Electoral Reform Committee on Oct. 19th, 2016

[Katie Ghose]

Sure. I think “evolution” is the word.

To take an example, there was the adoption of the single transferable vote in Scotland, with the first set of elections in 2007. I was looking at some information recently that showed there was an uptick as time went on with the second and third uses of the new electoral system. People were casting more preferences, going down and saying, “I will cast a second, third, and a fourth preference.” That's just an example from the voter's perspective of the kind of evolution of the system. There's certainly no evidence of anybody wanting to change back to first past the post from any of the proportional or preferential systems.

I think the times have been interesting. Also, as I mentioned earlier, it's been quite some years now that we've had the new institutions. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, we had these new institutions of the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, and with that a new electoral system. There's been that gradual evolution since then.

Again, to give a concrete example, there were some concerns raised about having two different kinds of members of Parliament—and I might have reflections on this from elsewhere—a constituency MP and a list MP. That's really bedded down in Scotland, and it isn't really an issue any more. You've maybe had people who've even had a go at doing each of the roles, as well.

It's really been evolutionary. As Darren sort of indicated, citizens are getting used to it; parties are getting used to it. It does take a bit of time, and I would say in all of our systems that are fairly new, maybe a decade or two decades old, it's a continual process. Parties will still talk about how they're adapting to campaigning, which is, practically, different under new systems.

There's evidence from the U.S. about the greater civility. Many are having different kinds of conversations. You're participating in different areas where perhaps your party wasn't active before. It's those cultural changes that take a while, and they carry on evolving. It's not a one-night wonder, if you like.

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

Great. Thank you.

Mr. Hughes, I'd like to get your thoughts. The comment was that nobody has decided to go back to first past the post. I'm wondering whether you can comment on the New Zealand case, and perhaps relate it to the U.K. as well. At what point do these new systems become the norm? We often hear that one of the fears with a referendum is that people will vote for the status quo. In New Zealand, has PR actually become the status quo, so the people are now comfortable with it and would be afraid to go back to first past the post?

I'll leave you with that one to start with.

[Darren Hughes]

That's a very accurate description of what has happened. If there had been a referendum at the end of the first Parliament of PR, I suspect it would have been thrown out because there was such an upheaval and so many things happened in that single first term that were counterintuitive to what people thought would happen. There were these new list MPs, elected on a party list. Some of them swapped parties. There was a lot of bedding down as the first-past-the-post culture and personnel, really, were transiting out of the system, and then new people were coming in who were part of the new political culture.

If you fast-forward 15 years from that, at the sixth attempt to have a general election under PR, by then, you're right in that it was the status quo. In the referendum that was held then, having had six goes at it, it won by a bigger margin than it had had when it first came in, so it had become the status quo.

More recently—I was alluding to the 20th anniversary taking place—there have been figures that people probably would have been quite surprised to see in favour of PR when it was first introduced. Now they are saying it's part of the landscape. There was some suspicion at the beginning that this would just favour one side of politics, but that hasn't been evidenced at all. It has been very fair in the way it has treated all sides. I don't know that the country has ever ended up with a government it didn't want.

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

Along those lines, if both of you would care to comment, would you say that the citizens of New Zealand see better policy?

I go to the U.K. example, where there are these different systems. Are the policies that are coming out of the first-past-the-post systems worse than the policies you are getting out of the more proportional ones? We keep hearing that different forms of PR can solve all of our problems. The U.K. has these mixed ones. Is there clear evidence that PR will give better policy? In New Zealand, was there a change from when you left first past the post and went into PR so that you can say clearly that yes, this is way better policy now and the country is doing better on whatever those markers are?

[Darren Hughes]

There are two good examples of this. On the one hand, what's gone is the surprise policies, policies coming out of nowhere and being enforced on the public with no real parliamentary scrutiny because it's one large, single-party majority government. There is much more signalling by parties before the election about what direction they are going in, and I think a lot more transparency, which has been a really good thing.

The second example is that there has been more policy stability, because you don't get the wild swings that first past the post gives you, the instability of having a result one way and then the opposite in the following election. With that winner-take-all mentality, you throw out what the last people were doing, and there are your own surprise ideas. What it means is that parties that were working with one government in one particular term might work with another government of a different political persuasion in the next term, but they have buy-in with some of the policies that were there.

When there is a change of government in New Zealand, what we haven't seen is an upending of everything and then a blank piece of paper, back to the beginning. There has been quite a strong public policy evolution. I would argue that's been a real strength for New Zealand's social and economic policy.

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

I'm going to get cut off. You have a minute to make a quick comment.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Comment very briefly, please.

[Katie Ghose]

That's broadly been borne out. Whether something is a good policy or not is going to depend on your perspective, but I'd really endorse those points about systems that enable and prompt parties to work together and do that detailed negotiation around policy. They are probably going to have different policy outcomes.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

Mr. Boulerice, you have the floor.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I promise to try to speak more quietly than in question period.

Mr. Becker, I think your demonstration of the disadvantages of the first past the post system and the benefits of more proportional systems is striking and irrefutable. We have often heard that a more proportional system or with a proportional outcome could create political instability. If we look at the facts, we see that this has not been proven. The proportional systems are not any more unstable than majority systems. Since World War II, Canada has had more elections than countries with proportional systems.

You are talking about the instability of public policies under majority systems, including the first past the post system. I find that interesting. Could you talk a little bit about what you have observed in terms of the instability of public policies in plurality systems?

[Byron Weber Becker]

I'm not sure that my simulations really have much to say about the instability of public policy. That's not something that I've attempted to model. I'm not sure that it's something I can model.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

You had some proposals about that in your presentation.

Mr. Hughes, for the sake of transparency, I will inform the committee that a number of the statistics and examples that I have presented in the past months have come from the wonderful little reports that you produce and that you have been kind enough to share with me in Montreal on a number of occasions for discussion purposes. You are a key witness for us also because you have experienced a change in a voting system, but you also have more first-hand experience as an elected official in New Zealand, both as an elected local official and as one elected from a list.

Could you tell me how you felt representing the citizens in those two categories of representatives of the people?

[Darren Hughes]

This was considered to be an area of huge interest when the system first started, because people were obviously used to having single-member constituency MPs only and then, suddenly, all these list MPs arrived and there was, I think in the early days, quite a strong feeling of class A and class B that did exist. And as Katie cited, in Scotland there was a similar thing at the beginning.

What I would observe is that, as time went on, voters and citizens tended to judge the politicians by performance, by achievements, rather than by what type of MP they were. Of course, not everyone does that. There are always some who will want to make the distinction.

I guess the constituency MPs continue to do the work that they've always done, and that you're all very familiar with here. List MPs fall broadly into two areas. One type are people who, in all honesty, probably want to be constituency MPs, and so their parties might assign them to a certain area to work in and they'll run services and be invited to things, and so on and so forth, in a way that gives representation of their party to voters in that particular constituency, remembering that the same voter has two votes under that in that New Zealand context.

The more interesting area, I think, about list MPs is that it enables a richer diversity of people to come to Parliament, people who represent communities that might be significant across the whole country but very, very small in status in a particular geographical mapped-off area of a constituency. That's enabled the Parliament, in what is called the House of Representatives, to look much more like a house of representatives because of that.

Also within that category are people who are policy specialists in certain areas, people who are experts at something, for whom the parties say, “Look, we really need somebody with these sorts of skills”. They might not be somebody who'd be elected at a geographic level or somebody whose great strength is in running surgeries for constituents in need, but they are people who have a lot to offer to public policy from a certain area. I think in that context, being able to get people from both walks of life was very useful.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Hughes.

Ms. Ghose, I am very pleased to welcome you. This is the first time I have had the chance to listen to you. I might also add that I love your name, particularly in French.

I want you to tell me a little bit about the process that was followed in the U.K. when the new regional parliaments in Wales and Scotland chose some type of mixed member proportional representation voting system. What was the logic behind that choice in those two regional parliaments? Let’s not talk about the Parliament of Northern Ireland, because I think it’s a somewhat exceptional political case.

[Katie Ghose]

I'm not sure I can give you a straight answer on this for the simple reason that there are all kinds of things written in the history books about the politics behind the different systems that people came up with. It was felt on the one hand that the government wanted a system for the Scottish Parliament that would mean that one party could never get a majority. Actually, what we've seen, which is a good thing, is that voters will ultimately decide who they want to cast their votes for. That's why sometimes under the same system you will end up with different sorts of power-sharing arrangements. It might be a minority or coalition government, or a majority government, as we've seen in Scotland with the Scottish National Party. There are a lot of politics there, just to give you the sense of it.

I think it's really interesting that when we look at countries around the world, it's no surprise, in a way, that mixed member proportional is often the system that's adopted. After all, it perhaps does bring the balance to, or a compromise between, some of the different elements that people care about: keeping, but developing, a constituency link; having a good degree of proportionality, but not obsessing over it to the nth degree, as Professor Becker has said. I think it's no coincidence that, perhaps, we were slightly reflecting a global trend in the United Kingdom by adopting the additional member system, which is basically MMP.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

We’ll now turn to Mr. Rayes.

[Alain Rayes, Conservative, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

Good evening, everyone.

My first question is for Mr. Becker.

Mr. Cullen pointed out to me that you were a great witness, because you have even provided us with a list of questions. For my first question, I will use one of those you have provided to us. I hardly changed a couple of words.

Your fourth question indicates that the preferential voting system seems to be a valid option for many Canadians. I would add that it also appears valid for our Prime Minister, who seems to like it a lot.

Then you ask why this modelling produces such poor results for the preferential voting system. Could you tell me what you think?

[Byron Weber Becker]

First of all, let me say that that list of questions was not meant to be distributed. That was for me to have in my hip pocket just in case everybody gave me a blank look. Nevertheless, since you have the list of questions, let me address it.

I think that alternative vote makes a lot of sense at the individual riding level. Let me say that I can appreciate why it would be attractive at the individual riding level, but I think there are also some problems at that level.

In each individual riding, the decision is made independently of all the other ridings, the same as with first past the post. It's when you aggregate all of those individual decisions that it breaks apart and becomes a disadvantage for Canada as a whole. I have sometimes compared it to the economic theory of the tragedy of the commons, where a village has a common pasture and everybody grazes their cow on that common pasture, and it works out wonderfully, as long as everybody obeys the rules. But then some bright soul says, “Ah, I can graze two cows on that pasture.” They make a locally optimal decision just for themselves. It's like the individual riding saying that it's best for it to use alternative vote. If everybody does that, the pasture gets over-grazed and everybody fails. If all of the ridings use alternative vote, then the system as a whole becomes very disproportional and Canada as a whole suffers.

[Alain Rayes, Conservative, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

Thank you very much.

My second question is still for you, Mr. Becker.

At meetings with our fellow constituents in our ridings, the issue of local representation comes up a great deal. When we talk about proportional systems, most presentations have been indicating a decrease in the number of constituency MPs to make way for list members.

My colleague Mr. Reid started to talk about the following. If we decided to keep the 338 constituencies, how many members do you think should be added for better proportional representation, even if we don’t necessarily have the best possible outcome? Is there something in-between that would prevent adding 200 or 300 MPs, but that would keep the 338 MPs in place? I think this would help the public be more accepting of a change in the voting system.

[Byron Weber Becker]

I've run a number of different models, some of which maintain 338 MPs and make the ridings a little bit bigger as needed to make room for those extra list MPs, while still maintaining 338. I have also run simulations or models where we keep 338 ridings for individual MPs and add on the top-up layer as well.

From my perspective, the optimal system that meets your criteria either way would be the rural-urban system. That maintains very good proportionality while still having just a very modest layer of top-up MPs, as few as about 50, which is significantly less than MMP for the same degree of proportionality.

[Alain Rayes, Conservative, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

I asked you that question because it’s something we have not discussed much. Every 10 years, the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada adds a number of MPs, given the population growth. It seems to me that there might be another solution: adding fewer members now, but planning from now on for all members added every time the electoral map is reconfigured to be elected based on a proportional voting system.

Do you think taking small steps to some day reach the number of MPs required for good proportional representation could be an appealing solution?

[Byron Weber Becker]

Certainly, we could take an incremental approach. The question, I think, is, can we trust those in power to actually follow through on the good intentions? Can we trust those in power to actually add the extra, the new MPs, to that top-up or to the list? If we can indeed trust that, what you have suggested is a nice incremental way to move from our current system to a proportional system.

[Alain Rayes, Conservative, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

Mr. Hughes, you mentioned the list members, which gave some food for thought. Since the list members are not connected to a constituency, what will happen to them at the next election? I guess their political party must submit their names on the list, if they still want to remain members.

[Darren Hughes]

That's correct. Many stand for re-election, just as any other member of Parliament would, and the law requires parties to conduct democratic processes for the assembling of the list.

[Alain Rayes, Conservative, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

If they were re-elected as list members, could they represent another region of Canada or would they rather be firmly assigned to one region of the country?