Electoral Reform Committee on Oct. 20th, 2016

[Matt DeCourcey, Liberal, Fredericton, NB]

I will let Mr. Bossio begin, Mr. Chair.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

I do really appreciate Scott expressing his concern over my riding being neglected in this diagram under rural-urban. To me, it actually looks more urban and small urban than it actually looks rural-urban. I have one of the largest rural ridings in southern Ontario, with a very strong rural presence. My largest town is 8,000 people.

I had three electoral reform town halls, which were very well attended, I might add. They all were very much in favour of electoral reform—as am I, to be perfectly up front. The biggest concern that all of them expressed was this rural mix. How do we get it right so that we end up maintaining rural representation? Every time we redraw the maps, our ridings get larger and larger. My riding is barely sustainable now. It takes four hours to drive from one corner to the other corner of the riding. I have 19 municipalities, one Mohawk territory, two county levels of government, the attached myriad entities—economic development, business, community, social—all of which I'm trying to represent on the Hill and lobby on behalf of. Compare that with an urban centre like Toronto, which has 30 MPs and one municipality, one chamber of commerce, one housing authority.

The deep concern that they have, and that I have, is what are we going to do in the rural ridings? Under your map here, once again it looks like the rural areas will get crunched, will get hammered. As I said, you don't even have anything where my riding is. Where you do have your circles, they mostly just happen to be right near a small urban centre, not a large urban centre like in Ottawa, but Kingston, Peterborough, Cobourg, Trenton, Belleville. These are all larger centres in eastern Ontario that all have representation.

I guess Scott's riding will expand substantially, and maybe Haliburton; I don't know. I don't know how you cover this massive hole that you have in the middle, which is actually the largest riding in the whole bunch.

I guess I would throw it out there once again: how do you address...?

[Réal Lavergne]

Can I speak to that?

That is in fact the whole purpose of the rural/urban model. We haven't called it “rural/small urban/urban” model, because that just gets too complicated.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

No, it's actually small urban and urban. It's not rural.

[Réal Lavergne]

Small urban is included in the rural umbrella that we're talking about. The idea is to create a model that has enough flexibility that where there is felt to be a strong need to retain, more or less, the boundaries of a riding as exists currently, this would be possible. It would still be possible to have proportional representation.

If you like, we can meet you on this at any time. I can come to the Hill. As I said, I'm 10 minutes away on my bike. I can come by, we can chat about it, and we can look at it very closely.

In this example that's in this map we were looking at earlier, you have nine existing rural ridings, rural and small urban ridings, that become eight. There is some expansion, but it's really modest compared with what you would have to have under MMP, where you'd be expanding the size of ridings by 60% or 70%. It makes a huge difference. It's a huge difference relative to STV, where the only way you can have multi-member ridings is to group two ridings together. You actually have to double the size of ridings.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Excuse me, but the problem we already have is this. I'm the chair of the national rural caucus. The reason I created the rural caucus was so that we could offset this lobbying capability that you see in the large urban centres. Any further increase in rural ridings is completely unacceptable. We're already stretched to the max. You can't stretch it any further than that. That's in southern Ontario. What are you going to do in the north? Right now many of them have to commute by plane just to travel around their ridings.

To me, this really is at the root of the biggest issue you have to deal with. As I said, I support electoral reform because I think, yes, every vote should count, and we need to find a solution that will work, but if it will be at the expense of rural, not a chance. We're already getting hammered as it is. We're already at a total disadvantage.

[Réal Lavergne]

It's really not at the expense of rural.... The distribution of seats, rural and urban, stays the same. You don't have an electoral reform and try to rebalance power at that stage.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

This really goes to the crux of the situation. Because right now we have the small communities fund that is defined. How they define a small community is 100,000 people or fewer, which is what you've done here, as well, right in your written report. This is the conundrum. How does a community of 1,000 compete for funding against a community of 100,000 people?

And now you're actually creating an even more unequal representation by increasing the size of these ridings. Even a 15% increase in the size of these ridings.... You don't understand. Have any of you grown up in a rural community and had to compete for those funds or been a representative on a rural municipal council and had to compete for those funds against the larger centres? It's very difficult.

Even though there are a lot of rural areas within eastern Ontario, they're controlled by urban centres, like Kingston, Peterborough, Belleville—

[Réal Lavergne]

I have a solution which is that, instead of reconfiguring the ridings, you add a small top-up of 10% to 15% new seats. Then you can leave the rural ridings exactly the way they are. If you think that's politically viable, that's one way to move ahead with proportional representation.

You can't have proportional representation without having some formula for multi-member ridings or top-ups. So, if you want to have multi-member ridings and top-ups, and you also want to keep single-member ridings exactly the way they are in rural areas, the only way to do it is to add a certain number of MPs.

That's what we're trying to suggest with the rural/urban model. If you want to go that way, that is an option. If it's—

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Our time's up. But it's been a very vigorous debate, and that's what keeps up coming back day after day.

Thank you to the witnesses. That was a very stimulating discussion tonight.

Mr. Reid?

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

I'll wait until you dismiss the witnesses.

I wonder if we could take a few minutes just to pass out the motion that I....

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Oh, yes. Okay. This is not in camera, though. Do you want it in public?

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

It's a public thing, yes.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Okay.

I thank the witnesses. Mr. Graves, thank you for your data; and Ms. Carmichael, it was nice to meet you. Mr. Lavergne, it's nice to see you again and to have the input from the French-language minority communities. It's very important.

Thank you, Ms. Lanthier. Thank you all.

Okay, Mr. Reid.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

If you don't mind just hanging on a second, until I get a copy of my own motion. It's late and we've been sitting in this committee, in various rooms, for six hours, so I may not be as crisp as I would like to be.

Colleagues, yesterday, Professor Becker testified—

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Just a second, Mr. Reid.

We have Mr. Fraser with us, as well. Welcome, Mr. Fraser.

We have more business to take care of.

Okay. So, if Mr. Reid could have everyone's attention, please, that would be ideal.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

You may recall at yesterday's meeting, while I was asking him questions, I said I'll be trying to get back to you with some suggestions about other models that you haven't done that are within the three families of proportional models that I think are the most high profile in the discussion in Canada, those being, STV, MMP, and the rural-urban model.

I said, for each of them, would you be able to run something that does not run into problems with the issue of proportionate representation under the Constitution, which could occur if you add seats?

This is an attempt to actually give him one model for each of these three categories, the first restriction being it has to comply with no new seats for any province. You get exactly the same number of seats, or the same number of MPs, rather, as you had under the 2000—and I see there's an error here. I see 2011. I actually meant to say....

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

It's 2015.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

The 2015 redistribution. Forgive that; it's 2015.

Secondly, the redistribution has to be capable of being executed on an expedited basis, which means any redistribution cannot be...as we see here, nine seats becoming eight, which would require a full two-year-long redistribution, but rather the briefer redistribution that is possible if you simply merge two ridings or three ridings or whatever together.

For all of this, once you've complied with those two restrictions, try to make this as proportional as possible, and the technology or the metric for measuring that is the composite Gallagher index. So that's what I've tried to accomplish in your task. Have us ask him to prepare those models for us.

I would love to pass this tonight, but if people want to take it home, I'll accept waiting until Tuesday. I just mention the obvious constraint, which is that we are trying to get this stuff back. Our negotiations are supposed to be wrapped up on November 10, so getting something back to him earlier is preferable to doing it later, but I leave that to the committee's discretion.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Mr. Cullen.

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

This is good. I too feel that sense of urgency for anything the committee wants to really consider, that we need to get at it pretty quickly.

My only thought is to ask for more time, because at first blush these two conditions you have down here, Scott, seem fine, but I have this inkling that there might be one other condition, just in terms of guiding his process. I feel if we set him off on a course and then say, “Oh no, you've given us some modelling that is actually stuff we can't consider because of X”....

I wouldn't mind the extra bit of time, even though I get that sense of urgency also.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Chair, do you mind if I respond to that before you go to the next person?

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Mr. Reid.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Nathan, I appreciate that. The goal here is simply to make sure we have something that will not cross a practical barrier that would make it impossible to implement for 2019. There may be additional things. Those are the two that I know of.

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

But broadly, Chair, just in terms of the intention, I'm totally in agreement. And I was impressed by Professor Becker's attempt to go at this a different way, which is to track your proportionality rather than start from some opposite thing of “imagine the House is 5% this way and 10%...”. That actually answers the wrong question. This answers the question we're actually going for, which is the trade-off question that we keep talking about: “If you do this, you have to trade off that”.

I'm in favour of it broadly. I wouldn't mind a bit of time just to see if there's a third condition that would be helpful.