Electoral Reform Committee on Oct. 19th, 2016

[Byron Weber Becker]

Yes. I was trying to be generous.

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

Is it a misbehaving system that, in your checking of our past elections, has never reflected the way Canadians actually voted?

[Byron Weber Becker]

Correct.

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

Is the only thing worse than that the alternative vote?

[Byron Weber Becker]

Yes.

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

Okay.

I'm very grateful that you already answered Mr. Reid that you would be prepared to continue to help us with modelling. Did you look—I don't think you did—at dual-member proportional, which is another system that has been presented to us?

[Byron Weber Becker]

No, I have not looked at dual-member proportional yet.

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

Okay.

You made the point that rural-urban proportional was similar to Mr. Kingsley's model. Is there any reason you didn't do a modelling of Mr. Kingsley's proposal?

[Byron Weber Becker]

I have done a model of Mr. Kingsley's proposal. I didn't show a graph because the graph makes it look very good, but if you look at the composite Gallagher index, which I did not have enough time to talk about, it shows that it's not as good as it could be.

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

Given the terrible risk that you might not ever again have enough time to talk about the composite Gallagher index, would you give us another bit of time on that, knowing that I want to move along? Can you give us a sense of it?

[Byron Weber Becker]

Sure.

Once again, the composite Gallagher index takes into account disproportionality between different regions of the country, and for Mr. Kingsley's proposal, in the simulations or the modelling that I did, it appeared to be very proportional, but in fact, regionally it was disproportional.

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

Okay, thank you. So the composite Gallagher index reveals that—

[Byron Weber Becker]

Yes.

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

—which is something we should bear in mind when we're doing further analyses.

I'll now move to Darren Hughes, the only former member of Parliament who's lived a life similar to the rest of us around this table when he was a member of Parliament in New Zealand.

You made the comment that a change in political culture occurred when you went to mixed member proportional in New Zealand, and that it shook up the way politicians campaign.

One of our goals and one of our principals includes trying to find a system that might promote greater stability and social cohesion. How did the political culture change from first past the post to mixed member proportional in New Zealand? There is this notion that we might have greater stability. That's one of my notions, but it's rather idealistic and not grounded in experience. Could you comment on that from a New Zealand perspective?

[Darren Hughes]

Sure. I think there's a high level of co-operation amongst parties at the parliamentary level, and that's a very good thing. Some of the hyper-adversarial nature and also the secrecy—“We're in power; we'll hold all information”—has diminished significantly. I'm not going to say it's been eliminated. Pixie dust didn't fall from the sky or anything magical like that, but it certainly has improved the notion of parties being able to work together.

The two major parties broke up a little bit. They became slightly smaller, and people on their right and left broke into new parties, so it kind of revealed the internal coalitions that all parties have to have under first past the post. I think that improves civility because people understand their positions much better.

I think the shake-up in the campaigning sort of got rid of the idea that there were no-go zones in parts of the country, so that if you were from one party there was no point campaigning somewhere else, because even if you had no chance of winning that constituency or that riding, there would still be a significant proportion of citizens there who might give you their party vote, so it made it worthwhile.

I think it has encouraged parties to think much more broadly about how they approach campaigning, and I think that has been a good thing, though hard for the parties. I was in a big party, so I liked the idea that we would win majorities, but until we could win a majority of the vote, I never felt we should get a majority of the seats. That used to be a minority view. It's now a view that I think nearly every politician in New Zealand would hold.

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

For instance, of the larger parties in New Zealand that used to profit from first past the post with sort of big swings—you would win one time, then you would be out for a while, and then it would be your turn again—are they now comfortable? I'm not generalizing. Do you have the experience that some of the more right-wing and far-left-wing politicians are comfortable with this now?

[Darren Hughes]

Sure. I think what's happened is that the politicians and the parties have just made it work. As I was saying before, there's no serious party that says, “Let's upend this and go back to first past the post.”

Recently, it was the 20th anniversary of the system coming in. I understand that a cabinet minister in the National Party, the conservative party, who is seen as being on the right of her party, was writing on the anniversary and saying that she's now in favour of it for two reasons: one is that every vote counts, and two, because of the diversity impact. Now there's a view in favour of every vote counting, and diversity is held right across the political spectrum, from the centre right across to the centre left.

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

As a segue before I go to Dominion Voting, did you find that it took longer to count ballots? I know it's longer sometimes to figure out how the government is coming together, but with the ballot, did it become more complicated? Did voters have trouble figuring it out? Did it take longer to count?

[Darren Hughes]

It's a transition. The first term was a little untidy, as we might say, as the transition took place. There were arguments about how the ballot paper was structured, but these teething problems all get resolved.

I think the biggest thing, from a political class point of view, is that as candidates, MPs, and campaign activists, etc., we're used to.... This has been part of our lives. We want to know the result on the night. We want to know who's up and who's down. It's part of the culture change, and it's about calming down a bit and leaving it for a few days, or maybe a couple of weeks, just to see what the people have said, and then what we can put together in order to form a stable government that can go the full term.

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

I don't know if I have time for a question. I think I hit my seven minutes before—

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Very briefly. If it can be brief and to the point, with a brief and to the point answer, we can do it.

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

It may open up a whole can of worms, but I wanted to ask something of Mr. Poulos. I hate to say it, but I think your voting systems were used in the New Brunswick election in 2014, where they—

[John Poulos]

Yes, that's correct.

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

It was a scary moment for me. I was hoping David Coon would get elected, which he was, but there was an hour of staring at pundits with nothing to say.

Quickly, how did that happen, and is it an ongoing problem?

[John Poulos]

There are official results and non-official results.

The ballots are marked by voters. They go through a machine. They get digitally scanned. The polls close at a certain time. One second after the polls close, the result tape is printed off and posted publicly. The results get modemed in to Elections New Brunswick.

They were added together, correctly mind you. Through months of recounts in a judicial court, it was found that it was 100% correct.

When the unofficial results were transferred—this was outside of the system, if you will, and this was an IT issue—from the official database inside of Elections New Brunswick to the news media, they used a freeware FTP, file transfer protocol. When the file was transferred, it was not doing proper checks and it was truncated. This is an example of when you treat unofficial results as official and proper care is not taken to transmit the results to the media. This was, I think, their fourth time running the same system.

You leave it to the court, which said very clearly that there wasn't one vote change. It shook voter confidence because of the way the results were transferred and handled outside of the official system to transmit unofficial results. We see this in the United States, for example, where the media does exit polls.