Mr. Speaker, I make the observation at the beginning that the reason why this has not been debated in the last 75 years is that the debate concluded 75 years ago with the conclusion that proportional representation is not anywhere near as democratic or efficient for democratic societies as what we do have in Canada, which is the first past the post constituency system.
I observe that the three most powerful democracies in the world, the three most efficient democracies in the world, the three democracies of which at least two of them have the greatest land masses in the world, have the simple plurality system that we inherited from the British parliamentary system.
If we compare proportional representation around the world, the majority of countries that have that type of system, which basically involves a party leader being able to name people to seats based on the percentage of votes his parties received, we will find by and large that the countries whose democracies work most inefficiently and with the greatest amount of difficulty are those that have proportional representation.
There is a reason for this. There is a very clear reason. Proportional representation is great in theory but terrible in practice. The reason is that in the end it so slices up the result of an election that very rarely do we have anything but a minority government and too often we have a situation where not only do we have a minority government but the balance of power is controlled by a very few.
I point out that Israel, which is currently in the news right now, is a classic case of proportional representation. What happens is that a legislative assembly or a parliament is fractured among many parties. What constantly happens is that no single party can get enough of the seats by proportional representation, percentage of the vote, to form a government. In the end, very small parties, often parties with very extremist agendas, form the balance of power.
I think one of the barriers to peace in the Middle East, to some extent, has been the fact that successive Israeli governments have had a great deal of difficulty advancing agendas for peace when they have had very small splinter parties, which they are dependent upon to remain in power, that are very reluctant to advance the peace process, as the current government of Mr. Barak. I find he made a superb effort, but we do realize that he had to come to some very difficult alliances to even bring the peace process as far as it has gone now.
Let us leave Israel. We can go around the world and find countries such as Italy and many others in which proportional representation has led to successive governments that are extraordinarily weak and have constant elections. It is bad enough to have an election in less than four years around this place, but some of these countries with proportional representation have elections about every year, if not every six months.
To illustrate my point I do come prepared. I do have an example that should strike great interest. It is the results of the 1997 election when the Liberals did form the government. It was a very narrow majority. In fact the Liberal government only received 38.5% of the popular vote but obtained 51.5% out of 301 seats in the House. So a government was formed.
The mover of the motion would find that unacceptable. Let us just consider what would have happened had we had proportional representation instead of the by constituency voting mechanism that we have inherited from the British parliamentary system. Here is what would have happened. I have a note here somewhere that I made. Had it been proportional representation in this parliament based on the 1997 election, two alliances would have formed based on the percentage of seats they would have obtained.
Let us suppose that one of those alliances would have been the Liberals and the NDP. The Liberals obtained 38.5% of the popular vote. The NDP received 11%, for a grand total of 49.5% entitlement for the number of seats. In other words, had the seats reflected the popular vote, then the Liberal and NDP coalition would have been entitled to only 49.5% of those seats.
Similarly we had the natural alliance formed around the Canadian Alliance, the Bloc Quebecois and the Conservatives. The figures are 18.8%, 19.4% and 10.7%, for a grand total of 48.9%. Of the five major parties in the House, neither natural alliance would have been able to form a government.
Where would the balance of the seats come from? There were three independents. In fact if the seats had been awarded according to the percentage of popular vote, enormous power would have been given to the two independent MPs who were sitting in this House. They would have had it in their power to determine whether it would be a government based on NDP-Liberal values or a government based on the more conservative or the more decentralizing philosophy that characterizes the Bloc, the Reform Party and the Conservative Party.
That is unacceptable. A country cannot be run when that kind of power is given to so few. What we have in our system is not fair, in the most literal sense, but it works.
When there is talk about democracy we do not simply talk about what is fair or what seems good on paper. We have to talk about what is good for the country and what is good for Canadians. What is necessary in any democracy is that we have a reasonable succession of governments that are able actually to carry out a mandate, if not for five years or four years, at least for three and a half years. In a system where there are two MPs holding 299 MPs to ransom, governments will rise and fall every six months, as indeed they do around the world with countries with this kind of problem.
There is another major problem with proportional representation which strikes near and dear to my heart. One of the problems is that in our current system the reason why there is a skew in the percentage votes is that if I win in my riding and another person wins in another riding I may win by 30%, 40% or 50%. It depends. Nevertheless I win in my riding and I come to the House representing the people in my constituency. It makes it very difficult for the Prime Minister or any party leader. If I come to the House I am not only here because of my party leader, I am also here because of the support I have received regionally in my constituency from my own electors.
In the proportional representation system there are no constituencies, not usually. In the majority of them there are no constituencies. What happens is that once the party leader, as in the case in Israel and so many other countries, gets the percentage of the vote, he determines who takes his place in parliament. The difficulty is that means the party leader can hold his politicians together with an iron fist, whereas the reality here is that the Prime Minister has to be on a certain amount of good behaviour around here because he cannot easily fire backbench MPs like me.
The reality is that he can dismiss people from cabinet but he cannot dismiss people from their House of Commons seats. If he does, he may do it at his peril because—and the hon. member for York South—Weston is a good case in point—the leader may dismiss but the voters may return that person as an independent.
The thing that I find most appalling about the very thought of proportional representation is that in that kind of parliament I would not survive 10 minutes.