Electoral Reform Committee on Oct. 20th, 2016

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

Isn't it good, Chair?

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Yes.

Ms. May

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

Is it my turn?

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Oh, I'm sorry. It was Mr. Thériault.

I do apologize, Mr. Thériault. Go ahead.

[Luc Thériault, Bloc, Montcalm, QC]

I will think about it and decide whether I accept your apology, Mr. Chair.

Ladies, gentlemen and students, I hope our debates fascinate you.

I will start with you, Ms. Webb.

So you know where I stand when I ask my questions, I'll tell you that our Prime Minister was just a babe when I was an activist in a feminist movement. I am for gender equity in the nominations, but I advocate more for real representation of women in Parliament.

I have a very simple question for you: if you had to choose between keeping our voting system, accompanied by coercive measures to encourage gender equity in the nominations, and a mixed member proportional voting system with incentives, which would you choose?

[Madeleine Webb]

Are you talking about choosing between the rules for—

[Luc Thériault, Bloc, Montcalm, QC]

Between the current voting system, to which we would add coercive measures to encourage equal nominations, and the compensatory mixed member proportional voting system, which would include incentives, which do you prefer?

[Madeleine Webb]

I'm going to respond in English, just because I don't know all the terms in French, but thank you for your question.

As a representative of CFUW I can say that we do not have a policy specifically to address that, but right now before this committee we are asking for change. I think what we see is that we can give incentives to have more women elected or more women nominated. Some parties take that upon themselves.

In general, I think it's a good idea to encourage parties to nominate more women. However, for real change, if we really want to see more women elected and more minorities elected, we need to change the electoral system. I would not say that we're advocating specifically for mixed-member proportional. We are advocating for a Canadian version of proportional representation, whatever form that might take.

[Luc Thériault, Bloc, Montcalm, QC]

Okay, I understand the nuance.

Mr. Bozinoff and Mr. Schatten, you said that people who say they know what Canadians want may be speaking carelessly by playing the representation card. I am a duly elected member of Parliament. We have a representative democracy. I do not claim to know what voting system all voters want.

I know what I want and what my party wants. We want the voting system to change and a form of proportionality introduced. We prefer the compensatory mixed member proportional voting system. However, we don't want just any model of this voting system, and we don't want it to be applied haphazardly.

We need to take the time to do things properly. For that, we have to let the Prime Minister out of the straitjacket we have put him in by saying that it would be the last election with the current voting system. I don't think he knew what he was saying and had no knowledge of what was required to transform things.

Suppose our committee moves on to a second step that would involve developing a model and continuing to consult all voters to make them understand the differences between the proposed voting system and the current voting system. People would then be better informed and could settle the debate. In that case, would you be in favour of a referendum on the issue?

People have told us that a referendum wouldn't be necessary because we are the representatives of the people. If a referendum isn't necessary to change the voting system, it isn't necessary either to maintain the status quo. Right now, one is as good as the other.

If we don't want to decide for the people and if we want to rise above partisanship, I think a referendum would be necessary and could be held during the next election.

To interest people in this issue, shouldn't we first have a clear model, rather than keep the status quo and continue the consultations?

[Lorne Bozinoff]

I'm going to respond in English.

The public generally is in favour of referendums. They like the idea because the idea is that they're going to be consulted on something directly. We did a poll a month ago and found that 65% favour a referendum. That's not a surprise. People tend to say that the public should be consulted.

I'm not convinced that they would want two referendums though. The counter-argument is about the cost of these things, and it gets into the millions of dollars sometimes. We sometimes hear that kind of push-back. I'm not convinced that there's interest in two referendums, but I think there would be a lot of interest in one referendum once the committee has made its recommendation and we have a concrete option.

You know, there's a lot of fluidity in these results because the details are still unknown. We don't know what the choice is going to be. We tested three options. Well, I don't think a referendum is going to involve three options. To really get a solid handle on this, the public would need to know what the idea is.

Going back to Mr. Cullen's point about the details and the trade agreements and so forth, I think that once the public knows exactly what the details are, they'll understand the implications through the dialogue in the run-up. They'll understand the pros and cons. They will then know what it means to them, I think. They will know—

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

[Lorne Bozinoff]

I think they will be able to answer in a more educated manner whether or not they're in favour of this system, or to say if it's the new system versus the old system.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

We'll go to Ms. May now, please.

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

Thank you very much, Chair.

Thank you to the committee and to all of our panel members who are here today. It's been a very good discussion. I'm also glad to welcome a political science class here in Parliament for this really critical discussion.

We were kind of teasing about Mr. Cullen's answer to the question. When Mr. Bricker was here, his polling numbers said that in August, 3% of Canadians were aware of our committee. We have vaulted to 50% of Canadians being aware of this committee, and if you turn around you'll see that the tables reserved for media are remarkably vacant, as they have been consistently in almost all of our hearings. I'm amazed that we got up to 50% since we're in a media blackout zone.

I want to identify myself as a member of the Canadian Federation of University Women, and I will try to come back to you with some more questions, but I first wanted to address Professor Cross.

I'm grateful to you for focusing on an area we hadn't heard about, but I wonder if I could bring your attention back to something we have heard about, especially since you were an adviser. Perhaps you could describe your role with the New Brunswick Commission on Electoral Reform in a bit more detail. Would you still hold to the recommendation the commission had then for mixed-member proportional?

[Prof. William Cross]

I spent about 18 months as a director of research for the commission working in conjunction with David McLaughlin who you have heard from. He was the deputy minister at the time. We had a small commission, ultimately of eight. We lost one; we started with nine. My role was really to provide the information and the research that the committee used on an ongoing basis during our meetings. We did a lot of public consultation as well across the province, and then ultimately wrote the report.

My view on electoral system change is that it is something one has to approach very cautiously, of course, with awareness of all the potential implications. In the New Brunswick case, the commission did a very thoughtful job and created a regional mixed-member proportional representation system, or N.B. MMP, that was tailored to the context of New Brunswick. Of course, it is unique in our confederation, with its two linguistic communities at the provincial level. A lot of regional dynamics had to be considered. The commission recommended a system that was appropriate to the province at that time. The new Liberal government has just engaged a new process. We'll see where that ends up.

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

The second part of my question is whether you still think that mixed-member proportional would be right for New Brunswick. Do you have any particular recommendation, given how much time you spent working on and thinking about this area in your own work as research chair for parliamentary democracy? Do you have a specific preference yourself on the electoral reform this committee should recommend? How would you suggest we prioritize the different values that we have to consider in making that recommendation?

[Prof. William Cross]

Sure. You're right to begin from a position of values. I think back to the dictionary definition of reform, which is to change something for the better. We have to be very careful that we understand the full implications of the changes we consider and that we are making it better.

I was just listening to the conversation about gender. I've just written a paper that will be in the Canadian Journal of Political Science shortly on candidate nomination and gender in the 2015 election. It's true that it is a principal obstacle, but if the intent is to get more women into Parliament, there are lots of other ways of doing that short of changing the electoral system if we have a real commitment to do it, which we should.

Changing the electoral system, in and of itself, doesn't guarantee that. People cherry-pick examples, right? Ireland, which has a more proportional system, has fewer women in their lower house, the Dáil Éireann, than we do. It just doubled in the last election earlier this year, and that was the result of tying campaign finance reimbursements to increasing the number of women nominated, which is something we could do if that were really what we wanted to do and we had that as a strong incentive.

I would just say, to answer your question, that I don't have a preferred position on this. My advice to the committee would be to go slowly. I get concerned, and that's one of the things I was trying to address. If we move very quickly and say that the next election is going to be under MMP or AV or STV, and we don't allow time for political parties to adjust to that, I think it could result in a real power grab toward the centre of our parties and away from internal party democracy where members and EDAs have an important role.

It doesn't have to end up that way, but if we don't leave time for the parties to consider those things and have a thoughtful conversation about them, I think that's where we would end up.

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

I think you'd agree with me that over the last number of decades, or certainly since the early 1970s, when for the first time a political party's name was put on the ballot and, for the first time ever, political party leaders had to sign off on nominations, it would be naive to suggest that the current process of nominating candidates across Canada in the major parties is free from top-down political control.

Would you agree that there's been a trend towards greater political control in the centre since we've put the names of parties on the ballots with the candidates' names?

[Prof. William Cross]

Well, it's complicated. Joey Smallwood, when he was premier in Newfoundland, issued a press release that listed who all the federal candidates would be for the Liberal Party in Newfoundland.

It has flowed back and forth. A decade ago, both of the parties, Mr. Harper's party and the Liberals, renominated all incumbents by fiat, essentially, from the centre. They backtracked from that, right? There was a real push-back.

As we all know, there is interference from the centre. It's contentious, but we just need to be careful in thinking about how that would play out under different systems.

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

I'll go to Mr. Bozinoff.

Just to clarify, on your page 8, in table 1, is this actually the description that was used on the IVR system? Is this all they were told about the different systems? If I'm correct in finding that this reflects only to the voter how each MP has been elected, it doesn't say anything about how, under first past the post, 39% of the vote gives you the majority. The proportionality impact is not riding by riding in its importance; it's the makeup of Parliament as a whole, which is completely absent from this description in table 1.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Very briefly, please, because we are up against a time constraint.

[Lorne Bozinoff]

Yes, those are descriptions we used.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

Mr. Aldag, please.

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

Good morning to our panellists. This has been another great morning. As we go through this, I'm always surprised at the new testimony we get each day. Each of you has brought us some new insight today, so that's really appreciated.

I did want to start with one small correction on a statement that was made previously when a discussion was happening about committees and how in this Parliament it's difficult to have full representation by women.

The example of the medical assistance in dying committee was given. I sat on that committee. I just want to indicate that it wasn't just one woman for the entire committee. The Liberals had two women who participated throughout. The NDP had one, Madam Sansoucy, who participated consistently throughout the process. Also, the Senate actually had two of five, because it was a special joint committee. There was actually fairly good representation.

We see other examples. My colleague Ms. Romanado sits on two committees, whereas I sit on one. Sometimes women have to work harder, but we can get that representation.

[Voices]

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