Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'll begin by telling you a bit about myself. I'm a professor of political science at Carleton University, where I hold a research chair in Canadian parliamentary democracy. My research is primarily in the area of political parties and electoral democracy in Canada, and comparatively with other Westminster democracies. I'm the immediate past-president of the Canadian Political Science Association, and perhaps of particular relevance to your work, I was director of research for the New Brunswick Commission on Legislative Democracy, under Premier Lord, in 2004-05.
I am, of course, acutely aware that you have been studying this issue quite intensely for several months, and that you have already heard from dozens of political scientists and others interested in the issue. I suspect many of you could probably teach a master's course in electoral systems. Accordingly, I'll refrain from rehearsing the pros and cons of the various systems and the representational implications of them. Rather, I'll use my 10 minutes to focus on something that I think is very important but has received very little attention thus far, and that is the implications of various electoral systems for the internal operations and organization of our political parties.
I do have views on the other more general issues facing the committee, and I'd be happy to discuss those in the question period, if you would find that of use.
Many of the functions of our parties and the nature of internal party democracy are affected by the choice of electoral system. These include the principal functions of our parties: selecting candidates, election campaigning, government formation, and party leadership selection. Time will not allow me to say much in detail, but I will use examples from Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand, which between them use STV, MMP, and AV systems, and are, I believe, among the most useful comparators, as they are parliamentary democracies with similar political cultures and democratic infrastructure to Canada.
For candidate nomination, if MMP is chosen, I suspect it would likely come with closed party lists. The question then is, who in the party has the authority to construct a list? Using New Zealand as an example, we find that the three main parties—Labour, National, and the Greens—all hold delegated conferences at which party members elect the candidates to be on the list. The electoral law in New Zealand was changed with the adoption of MMP to require that parties use “democratic procedures” in constructing their lists, and that these procedures include participation of party members.
The parties differ, however, in the all-important process of determining who gets ranked where on the list, which is fundamental to determining who ultimately gets elected. The Greens hold a plebiscite of the entire party membership to determine this using a mail ballot. Labour does it through something called a moderating committee, whose membership has been highly contentious in recent years, as all parts of the party, as you can imagine, want to be included on that committee. Currently, its membership is quite large. Many, including the party president, relate that they think it's too unwieldy. It includes MPs, regional representatives, Maori representatives, and representatives from the party's many sectors, including youth, Rainbow Labour, trade unions, women, and Pacific islanders. Both Labour and the Greens have rules aimed at ensuring that the representation of many of these same groups is provided for in high positions on the list, whereas the National Party does not.
Our parties would have to grapple with these issues and construct an appropriate process should we adopt closed-list MMP. You, as MPs, would have to decide how prescriptive you wanted Parliament to be in this regard, if at all, and whether or not it requires something like democratic procedures. This would be a dramatic shift from the current status quo.
In STV there are multi-member districts. If we take the example of Ireland, there are three to five deputies per district. In the major parties, the locals hold nominating conventions similar to those in your parties, but they operate under rather expansive instructions from the centre, concerning how many they can nominate and where in the electorate geographically the candidates chosen will come from. Increasingly, parties are issuing a gender directive from the centre, as well. This has proven, in some cases, to be highly contentious, creating strong tensions between local party members and associations and central party officials, as locals often wish to nominate more candidates than the centre permits. The logic of the system is that you don't nominate as many candidates as there will be MPs, or TDs, as they call them, from the electorate. The locals wish to do this in a rather unfettered fashion.
Our parties would have to determine who would have the authority to make these decisions—it might be national, regional, or provincial—and how expansive any directives to the local associations would be.
With respect to government formation, under MMP or STV, it is highly likely we would end up with multi-party governance, and perhaps in AV as well. This, of course, requires negotiation among the parties—typically, though not always, post-election—to reach a coalition agreement. The question of relevance here is who in the party would have the authority to commit to such an accord. There's considerable variance in this regard.
Some of the Irish parties, Fianna Fáil and the Greens, for example, require a special party congress after an election to approve any coalition agreement. Others, such as the New Zealand National Party, require approval from the party's national executive as well as the parliamentary leadership.
If we were to end up in a highly fragmented system, which could well be the case under either of these electoral systems, government formation could prove very difficult, but at a minimum, parties would have to decide who has the authority to make these deals. Leadership selection is not something we typically think of in relation to the electoral system, but it comes into play as a result of multiparty governance. In all three of the countries I've taken examples from, we've witnessed cases where one of the parties in a coalition government exercises influence over leadership selection in another party.
In Australia, for example, when Liberal Prime Minister Harold Holt was presumed dead, the candidate who was the favourite to replace him, William McMahon, who was serving as treasurer in the Liberal government and had widespread support within his party, was vehemently opposed by the junior coalition partner, the Country Party. The Country Party threatened to withdraw its support for the Liberal Party if Mr. McMahon was chosen as leader. He ultimately had to withdraw from the contest so that the Liberals could maintain their governing position.
Similarly, in recent Fianna Fáil governments, two party leaders, both serving as Taoiseach, or prime minister, at the time, Mr. Haughey and Mr. Reynolds, were dumped after support parties in government—in one case, the Progressive Democrats; in another, Labour—threatened to withdraw their support. Both leaders still had support in their own parliamentary caucus, but in order to remain in government they were removed.
In New Zealand we have seen it work the other way. National Party Prime Minister John Key has threatened to remove a smaller support party, ACT New Zealand, from his coalition if they went ahead with plans to remove and replace their leader.
What we find is something that is largely unprecedented, I suspect, in the Canadian case: parties in coalition with one another influencing leadership selection in the other party. This could prove particularly difficult in the Canadian case, since the authority for both leadership selection and removal is vested in our extra-parliamentary parties. In all of these cases, the parliamentary party was able to make the change quickly because it had that authority. I suspect, if we were to go down this road, it could challenge the current practice of giving the extra-parliamentary party the authority to select and remove leaders.
The fourth and final area of party democracy I'll mention is election campaigning. In both STV and in open-list MMP, general elections include intra-party competition, which our parties would have to learn to manage.
In MMP of the New Zealand variety, we've seen a shift of emphasis away from ridings to regional and/or national campaigns. The number of seats a party wins is almost fully determined by its share of the party vote, not how it performs in the electorates or ridings. Nonetheless, local party organizations, and particularly incumbent electorate MPs, want to run vibrant local campaigns, often at the expense of maximizing the more important party vote.
New Zealand Labour in particular has struggled with this. In recent party reforms, Labour created something called regional hubs, for election purposes, in an attempt to shift resources toward the party vote campaign, but this was not done without considerable tension between locals and the centre, since the allocation of campaign resources is essentially a zero-sum game.
There are also implications in AV. In Australia, parties issue how-to-vote cards indicating how they want their voters to rank lower preferences. Deals have to be made among the parties in this regard. Sometimes this is straightforward but not always, and it can result in tensions between local party organization candidates and the centre.
For example, in 2016 an incumbent Labour MP in the Melbourne area, Michael Danby, issued his own local how-to-vote cards asking his voters to direct their second preferences to the Liberals over the Greens. In the same electorate, the central party, the central campaign, issued cards favouring the Greens over the Liberals as the second choice of Labour voters, so voters received conflicting information. There are often tensions in this regard among locals, state party organizations, and the national campaign.
To conclude, the point of all this is to say that there are many collateral effects of electoral system change that need to be considered and are often overlooked. Also, at a minimum, time needs to be set aside for our parties to grapple with these issues in advance of any election run under a different electoral system. Otherwise, I believe we risk a considerable shift of authority away from our EDAs towards the party centre.
Thank you.
