Electoral Reform Committee on Oct. 7th, 2016

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Yes, I'm looking at that right now. I'm just trying to imagine it in my head. For New Brunswick, you've said you would have six local seats and four regional seats. What if, since there are fewer regional seats, one of the local members of Parliament who is selected ends up ranking really low? Let's say they were the 20th choice in the province. You'd have to choose a local representative, but you only have the four regional seats, and they ranked much, much higher.

Do you see what I'm saying? Let's say you have somebody who ranked in the 10th spot or the eighth spot, but they don't get a seat because they weren't listed in the regional section.

[Leonid Elbert]

Well, the way it works is that all the candidates are listed on a ballot.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

I meant the local section, sorry.

[Leonid Elbert]

You can see that they are grouped by their party affiliations. The local ones are at the top in the highlighted area. You have a choice. You rank them by your order of preference. You rank them the way you want, but obviously some would choose a local one. Some would choose a regional one.

The situation is such that in order to get elected, one has to meet a certain quota, either 50% locally or to have, as in New Brunswick, 9.1% regionally. Let's say we had five candidates in a region and four of them got eliminated because they didn't score. There fifth one left is elected by default. Then again, that fifth one was the highest-ranking. He may be away from the 50%. He may have had 30% locally, and may be still a few percentages away from the original quota, but he is the most supported one there.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

You wouldn't vote a second time around and eliminate some candidates to get to that threshold.

[Leonid Elbert]

No. There will be no runoff election. But the way the preferential vote counts, it's practically an instant runoff.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Okay.

New Brunswick has 10 seats. On your ballot you have about 36 choices and you show up to 18 ranked people. We've had experts say that for the average person to go out and learn about that many candidates, about seven choices is all they're able to really be informed about. I ran in this election, and I don't think I could accurately rank 18 people—before they were my colleagues, let's say—and also know a lot about what they were all about. I wouldn't be able to do it, and I'm into politics. I follow politics very closely.

I don't know; 18 just seems to be a lot.

[Leonid Elbert]

The reason I ranked 18 was just to show how the ranking can go. You don't have to rank everybody from the same party. You don't have to go consecutively, one, two, three, four, five. You don't have to rank the local one as your first choice, and so forth.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

How would you do this in Ontario? Ontario has 121 seats.

[Leonid Elbert]

There are a variety of descriptions. We'll have about a dozen different regions ranging from six seats all the way up north to as many as 14 or 15 seats in Toronto. Again, there will be, obviously, probably eight or nine local candidates in each such urban region.

As I mentioned to Mr. Richards, this also depends on education. We have to explain to people not to stop with just one, but to rank them. Obviously, there will be those who will just go with their favourite party, and go one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and not go any further. But again, with the 14-member region, to get elected a party needs roughly 6.7% of the vote. Even that will be enough.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

Mr. Nater.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Again, thank you, to both our witnesses, for your testimony. It's been informative and very interesting as well.

Mr. Elbert, I'm going to start with a very quick question for you.

I appreciate your providing us with a sample of a potential ballot. I think that's useful. I was somewhat intrigued that it's a machine-readable ballot. We've actually heard some conflicting testimony about the benefits of online voting, electronic voting. I haven't heard a lot, at least from the time I've been on the committee, about an electronic readable ballot. It can still be audited. It can still be counted in a traditional way if there's a problem with the machine.

In Ontario they're currently piloting machine-readable ballots in by-elections. Beyond changing the voting system, electoral system, would this be a change you recommend regardless of the voting system, a machine-readable ballot?

[Leonid Elbert]

A machine-readable ballot, yes, I would recommend that.

We have that in New Brunswick. We had that for municipal elections. I moved to New Brunswick in 2005, so I don't know what kind of ballot they voted with in 2004. But in 2008 and 2012, they had machine-readable ballots. In the 2006 provincial election, there was a manual ballot. In 2010 they had the design for a machine-readable ballot, but it was still counted manually. In 2014 they had machine-readable ballots for the provincial election as well, even though I heard there were some issues with the software. I used to be a programmer, I know what it is.

It makes sense to adopt the machine-readable ballot. Unlike, let's say, text voting or online voting, a machine-readable ballot can be scrutinized. It's paper evidence. It's always there. If there is a glitch, it can be recounted. If, let's say, we were to have a situation like we had in 2014, where candidates were just, I think, nine votes apart, again, that could be recounted. That could be verified manually.

With the system I propose, when we have probably a dozen different preferences on a single ballot, a machine-readable ballot is a great help. That's why my submission also includes a sample of a machine-readable ballot.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Very good. I do have to admit that these types of things actually give me nightmares. They remind me of the Scantron sheets from first-year university. I still get terrorized over that. But from a practical standpoint, I know exactly where you're coming from.

I want to go to Professor Lewis for a moment.

You brought up the concept of citizens' assemblies, and of course Professor Rose has talked a lot about that. We know that not a lot of people are paying attention to this right now. Not a lot of people are paying attention to this process.

Would you recommend a type of citizens' assembly to add legitimacy to this process, taking some of the deliberation, some of the power, outside the hands of self-interested politicians and giving a group of citizens an opportunity to deliberate, to evaluate, to participate in a deliberative fashion? It would be more than simply consultation. I think Professor Rose made a very good point when he appeared before the committee. There's a difference between consultation and deliberation. I wanted to hear whether you had some thoughts on that.

[J.P. Lewis]

I think, especially with the evidence we have, that a citizens' assembly for the people involved in that citizens' assembly would be a good experience. They would be engaged and informed about whatever electoral system they decided to put forward. I would still be concerned about the information gap, regardless of whether it came from a committee or a vote in Parliament or a citizens' assembly, and about addressing the role of information, engagement, and education. I'm not sure it would make a difference.

Going back to Mr. DeCourcey's point about the ecosystem and all these different parts, we might be able to change some. I'm thinking about online voting. I'll defer to my colleague, Nicole Goodman, who is the expert on it. Again, if you think about the notion of certain Canadians, whether they're young or old, being tuned out of politics, how you vote may not matter at all in whether they are compelled to become engaged.

Returning to civics education, in teaching Canadian politics you see over the semester that not everyone gets the bug, but when you see a science major who by the end thinks about switching his or her major to political science, that took 12 weeks of reading the textbook and going into detail. It wasn't a magic bullet in the sense of changing engagement patterns.

While I personally like the notion of a citizens' assembly, and the idea and the experiences I've heard about sound very positive, I don't know if it gets to the problem we've been talking about in terms of changing people's engagement and attention to this committee.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

I will just point out that when I taught first year political science at King's, one of my greatest achievements was a business student telling me that they were switching from business to political science as a major. That made me feel good, because not many people are going to be doing that. I appreciated that.

Do I have a bit of time left?

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

You have 20 seconds for a quick answer.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Very quickly, then, you mentioned that you echoed the comments of Professor Loewen about the function of our democracy not being entirely appreciated.

In 10 seconds or less, could you expand on that?

[J.P. Lewis]

I think maybe what the professor was getting at was that it can be difficult to evaluate institutions if you don't have the information to evaluate them. Maybe for Canadians who aren't following along, or who are and are feeling confused about picking between electoral systems, it could just be that information gap. That has an effect, getting back to the political ecosystem and the political culture.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thanks.

Mr. Aldag.

[John Aldag, Liberal, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

Thank you.

Professor Lewis, when you were responding to Mr. DeCourcey's line of questioning, you were cut off at the end. You had been talking about budgets and were just on a point about B.C. I'm a B.C. MP. You were just starting to get into what the budget was in B.C. for the referendum.

Did you have any thoughts on the budget question related to engagement by an organization such as Elections Canada? It's not something they've been doing. It's the how versus the why. If we were to look at expanding the mandate and moving more into civic engagement, either directly or perhaps in partnership with some other organizations, like Apathy is Boring, what kind of budget would be required? If you've looked at other organizations, what kind of money is actually spent on that kind of engagement?

[J.P. Lewis]

The exact number.... This is from the Elections B.C. annual report from 2012-13. The budget line was voter education, and they spent $15,643, and their entire budget was $18.3 million.

[John Aldag, Liberal, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

Wow, that doesn't seem like a very high priority—

[J.P. Lewis]

Well, I think the point is more—

[John Aldag, Liberal, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

—or they were very efficient.