Electoral Reform Committee on Oct. 7th, 2016

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

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to our guests.

I want to talk about that last point, Mr. Elbert. I suppose if we choose a system in which an overwhelming majority government making unilateral decisions is avoided.... The scenario that you're worried about, that policy lurch that we see so often in Canada when a party comes in and wipes out all the policies of the previous government, is a problem we're trying to fix with the suggestion of more proportional systems.

I guess all this breaks down and connects to your comments, as well, Mr. Lewis, about trade-offs. What system advantages what? Other systems have different things they advantage.

The value lens I'm trying to look through right now is the notion of voter equality. This is something we heard from Prince Edward Island yesterday. Regardless of where you vote, or who you vote for, your votes should be treated with the same respect, as opposed to what we have right now where some votes count but more than half of them don't count toward electing anybody.

Mr. Lewis, I don't think I caught it in your testimony, but you talked about the role and the importance of education. Your work has been put forward to this committee as one of the arguments for considering lowering the voting age, which is something that we're also being charged with. A great advantage is that, at 16 or 17, young people are traditionally in school still and part of the civics would be a real lesson, not a theoretical lesson, about how politics, Parliament, and democracy work.

Have you had any thoughts toward that, not just the issue of whether the age should be lowered, but whether there is in fact an advantage to having young people learn about the parties, platforms, and leaders, and then go out and meaningfully participate in electing a future government?

[J.P. Lewis]

Thank you for the question.

I've definitely thought about that and I think I'd support—I believe Henry Milner has made this argument before; he's written a lot about it—the socialization aspect to it.

If you're at home and you were in Ontario to take that grade 10 civics course, when you turn 16, you get to go vote with your parent, parents, or guardian.

I've been teaching now for almost 10 years on university campuses. It's interesting to see those students who initially take a Canadian poli-sci course—and they weren't interested in politics, but then they are—and then they want to vote. If they're from away, then they have to figure out all the—

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

All the barriers that start coming forward...?

[J.P. Lewis]

Yes.

Universities and electoral agencies are getting much better. They have satellite polling booths on campuses, but it's still a barrier. Even though I think the international research is somewhat mixed out there, I think the socialization argument that Milner's made before is quite convincing. You even see it now without the lower age. You hear about parents taking their children to vote with them, just to walk down to the polling booth. Young people in that age group, and I can't remember the 2015 numbers off the top of my head but the 2011 number, I think, for 18 to 24 was something like 38%.

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

That's right.

[J.P. Lewis]

The most exposure I have to that age group is university students. We normally assume that those who are more educated are going to vote more. But even at that point they're at a stage in their life where maybe making that step into a political act is complicated by everything else going on.

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

I'm just recalling. I've lived in a number of Central American countries. They would have two ballot boxes with the same ballots but different coloured paper for under 18 and over 18. Families would go and vote, and from whatever age you could hold a pencil you would vote in the youth election, with the same candidates, the same parties. On election night they would release the results first of what young people in the country had said, and it had an incredible predictability rate for the next election. They didn't vote the same as their parents, but they predicted the next election.

There's some insinuation that it would just be one more vote for that family, for the parents. I've turned my mind very much to this. Rather than being influenced, I think those young people would be influential. If they're in class, and as part of their class they are studying the parties, meeting the candidates, going through the platforms, they're bringing that home and perhaps challenging the voting patterns of their parents or guardians when they say what they learned today about party X's policy on the environment, which they care about, or rights on such-and-such.

[J.P. Lewis]

Yes. Being around people that age, I hear much less about how they all vote the same way in their family and more about one uncle they can't even talk to about politics. I think there is divergence there.

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

Yes. You've gone to high school. If parents were influencing their children on everything, I don't think they'd be wearing all the things they're wearing—

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

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

—or piercing the things they are piercing. But that's probably another committee's topic rather than ours.

This is perhaps my last question. Part of the referendum question has been an assumption that we can educate people about STV, MMP, dual-member, all of the different options set out there. That precondition to knowledge is very important in making an informed vote. P.E.I. struggles with this, and I think is struggling with it right now, where misinformation is very easy and explanation is very difficult.

Do we have any evidence on the education process of voters in bringing up their knowledge of a voting system? Can we feel confident that there is such an education program we can put out into the public broadly, and what it might cost to bring the electorate up to a place where they're making an informed choice over systems that most people find complex to understand?

[J.P. Lewis]

I can't think of any research off the top of my head that speaks to the misinformation, but I can speak to research I've seen presented about the success of citizens' assemblies, where you'd have the most heightened information and awareness. I'm sure most of the committee is familiar with the citizens' assemblies that took place in B.C. and Ontario.

I've heard Ken Carty talk about B.C. and the success of its citizens' assembly, and especially Jonathan Rose discuss the misinformation that was out there in Ontario. I was living in Ontario during that campaign. It was definitely lost at that point, in terms of trying to keep up this parallel information with the referendum question going out, so that there wasn't misinformation and the systems were being explained equally.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

We'll have to go to Ms. May now.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to both witnesses. I'm going to echo my friend Blake's comments about your diligence, Mr. Elbert, in coming up with yet another voting system. I plan to study it, as we will all the systems that have been put before us.

But I'm very tempted right now to go right to Professor Lewis and ask you a bit more about Elections Canada, as such a trusted agency. You're the first witness, I believe, to put that evidence before us, even compared to the Library of Parliament. I think this is important information for us.

When Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand appeared before us, he noted that he hoped this committee would make recommendations for the role that Elections Canada had before Bill C-23, and what specific steps they should be able to engage in. I wonder if you want to expand on, ideally, how you see Elections Canada interacting for civic engagement with Canadians in a non-partisan and trusted fashion.

[J.P. Lewis]

I think the amendments that we were made to Bill C-23 gave it some clarity, but there is still some ambiguity around what the role of the Chief Electoral Officer should be, so you could strengthen language in that way. The research was showing that it wasn't just Elections Canada having to do it on its own. Sixty-four per cent of the civic education policy groups shared information or data with another organization within that policy community; 50% did joint research, with one NGO or government agency working together; and 20% shared personnel. It's a strong community there. I'm sure you maybe heard from some of the NGOs that it's about resources and things like that.

I think maybe it's just a matter of emboldening and clarifying to whoever the next CEO is that they can play that role. Then it comes back to this big question—and I mentioned it briefly and maybe it was during my fast-talking—of how versus why. That's where the debate is.

It's very normal with regard to the how. That's directions to where you vote, how to make an X, and things like that. It's more contentious around the issue of why one should vote. We see evidence of that. I've also done a survey of what you would find on election agencies' websites. You find tools for educators and things like that. That would kind of encourage voting.

I think if there is a new electoral system, those questions become a lot closer, because not only do you have to explain.... This is actually an interesting experiment right now, for people who haven't read about Mr. Elbert's new electoral system, to watch people trying to follow along a new system as we're sitting here.

I think the committee really needs to take into consideration that this will have to be explained to the Canadian public, and it will also have to be justified and given legitimacy.

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

As you were talking, I was thinking about a book I wrote a couple of years ago called Losing Confidence. It was about the crisis in Canadian democracy. In doing my research, I found that it wasn't a generalized phenomenon that youth were voting less everywhere. The most pronounced areas where youth were voting a lot less than the older generations were in first-past-the-post countries. Youth in Scandinavia—at least the research I was finding when I was writing that book, which was in 2008, indicated—were voting at the same levels as their elders. They also had a tremendous level of political and civic literacy, since they read on average several different newspapers every day.

I've been struck through the course of this hearing—so I'm going to name something that I'm concerned about and just ask for your comments—that we're not getting any media coverage, for the most part. We're not getting covered as we go across the country listening to Canadians. This is the end of the third week of very intensive hearings. I think a good part of civic literacy and political literacy is having an active fifth estate that's actually covering issues of democracy.

Do you have any comments on that as an aspect of what Maryantonett Flumian called the ecosystem of democracy? I think there's a role for media. Do you have any thoughts on that?

[J.P. Lewis]

I think it's easy even for all of us who are engaged in political culture to fall into the horse race side of things. You might follow politics very closely, but you aren't as much concerned with the institutions or how policies are made and how it's functioning.

Even following the American election, I've listened or watched hours of it and sometimes I can't even think of what policies they're discussing anymore.

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

There's a policy, I understand, about Miss Universe. I think that's core.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[J.P. Lewis]

I'd imagine it could be difficult.

We can encourage the media, but I think that's why we have these institutions like a non-partisan electoral agency, which we've had since 1993. I can provide these papers to the committee. There's been a real growth in NGOs working on civics. I didn't even mention Historica-Dominion, looking at the more historical aspects of it. I think about the great work that Samara has done. I was thinking during Mr. Cullen's comments that we can't neglect to raise a point about the student vote program in Canada, which sees lots of numbers. Obviously there is something being lost there, even with all of those efforts.

I hear it every semester that I teach. I'll say something that I just assume 18-year-old Canadians know, and a lot of them say they didn't take it or maybe they took it in grade 9 history, and then by the time they're in university it's been five years since they talked about the fact that the Senate is appointed. This also goes back to the question of voting at 16. I'm not blaming secondary school teachers—my dad was a teacher—but something is getting lost.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

We'll go now to Ms. Sahota.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Thank you.

My initial questions are for you, Mr. Elbert. Thank you so much for presenting here today. I definitely respect all the witnesses who have come before this committee with unique ideas. It takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of effort. I can't imagine how many years you probably spent perfecting this.

I'm having a little difficulty understanding what the difference is between MMP and this system in terms of the outcome. I know that in this system, you're saying you don't have to vote particularly one vote in one part of the ballot and then the other in the other part, but essentially people would, right? They would vote for their local member of Parliament, and rank them, and they would vote for the regional.

Do you think there would be a lot of people who wouldn't rank their local member at some point, and they would just be ranking the regional members?

[Leonid Elbert]

To make it even easier, let me just call it STV, single transferable vote, with local designations. They have different candidates. Some of them are from your local area, and they are marked as such. There is a guarantee that at least one of them gets elected. That will make it much easier to understand.

The way things will work is that with mixed member proportional, you vote for your local candidate, who's elected the same way as they are now. Then you will vote regionally, either for a party or for one of the regional candidates. If your local candidate doesn't win, and the party to which the candidate belongs is under-represented, they will use the regional MPs to offset the distortion, to compensate, to make the results proportional. That's mixed member proportional.

The STV, or the local transferable vote that I propose, is one vote, but you rank candidates by preference.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Are the local candidates duplicated in the regional category? Are they in both?

[Leonid Elbert]

Each candidate is listed only once on the ballot. The local candidates are marked as being local candidates. Actually, when I submitted the brief and also when I gave the speaking notes to the administration, it included a graphic presentation of how the ballot would look.