I know you've been listening to people for a long time, and you've probably heard all the different arguments, so I'm not going to go into a broad range of points. I'm going to focus primarily on the question of representation.
I know there are five principles driving this commission: trying to make sure you have a good balance between voters' intentions and electoral results, encouraging engagement, creating a system that's accessible and inclusive, safeguarding the integrity of our voting process, and preserving the accountability of local representation. Those don't always work in conjunction with one another. I'm going to highlight how there is a bit of a disconnect.
As I said, my main focus is going to be on point number two, and that's greater participation of under-represented groups, and the most under-represented, which are women. My comments today are drawn on over 30 years of research in the field of gender and politics, with a particular focus on the Canadian political system.
When I first began looking at the impact of the electoral system on gender representation, Canada ranked quite high in the world in the representativeness of its federal Parliament. At that point, probably about 20 years ago, we were ranked in the low 20s in the world of, say, 190-odd states. In 2003, when I was looking at this for the New Brunswick legislative democracy commission, we had fallen to 33rd. Five years ago, when I was looking at this again for another presentation I gave, we were 44th. Today, in 2016, we rank 64th in the world in the representation of women within our political structures.
In terms of the overall gender equality index, we rank 25th in the world, but as I said, 64th in political representation. Now 25th is better than 64th, but I would argue that our ranking at 25th could be a lot higher, a lot better, if we didn't have our political representation numbers that are built into that index pulling us down.
Why are we ranked so low? I would argue that, given the majority of those who are ranked higher than us in Canada are using a more proportional system, a PR system or an MMP system, it's hard to question the conclusion that the electoral system is having an effect. Since Wilma Rule's influential 1987 paper on the impact of electoral systems on women's elections, study after study has shown that SMP systems, such as we have, typically result in lower numbers of women being elected to legislative bodies than do proportional systems.
We in Canada do quite well in comparison to other SMP systems, but we fall far behind MMP or PR systems. The reason for that is—I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but let me just say it, anyway—in a single-member system, parties have to choose only one candidate, and so they're going to choose the best candidate. Frequently, the best candidate looks like candidates they've had in the past, coming from the networks of people they have been drawn from in the past. Typically, those individuals have been men.
In the PR system it's easier to challenge a party's list, where you put together a list of however many candidates you need to represent your size of district, and it's much more difficult to have all the people at the top being men, or anglophone, or from a particular region. There's much more public pressure to make sure that those lists are representative, and that people are distributed in a representative way throughout the ranking of that list.
It's much more difficult to challenge individual riding choices, where a party has nominated individuals in one place after the next, after the next, who they think are the best. Ironically, the majority happen to be men: 70% to 80% of the parties select men. In today's society, that doesn't seem what you'd expect to happen.
Proportional systems tend to have greater central party control over who they put forward. It's much more difficult in our system, where individual decisions are being kept at the grassroots level, to encourage parties to seek out and nominate more women, minorities, under-represented groups. As a result, I would argue that real representational change is only likely to occur with significant electoral change: electoral reform to a PR or an MMP system. Simply changing the balloting structure to a preferential list, which is one thing that has been proposed both federally and provincially, but keeping that single-member option would do little to increase the number of women because you'd still have one person being put forward by the parties.
Having said this, I acknowledge that these systems present some challenges to that fifth principle of local representation. Canadians are very used to having a member of Parliament or an MLA to ask questions of and to seek support from. I think our members play a really important role in Canada being ombudspeople for their constituents. That's a really hard principle to move away from, so your task is going to be very challenging as you try to grapple with the disconnect and conflict between these different principles of representation versus local accountability.
However, I would suggest—and I think this is what is really important here—that there is a possible solution to this conflict. The most obvious is to provide parties with some carrots and sticks, some incentives and penalties, to encourage them to be more inclusive in seeking out a diverse range of candidates. This could easily be done through our current electoral rebate program that we have had in place for decades. As it stands now, candidates and parties recoup a significant percentage of their electoral expenses if they meet minimum thresholds of votes. This was put into place decades ago because we, as Canadians, believed that different voices should be participants in our electoral system and not just those who had deep pockets. That dramatically changed how parties engaged in election campaigns, opened up opportunities for new parties to become involved, and ensured new ideas could be incorporated into our political system.
I think it's important to note that by funding parties, we are in a sense supporting them, but we can also hold them accountable to the values that we hold important as Canadians. If equality and diversity are important to us as principles, we can use that rebate system as a way of enhancing those principles.
It's only, as a result, a small step further to argue that, if Canadians are really committed to ensuring the participation of all Canadians, and in particular female Canadians, more could be done to use these rebates as a way to encourage parties to nominate more women. Decisions would still be left with the parties, but it would be more likely for the party to nominate, go out and seek more women, if they could be guaranteed a higher rebate if they had female candidates. More importantly, it would be an even higher rebate if they were nominating them in winnable ridings.
One of the real challenges, I think, that we face now is that women are being nominated, not in equal numbers to men, and likewise with minorities, but they're not being nominated in the strong ridings, the ridings where they're likely to win. We just have to look at what happened here in New Brunswick in the last provincial election, where all the Conservative women lost their seats and all the Liberal women won their seats, and not one of the incumbent Liberal seats in that election, where someone had stepped down and resigned, was replaced with a woman. The strong seats were all replaced by men. The swing seats in both the Conservatives and the Liberals were nominating the women.
I would argue that here in New Brunswick, where we're at the back of the pack of the country with a 16% representation, we're not likely to see much change going forward if parties continue this way. There have to be incentives to nominate more women and nominate them in strong seats.
Similarly, parties could be penalized by having their rebates reduced if they don't meet a certain threshold.
These reforms would not result in significant changes to the electoral system. They wouldn't require major referendums to make changes with. They would be easily legislated, and they would have an impact on the way parties react and respond to the nomination processes. They could still choose not to if they didn't want to, but there would be incentives for them to do so.
The end effect would be enhancing representation while maintaining those other principles that you've outlined here as being the goals of this commission's tasks.
I'll leave it there.