, the different attributes of the electoral systems we should be looking at, and different things we should consider relative to different kinds of systems.

We came back after our fall consultations and put together an interim report which effectively recommended that we narrow our consideration to four different new options, in addition to our current first-past-the-post system.

We undertook that consideration throughout the course of the winter, in meetings that looked a bit like this one actually, except that members of the public were invited to interact with committee members. Basically, a microphone was passed around to seek input on the different systems and to engage in a discourse back and forth, so it was very informal.

The idea was to narrow down the options that we had for consideration and to try to figure out what a plebiscite ballot would look like. There was a lot of consideration that went into the plebiscite ballot structure over the course of that time. To bring it to a conclusion in that regard, we chose the structure that we have because we thought it would ensure the greatest level of engagement in the process. In other words, it would encourage people to go beyond picking their favourite by essentially tipping voters off to the fact that their favourite might not be picked first and that they might want to have a say in the overall choice through a second, third, fourth, or fifth choice.

We advanced a further interim report in the spring of last year, recommending that a plebiscite take place starting on October 29 and that electronic voting be conducted. Essentially, that means you can vote pretty well any way you can conceive of, including from home at 2 a.m., in your underwear, sitting in front of your computer. Effectively, the idea is to make it as easy as possible to select your choice and to vote. The period is open for 10 days. You can vote by phone. You can vote in person. You can mail in a ballot. You can vote on your computer. You can vote however you wish, and 16- and 17-year-olds will be able to vote in our plebiscite.

There's obviously a lot more that went into it than that, but in 10 minutes, those are the high-level notes of the process that we've undertaken over the past year and a little bit.

1:50 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

Thank you very much. That was quite fascinating.

Now we have an opportunity to delve into your testimonies in greater depth, beginning with Mr. Aldag, for five minutes.

1:50 p.m.

Liberal

John Aldag Liberal Cloverdale—Langley City, BC

Thanks to both of our witnesses for being here today. It is a fantastic day to be in your lovely city and province.

We'd like to also thank members of the audience for coming out to be part of this today. Hopefully, you'll be around to give us your opinions and thoughts on this important topic as we work through the afternoon.

As the chair said in his opening comments, it's really exciting for me and our committee to be here to talk, based on the many years of discussions we've had in this province about electoral reform.

Our committee has spent a fair bit of time on the question of referendum. It has come up more than once and sometimes many times in a day.

I want to go to the education piece. I was reading some of the background materials over the last couple of days. What I didn't see was anything about the education that was done leading up to the referendum, or plebiscite in this case, and what the parameters are around that.

Maybe, Mr. Russell, I could start with you, and then I'll move to Mr. Brown. My question is on the current plebiscite about who's doing the education piece and what the costs are and what parameters there are around other parties getting involved in it. We've heard comments that on complex issues like this, the main message can get lost and you end up voting on other issues. You've had experience. I'd like to know how you're dealing with that whole issue of the plebiscites and the education leading up to it.

Mr. Russell, based on your recollections of what happened back in 2005, could you take us through a bit of the public awareness and education piece?

1:50 p.m.

Chair, Commission on P.E.I.’s Electoral Future

Leonard Russell

The members of our commission spent their in-house time trying to develop some approaches that ensured information was provided to the general public. It ranged from trying to get a TV spot during the hockey game on a Saturday night, to ensuring that there were materials delivered to every mailbox in the province.

I apologize. I don't have copies of those kinds of things, but we had pamphlets of this nature. One was how our list candidate was selected. If people wanted to find out how that fit in, there was a brochure on that.

There was another one on the characteristics of first past the post and mixed member proportional.

The proposed mixed member proportional model describes the electoral future in Prince Edward Island based on what we were talking about, so it talked about women and politics, and then there were some answers.

1:55 p.m.

Liberal

John Aldag Liberal Cloverdale—Langley City, BC

Is it your commission, exclusively, that did the promotion, the educational piece or—

1:55 p.m.

Chair, Commission on P.E.I.’s Electoral Future

Leonard Russell

We engaged a public relations firm to help us with the design of some of the materials.

1:55 p.m.

Liberal

John Aldag Liberal Cloverdale—Langley City, BC

Do you recall the government of the day or any of the other parties or advocacy groups for one system or another getting involved as well?

1:55 p.m.

Chair, Commission on P.E.I.’s Electoral Future

Leonard Russell

Yes, there certainly were “yes” groups and “no” groups who were on their own, putting information forward to the general public and to our commission as well.

1:55 p.m.

Liberal

John Aldag Liberal Cloverdale—Langley City, BC

Do you remember whether there were any spending limits or constraints, or was it simply anybody who had a budget could engage in the conversation?

1:55 p.m.

Chair, Commission on P.E.I.’s Electoral Future

Leonard Russell

Do you mean the spending limits of other people?

1:55 p.m.

Liberal

John Aldag Liberal Cloverdale—Langley City, BC

For any of the organizations, for the plebiscite, was it just anybody who wanted to engage—

1:55 p.m.

Chair, Commission on P.E.I.’s Electoral Future

Leonard Russell

There were no limits put on it, except the limit that was put on us by a reasonably small budget. We came close to staying within it.

1:55 p.m.

Liberal

John Aldag Liberal Cloverdale—Langley City, BC

With that, I'll move to Mr. Brown to bring us to what's happening in the current one and how it's being structured for the education piece. Are there any parameters put around other organizations participating, or is it that anybody can join in with whatever resources they have?

1:55 p.m.

Chair, Legislative Assembly of Prince Edward Island, Special Legislative Committee on Democratic Renewal

Jordan Brown

There are no parameters. Anybody can join in. I understand you're hearing from the head of the PR action team later today. I'm not sure that's part of what she's presenting. Perhaps she could give you some more insight from that side of things.

Mr. Russell presented to us and talked about some of the issues they encountered going through. We made the decision early on that this was something that was going to be a key piece of whatever we ultimately decided to do. As much for reasons of impartiality as anything else, or an appearance of that, we decided to task Elections Prince Edward Island with that job. They, in more recent elections, have taken on that kind of role in any event. It was something that I think they were somewhat keen to do.

They've engaged a PR person and a number of different, what I'm going to call, senior political science students who have been actively involved in their communities in both languages. They have a four fold pamphlet that's going out this week. They have radio spots, which you might hear while you're here. There's a lot of social media activity going on.

Members of that team are going out presenting to numerous groups every day around the province. They've developed an education package to take into the schools, and they do presentations at the schools. With 16- and 17-year-olds voting, that was a key piece of our education platform, and it's really a key piece of our engagement platform. We figured we would get them while they are in school and young, and hopefully they will keep voting after they vote in this plebiscite.

Basically, the idea is that you need to start a conversation in the communities and to foster that conversation.

1:55 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

Thank you. We're up to seven minutes now. That's good, we're getting good information.

We'll go to Mr. Reid.

October 6th, 2016 / 1:55 p.m.

Conservative

Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON

Thank you very much. Those were good answers. It was well worth waiting for them to come out. I appreciate the flexibility you showed, Mr. Chair. I'm hoping you may show it again.

1:55 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

It'll depend on the quality of the questions, but in your case they're always good questions, so I think you can count on it.

1:55 p.m.

Conservative

Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON

Thank you.

I want to ask a question. I'll start with you, Mr. Russell, because you administered the first process the province went through.

In that plebiscite, there was less than a 40% turnout, as you know, and only 36% of those who did participate voted yes. This raises a number of turnout-related questions I'd like to pose to you.

Let's say for the sake of argument that you had the same less than 40% turnout, but you had a majority of.... I think you had a 60% cap at that time. Let's say you had 60% plus one, but a 35% turnout. Would you have regarded that as a legitimate mandate for change?

2 p.m.

Chair, Commission on P.E.I.’s Electoral Future

Leonard Russell

When those questions were raised around our commission table, we always came back to answering them with what would happen if this were a provincial election. It's voting day. People have the opportunity to come out and vote. The numbers that show up are the numbers that show up. How does it cut itself?

We recommended, if you read the report, to government that it become a 50% plus one for the same reason. That's the way all other government-related and public-related decisions were made.

Yes, my answer would be if it met those terms, then it would be fine with me.

2 p.m.

Conservative

Scott Reid Conservative Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON

All right.

I agree with you about 50% plus one as opposed to 60%, by the way. I think in British Columbia, when they achieved 57%, it created a legitimacy issue. They were therefore forced to have a second referendum shortly afterwards, because clearly a majority had actually supported the change.

To some degree that was kind of a trick question. The reason I asked it was to make the point that if you have low turnout and people vote no, that is also a legitimate mandate. It is not, in my view, an excuse to say that the people were wrong, that they should have known better, that we don't need to have, or indeed we don't want to have, public consultation, because they might not participate in the numbers we want, or they might vote the way we don't want. That to me is profoundly anti-democratic.

At a practical level, dealing with the education component, it sounds as though you've gone to considerable effort, Mr. Brown, to try to have more public education this time around than last time. Of course a number of things have changed, with access to electronic media and so on.

This question is for both of you. Do you think part of the reason for a lower yes vote in the last plebiscite was a lack of public awareness, education, and understanding of how the systems work? Do you think that is being overcome, or if you don't think it is, do you think it can be overcome as a practical matter?

I don't know who should start with that, but I'll throw it out to both of you.