Electoral Reform Committee on Oct. 19th, 2016

[Darren Hughes]

It would be possible. It would be a matter for that member of Parliament and for their party and the size of the party in terms of where they were trying to use their resources around the country. I think that would be a matter for what the party thought was the best way to use its resources.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

We'll go now to Mr. Fraser. Welcome to our committee.

[Colin Fraser, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. It's a pleasure to be substituting in this evening.

Witnesses, I want to start by thanking you for your excellent testimony and for answering our questions.

I also want to thank you, Chair, and all the members and staff, for the great work you've been doing. I know members who aren't on the committee have been following it closely, and we really appreciate the good work you're doing. It's a privilege to be here this evening and to ask a few questions on this important discussion.

I want to start with you, Mr. Becker.

This is with regard to rural-urban proportional, which I understand you're saying is the best of all the systems that you looked at. I'm wondering if you could explain the legitimacy of a member directly accountable to his own constituency and riding, such as in the rural area as you're proposing, versus one who is elected among other members who doesn't necessarily have one single constituency, where a constituent can say, “That's my MP and I want to hold him accountable if he doesn't do what I think he should do.”

Can you explain how the different levels perhaps of accountability or legitimacy would be reconciled in Parliament?

[Byron Weber Becker]

It's important at this point to draw analogies from what Mr. Hughes talked about with mixed member proportional, because it's very much the same. There are MPs—the top-up MPs, as I often refer to them—who have broader responsibilities than do MPs in the local ridings. I think it wold be very much like mixed member proportional. They can address broader issues, not just issues specific to their local place.

For MPs who are in multi-member ridings and come from densely populated areas, there we can look to the analogy of single transferable vote and other places where there are multiple members. They would be, in a sense, each of them responsible to their whole larger riding in terms of policy. However, for constituency work, they might very well carve it up and say, “This part of the riding is your job, and this part of the riding is your job.”

[Colin Fraser, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Very similar to the first question, I would imagine that in an urban riding where you have multi-member, there could be hard-working MPs who are taking on the vast majority of the work, and the one who is not working very hard or is not necessarily representing the people or doing a good job kind of gets lumped in and isn't held accountable.

Could you comment on the problem that may create with some MPs perhaps being better MPs and dragging along those who aren't performing very well?

[Byron Weber Becker]

I think the voters are smart enough to tell the difference. I think those freeloading freeloaders, if we can use that term, would pay the price in the next election. It could be that they can attract enough votes to still squeak by, but it also might be the case that they're turfed out in favour of somebody else.

[Colin Fraser, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Thanks.

I want to move now to Mr. Hughes.

I'm wondering, in the New Zealand model, when you brought in the mixed member proportional system, how that change affected political engagement, memberships in political parties, for example, fundraising. Did it have any impact or noticeable effect on the political parties themselves?

[Darren Hughes]

I'm afraid I don't have any information about the actual party membership of the existing parties. I suspect that they continue to decrease, as they have been. Although other factors came in when one of the major parties decided to have an election for the leadership of the membership. That did increase.

I think probably, where there were increases in membership, it would have been for smaller parties that up until then didn't have much of a realistic opportunity of being in Parliament. Suddenly, people who supported those parties thought it was worthwhile getting involved and joining up. I suspect that smaller parties saw an increase in their membership as a result.

On the fundraising, I guess equally, the amount of money that people were making as donations was going to more parties because there was a more realistic chance of them being in the House.

[Colin Fraser, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Also, in New Zealand, it's quite geographically different from Canada. Obviously, there is a larger geography here, more regions. There are 10 provinces and three territories.

Could you comment on the differences you would see in the Canadian system that would have to address regional issues, linguistic issues, versus what you experienced in New Zealand?

[Darren Hughes]

I think it's a summary of what the issues are. New Zealand is a single chamber. It's a unicameral Parliament. There is no upper house. There are no states or provinces. There are three official languages, and Parliament must engage in those languages.

I can understand that the vastness does present some challenges about how you put it together. I'm sure that given that the government has made this commitment about it being the last first-past-the-post election, I guess the thought has been given to how you can honour that, but also replace it with a system that will be a vast improvement on what you have at the moment.

[Colin Fraser, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Do you think there would be an incentive for political parties to focus on more targeted issues in certain areas of the country versus having a broad national vision that would answer to all regional concerns at the same time?

[Darren Hughes]

I think it's a fair question. I think it depends on the party size. What tends to happen with PR, whether it's single transferable vote or MMP, rather than trying to squeeze everybody into two parties and then hoping that the result reflects what people are looking for, you do have many more political players and many more political parties that are in the system.

Some of them will be very much more narrow and focused than a larger party. It may be that they have particular concerns that they wanted to address, and they stick to those issues, whereas you would expect the larger parties that are seeking to lead a government to have that broader vision that you talk about. There's much more choice in the system, and so consumer choice becomes citizen choice, and that's reflected across the political landscape.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you, Mr. Fraser. Those were excellent questions.

Thank you to our panel. It was another great discussion, and we deepened our knowledge of the issue of electoral reform. We appreciate, Mr. Hughes and Ms. Ghose, that you came from so far away. Mr. Becker, we appreciate that even though you have a day job, you devoted so much time to these models to illustrate how systems behave. Mr. Poulos and Mr. McKinstry, thank you for your real-life concrete knowledge of how electronic voting or online voting works. It informed our discussion a great deal.

Thank you to the witnesses. You're free to go.

To the members of the committee, tomorrow we meet here at 8:45 a.m.

Mr. Cullen, are we going to do that tomorrow?

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

Tomorrow.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

That's it for the meeting tonight.

Thank you very much to everyone.

The meeting is adjourned.