Electoral Reform Committee on July 26th, 2016

[Michael Gallagher]

Well, it is a fact that to be elected in Ireland it does help if you have a name early in the alphabet. It's a striking phenomenon that academics have noticed. If your name begins with “A”, “B”, “C”, or “D”, that helps you. If it begins with “Z“, actually, that's okay too. If it begins with “M” or “O”, that's not so good; you're lost in the middle. It's something that people have noticed, but it still goes on. Personally, I think randomizing the order of names would be a good idea, but it's not mandatory.

[Michael Marsh]

The Supreme Court, I think, looked into this and said it wasn't for them to look into the mind of the voter. You could certainly randomize it, but that might make it even more difficult for voters to find the candidates they were looking for.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you very much.

We'll go to Mr. Cullen now.

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

Thanks. I'm also getting some questions on Twitter that I would really want to put to you.

I'm not sure how familiar either of you is with the Australian system and some of the results they've had. I'll ask one specific question, and if you don't know the answer, we'll move on.

This question comes from Michael Bednarski, who said that under the Australian alternative vote, around 8% of the first-choice candidates lost to second-place candidates and no third-place candidates won. Can you explain that phenomenon and how that alternative vote system produced results in which first-place candidates, as much as 8% of the time, didn't win? If you can't, we'll move on to another question.

[Michael Gallagher]

It's perfectly likely that the first-place candidate might have been, for example, a Liberal candidate, the second one a Labour candidate, and then a Green candidate in third place, so when the Green candidate was eliminated, their preferences would have taken the Labour candidate ahead of the Liberal candidate.

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

I see. The candidate initially seen as the most popular doesn't end up winning the riding, with Australia as a recent example, 8% of the time—

[Michael Gallagher]

That's right.

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

—simply because they were popular within a constituency, but not popular with anybody else.

[Michael Gallagher]

Yes, but the logic would be that the person who eventually wins, the Labour candidate who was second, actually was more popular among the voters as a whole, even though he or she didn't have as many first-preference votes.

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

Someone has raised this scenario, and I hadn't thought of this before. If we end up with a mandatory voting system, plus alternative vote, is there a potential to skew the distortions that alternative vote gives us even more?

[Michael Gallagher]

The alternative vote is not a kind of PR and the outcomes it produces are not that different from first past the post, really, so in some ways I think it would be a huge amount of effort to achieve very little if Canada had a really strong deliberative process and then simply moved to the alternative vote. It wouldn't make a great deal of difference.

Mandatory voting is a different thing entirely, but in Australia it means that voters, when they vote, have to give a preference to every candidate, because “mandatory” means not just that you vote but that you have to vote right down the ballot paper.

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

Let me just walk back to the first part of that comment, and I'll get both of yours.

You said to go to an alternative vote would be a huge amount of effort without producing much or changing much of the results of what we have right now in first past the post.

[Michael Gallagher]

Yes, I think so, because the results of Australian elections tend to be just as disproportional as elections in Britain or Canada, for example. You don't get very close proportionality, and in particular the smaller parties really lose out systematically.

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

That's interesting.

What have we done for diversity under proportional systems, including your open-list system in which voters get to choose who constitutes that proportionality? Have we seen greater diversity of under-represented groups in Ireland or other countries?

[Michael Marsh]

I think gender is the one looked at most often, and in general, proportional representation systems using lists have far more women elected than we see in first past the post...[Technical difficulty—Editor] Putting several people on the ballot is a different process from just putting one or two.

Obviously if the aim is for a particular characteristic, that can be done in other ways. As it's done here, all parties have to put forward a certain number of women candidates, because otherwise they would not get their election expenses back.

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

I see. There's an incentive in Ireland to ensure that you have a certain proportion, particularly of women, on your list as a party. There's a similar law—

[Michael Marsh]

Women candidates.

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

Right, candidates.

We have a similar law being proposed by Kennedy Stewart right now in our Parliament to create an incentive for diversity on the ballot. It's interesting.

I'm not sure how I'm doing for time, Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

You have 45 seconds.

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

I have one last question. I want to skip back to this independents notion.

What has been the public's reaction to having independents participate in government? Has there been any backlash or negative feeling toward the government for having incorporated independents or toward the role of independents in the Dail?

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Please answer briefly.

[Michael Gallagher]

We had an opinion poll just last week that showed that the support for independents had really gone down a lot since the election, so the public as a whole doesn't seem to like it a great deal, but these are early days and things may change.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you.

We'll go to Mr. Thériault.

[Luc Thériault, Bloc, Montcalm, QC]

In answer to my last question, concerning the relationship between the value of an election platform and the alternance phenomenon, you rightly said that the first-past-the-post system would not be any more or less legitimate than another proportional system. The situation would be the same if the Prime Minister, who was elected with 36% or 38% of the votes, did not take into consideration the official opposition as part of parliamentary dynamics when it comes to improving legislation.

We travelled across Quebec for an electoral reform project. Ministerial responsibility—accountability—was an issue that was raised many times in that context.

How is that accountability reflected in the context of electoral dynamics in a system like yours?

In Canada, the government submits its financial statements, which are then criticized. It has to assume full responsibility for its governance.

How does that manifest itself in a system with coalition governments?

Out of curiosity, I would like to know what happens to cabinet solidarity in an electoral environment. Since there are several different parties, I assume that, come election time, those parties disagree with one another and are not really solidary in terms of governance. Could you tell me how that works?

[Michael Gallagher]

When it comes to, say, manifesto promises, if you have a small left-wing party that people expect to get about 10% of the votes, their manifesto might say that if they form the government, they'll do all these things, but the voters know they're not going to form a government on their own. What it means to vote for them is that you want their influence on government. They won't be able to achieve everything they promised, but they will have some input into government. Voters understand the rules of coalition governments. Voters understand that voting for someone means to strengthen their voice, hopefully to strengthen their voice in government, not that they're going to do everything that's in their manifesto.

When it comes to ministerial accountability, the practice in this country is that a lot was inherited from the British practice, perhaps as in Canada. We're not experts on Canadian politics, but it means that government's collective responsibility is very strong. All ministers go out and defend the governmental line. You don't get ministers arguing with each other in public. They have their arguments in private, behind closed doors, but they all defend the government line.

Coalition governments in this country have been just as united as single-party governments; in fact, the most divided governments we've had in the past have been single-party governments, but that's not a problem anyway. There might be other problems, but government unity really isn't a problem.