Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I thank the members of the committee for giving me an opportunity to share my ideas with you on this very important topic you are working on. I congratulate all 12 of you for working on this committee and devoting some real time. I guess it's not just time; it's your head you have to really apply. There are some complicated questions when you get down to alternatives.
I'm here today making a kind of one-dimensional pitch to you. It's set out in my paper, which I'll just skim through, but my one-dimensional pitch is that the one thing, the top thing, the key thing that your committee's recommendations should point toward is creating a House of Commons that represents the political preferences of the people. Now that's quite an idea, isn't it? Imagine an elected assembly representing the people in their political choices.
There are many other values and concerns that go into an electoral system, and they've been set out in various documents to you: accessibility, simplicity, blah, blah, blah. However, members of Parliament on this committee, if your recommendations do not really address this fundamental concern about making our Parliament represent the people, and you might do very well in some of the other concerns, but you will be a failure. You will be a failure because your job is to really deliver recommendations that can make us a representative democracy. That's what we're supposed to be.
So that's what I'm all about and all over.
In my paper I try to explain briefly why the first past the post system, which Canada has had at the federal level from Confederation until today, no longer fits the political circumstances of the country and has not done so since 1921. Why 1921? Yes, I said 1921; that's when things changed. From 1921 on, we did not have a two-party system. Up until 1921 there were two parties. Do the math. One was going to have a majority and the other was not. You were going to get governments that pretty well represented the people—no problem and no issue. It was a natural for our founding fathers—there were no mothers.
Then in 1921, Conservatives under Arthur Meighen actually came third and the Progressives came second to Mackenzie King's Liberals. From that time on we've had a multi-party system, mostly four or five parties, and that kind of party system is really torpedoed, undermined, by the first past the post system. You can see that clearly when you look at the top of page 2 in my brief, where I give the results of federal elections since 1921. We've had 30 elections at the federal level since 1921. Fourteen produced false majority governments. I'm going to come back and defend my use of that term and explain it, but basically, it means governments with a majority of seats in the House of Commons but not supported by a majority of the people. We've had that. That's been the most frequent result, false majority governments.
Just behind it, 13 times, we've had minority governments. Only three times in 30 elections have we had what you could call a true majority government, a government led by a party that won 50% or more of the seats, but also, most significantly, 50% of the popular vote. It was always just over 50%: Diefenbaker's landslide in 1958, Mackenzie King during the war, 1940, and Brian Mulroney in 1984. But they're very exceptional. If you look at our so-called majority governments in the last period, since the late eighties, no government with a majority has had more than 43% of the popular vote, but they have had a majority of seats in the House of Commons and been in a position to control really what happens there and to control government. Indeed, today, 43%, my goodness, party leaders, Liberals and Conservatives, they salivate when they hear that number. They haven't got close to it in recent years. They haven't even hit the 40% mark in the last couple of elections that have produced majority governments.
As I say in paragraph seven, as a parliamentary democracy Canada surely can do better than being most often governed by politicians who were not the first choice of 60% of the people, but who have the power to control Parliament. Electoral reform should, above all, be directed at that situation. That's the number one target I think your committee should have.
I'll go on to talk about some of the concerns people have in a way about what I've just said. I hang out in South Rosedale with Liberals and Conservatives. They're not very interested in electoral reform. When I tell them it's almost guaranteed that no party will have a majority in Parliament, they gasp in horror. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, we've got to have a majority in Parliament.” I start the conversation by saying, “Wouldn't you like to have a House of Commons that represents the people, the political preferences of the people?” “Yes, of course, of course, of course. Oh, yeah, give me that. I mean that's what democracy is all about.” Then it's, “Peter, do you mean to say that when they have this sort of system, some proportionality that makes the elected assembly reflect the political choice of the people, they don't have majority governments?”
I say, no, I'm afraid they don't. It's very rare. Why is that? We don't have any popular political parties anymore, not really popular. Popular parties are a rare breed. By “popular”, I mean 50% or more of the population. This is in any of the western democracies. Not just here, everywhere. People have very different views. It's not just Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Tories and Liberals. They have many different ideas. If a country's electoral system and system of representative democracy doesn't respond to that reality—and we haven't for nearly a century—it's really not delivering the kind of representative democracy people need.
With my neighbours and my friends—and they're good people—who are alarmed, and say, “Parliaments with no majority?”, and they shiver and if they have hair it stands on end, I say, “Now, look...”, and then what they sometimes do right away is say, “Italy and Israel, we'd be like Italy and Israel.” Actually, they haven't kept up with Italy. If they did, they'd know it's gone almost the reverse of proportional representation, and Israel has no threshold for its smallest parties. But what they don't know is that almost all of the parliamentary democracy world, that's the countries that practise parliamentary democracy, have some system of proportional representation that represents the political divisions in the country fairly accurately, and they rarely ever have a majority government. They have minority governments or coalitions.
Once you get that out, then you have to ask, what are those countries? Well, they're messy old countries like The Netherlands and Germany and New Zealand, and you can reel off—and I do in my paper and in my book, Two Cheers for Minority Government—a dozen or more countries that have governed themselves extremely well with no government having a majority of seats in their parliaments.
In my book I also look at how this has worked out in Canadian history. In my book, Two Cheers for Minority Government, I take the minority governments we had from 1921 up until publication in 2006, and I do a profile. Mackenzie King had three. I go on and I do Diefenbaker's and Pearson's and King's and Clark's—a disaster that one—and Stephen Harper's. What I hope I show, and there's lots of evidence in the book, is that these were pretty darned effective governments. They really did get things done. It wasn't a matter of being stalemated and crippled and feeble. They were some of the most dynamic governments we've had.
I take a look at some of the provincial situations where there's been no majority in a legislative assembly and how productive governments have often been in the provinces. My model is Davis' six years. Bill Davis' Conservatives had a minority situation through the 1970s right up to 1981. It was an era of tremendous reform and accomplishment for Ontario. Most of the time Mr. Davis' Conservatives reached out to Stephen Lewis' NDP and they put together a really interesting program of policy reform for the Province of Ontario.
My point here is to underline that those screams of horror at the prospect of no single party having a majority in Parliament, you should be able to deal with those with evidence. We have a very well-educated population, evidence-based thinking is, I hope, really on these days. Ask them to look at the evidence, not the little tidbits they've heard about Israel and Italy, but the evidence. They can start with my book. They don't have to start there but it's the only book on minority parliaments in the English-speaking world right now. Look at the evidence before they lose sleep over the possibility of a proportional representation system giving us no majority in Parliament.
I go on in the paper to say besides governments based on what I call minority parliaments, parliaments in which no party has a majority, Parliament itself works better—there's lots of evidence about that—when no party is in a position to really control it, when there's a real incentive to survive, to put together policies that accommodate more than the plurality party in the House. I think a textbook example, in my opinion, was the first year of Stephen Harper's first minority government. He didn't have a natural ally in the House of Commons, an opposition party that was close to his party, but he managed to reach out on policy after policy, foreign and domestic, to different parties to put together policies that were not an abandonment of Conservative positions but a modification and adjustment of them, and at the same time got through four of his five election priorities.
More often, minority parliaments have two parties that can be more natural allies. My point is that minority parliaments—parliaments in which no party has a majority—can produce strong and effective government but also, and this is so important, they can make Parliament really matter, really be significant from the time it meets until the next election. It's difficult to say that about parliaments in the past—not the present one—that have been dominated by a false majority government.
I promised to explain the falseness. The only reason I call a majority government false when it hasn't been supported by the majority of the people is that I've seen several times both Liberal and Conservative false majority leaders say, “We got a mandate from the people; the people voted us in”. That is—excuse me, members of the public—BS. They did not. That leads to the arrogance that is just lethal in a parliamentary democracy.
I will give up calling them these false majority parliaments when their leaders give up saying, “We got a direct mandate from the people”.
Now, I'll say just a word or two about minority governments versus coalition governments. I have a section on that. I prefer a minority government to a coalition, on the whole, and I think most Canadians do.
We have not had a coalition government, since 1921. We had one just before 1921—Robert Borden's Unionist coalition—but that was a wartime effort when the Liberals split.
I think the advantage of a minority government over a majority coalition...and let me pause to underline what you probably know. Coalitions can be minority coalitions. The one that Mr. Layton and Mr. Dion planned to put together in 2008 would have been a minority coalition.
The disadvantage of a coalition in terms of parliamentary life is that most of the give and take, the reaching out and making broader policies that are more inclusive, takes places in a coalition when the leaders negotiate a deal that brings the two parties together to share cabinet positions. After that, a majority coalition can be as dominating of Parliament as a false majority government. I think we saw that most recently with Cameron and Clegg in the United Kingdom.
On the whole, I prefer the minority government solution.
Let me acknowledge that the downside to minority parliaments is the danger of too many votes in the House of Commons because confidence votes, when you have them often, create a sort of crisis-to-crisis situation. If every vote becomes a matter of the government's survival, you get a crisis situation in the House of Commons—and some of you have experienced that—and you really don't get any interesting and collegial co-operation in making policy. I worry about that.
My answer is that, under an electoral system that's proportional, I think there is less likely to be a lot of votes of confidence. You get a lot of votes of confidence when there is a really good possibility that you can bring the government down, have an election, and get a majority. And oh boy, do party leaders love majorities. I'll be very blunt; I mean Liberal leaders and Conservative leaders. Life is a lot easier, but it's more than that. With Liberals and Conservatives, the gold standard of a leader's success is winning a majority, and that's the way the public and the media gauge them. “He hasn't got a majority yet; he's not really being a great Conservative or a great Liberal leader”.
When you change your electoral system to suit a country in which no party is very popular, in which getting 40% is really as high as you'll get, I think that culture will change and the people, the media, and the political leaders will realize that just bringing down a government to force an election is not very smart because you really don't know what's going to happen with a system that really does accurately reflect the views of the people.
One reform that I urge you, as parliamentarians, to think about in this context is what some of the European parliamentary democracies with PR have developed, the constructive non-confidence vote, requiring that the mover of the non-confidence vote attach to that vote—and this would have to be in your parliamentary rules and the Speaker would have to enforce it—a choice of the next government leader. They say, “Support my motion to bring the government down, and support this political leader.” It's usually the leader of their own party. It would still be a minority party. Indeed, what happens is that if you bring the government down, you would have another government, another combination of political parties that can produce a minority government that can survive in the House of Commons.
European parliamentary democracies with proportional representation have found this to be a very good stabilizing device. That's entirely in your hands. It would be something that a House of Commons, having a adopted a proportional representation system, would want to look at carefully.