Mr. Speaker, I want to say a few words about this subject today. I appeal to the Liberals opposite to look seriously at the merits of changing our electoral system.
In Canada today there is a real crisis in democracy and I think we are sleepwalking toward that crisis. If we look at the turnout in the last election, fewer than 60% of the people voted. In 1997 it was 67%. Years ago it was 75%, 80% or 85%. People are being turned off by the political system and by politics.
If we walk down the street in any town or city in Canada we find people who are alienated from the political system. Part of the reason is that when people elect parliament their votes are not mirrored in the composition of the seats. That is one of the big problems we have today.
For example, the Liberal Party received around 40% of the vote last November. Only about 60% of the people voted. Therefore the Liberals received about 25% of the support of the electorate. About a quarter of the people have elected a government that will govern constitutionally for some five years. That is a problem in terms of the credibility of the House of Commons and the credibility of parliament. That is why we should seriously look at changing our electoral system.
It is amazing. Those of us who come here, come through the first past the post system. The last time there was a vote in parliament on proportional representation was before you were born, Mr. Speaker. The year 1923 was the last time there was a vote in the House of Commons on PR.
Last fall my private member's motion was drawn and declared votable. We had one hour of debate and the election came before we had a chance to vote on the motion.
We are saying that we should strike an all-party committee to look at the merits of the various forms of proportional representation that might be incorporated in terms of an element into our electoral system. We must have a debate on the issue. It is a fundamental issue which we should be facing but parliamentarians are refusing to deal with it.
There is growing interest across the country in the whole idea of changing our electoral system. There is an organization called Fair Vote Canada. There are other organizations out there promoting a change. I will be hosting a conference in Ottawa on March 30 and March 31 at which all five political parties will be speaking to and supporting the idea of looking at the kind of PR that might be relevant to our country. I call upon the Parliament of Canada to join the cause of looking at changing our electoral system into something that is more relevant to the 21st century.
Our system is outdated. There are now only three countries in the world with more than eight million people that do not have some form of PR. They are India, the United States and Canada. Britain, the mother parliament, has an element of PR in the Scottish, Irish and Welsh parliaments. All other members from Britain are elected to the European community by PR. In the election after next England will probably have a measure of PR in terms of what the Blair government is planning. Canada will be one of only three countries in the world without some element of PR.
Another problem with the lack of PR in the first past the post system is that a lot of people feel their votes are wasted. Many Canadians vote for people who are not elected to the House of Commons because of the winner take all political system. If we had a system of PR people would be empowered and included because their votes would be reflected in the House of Commons. If we received 20% of the votes we would have roughly 20% of the seats. That is not the case in the House of Commons today.
Canada has a very unfair system. Let us look at the last election. The party to my left over here, the Conservative Party, required 130,000 votes to elect a Conservative member of parliament while the Bloc Quebecois required 36,000 votes to elect a member of the Bloc Quebecois. That is how distorted our political system is.
Sometimes it works in favour of one party against another, but the first past the post system always distorts the outcome of elections. What we see in the House of Commons does not reflect the way Canadians are voting. That is why the political system must be changed.
In 1997 the Conservative Party got 19% of the vote and the Reform Party got 19% of the vote. The Conservatives got around 19 seats and the Reform Party got around 60 seats. The NDP and the Bloc each had 11% of the vote. We had 21 seats and the Bloc had 44. The Liberal Party, with just 38% of the vote, won a majority and can constitutionally govern for five years. That is not fair. That is not just.
In the province of Ontario we would think everyone is Liberal. In the last campaign the Liberals won about 50% of the votes and 97% of the seats. In 1997 they had fewer than half the votes, 49.6% or 49.7%, and had all but two members of parliament from the province of Ontario. The electoral system distorts the way Canadians think.
It is the same in the west. People might think all but a few people in the west vote for the Reform Party or the Alliance Party. In the campaigns of 1993 and 1997 the reform alliance was a minority party in western Canada. It received 40% plus of the popular vote, yet it won the absolutely overwhelming majority of seats.
That is the unfairness of the system. Other countries have remedied the unfairness by bringing an element of PR into their electoral systems so that people's votes are counted in parliament. It is about time we caught up with the trend in terms of modernizing democracy.
There is also the whole question of national unity and regionalism. We are seeing more of a regional Canada all the time. We are seeing it increasing day by day. I am thinking in terms of the politics of the Harris government, of the Klein government and of the Parti Quebecois that regionalize Canada. That is now reflected in the House of Commons where we have in essence five regional political parties representing one or two regions of the country.
If we had a system of PR, all parties would be forced to think of the country as a whole, of a national vision of what is best for Canada, because a vote in Newfoundland would have the same power as a vote in rural Saskatchewan or Montreal or Vancouver. It would force all political parties to have a national vision to knit and pull the country together. That is not happening today in terms of our first past the post political system.
There is also the whole question of empowerment. People feel excluded from the electoral system. If we had an element of PR in the electoral system everybody's vote would count. Nobody's vote would be wasted, not just on election night but throughout the term of the parliament. It would mean a radical change in the Parliament of Canada. It would mean almost certainly that most governments would be minority governments. It would force a radical thing upon the Parliament of Canada. It would force politicians to work together to come up with a consensus like most countries in the world.
Since 1921 we have only had three governments of a majority sense that were elected by the majority of the people. The other majorities have been fake majorities in terms of a minority electing a majority of MPs and then governing as a majority. That is true in the case of all three Liberal majorities.
There were very few majority governments elected by a majority of the people. There were Mackenzie King in 1945, John Diefenbaker in 1958 and indeed Brian Mulroney in 1984 who, with a big sweep, had about 49.9% or 50% of the votes.
Time and time again we are electing a parliament with a composition that does not reflect the voting pattern of the people of Canada. What we are saying today is that we should strike an all party committee to look at the various types of proportional representation that might be relevant to this unique federation of Canada and make a recommendation back to parliament as to the best type of system for the Canadian people.
People talk across the way of Israel and Spain and many years ago. There are all kinds of proportional representation systems. We are saying that we should bring an element of PR into the Canadian system. We are not specifying as to what that element should be, that is for the Canadian people to decide. It is the unique federation. Perhaps we could look at a model that is similar to Germany. It has half the members chosen on a riding by riding basis and half of the members chosen through the proportional representation of the parties. It has what is called the mixed member proportional system which seems to have worked very well for Germany as a federation.
There are all kinds of other examples. Some countries have 15%, 20% or 25% of their members elected by proportional representation and that may also work well for them.
These are some of the things we should be considering in reforming and changing our electoral system and making it more fair, more just and more reflective of how the Canadian people vote. People are losing confidence in the political institutions, in politicians and in the very democratic practice of voting by itself.
We are also saying in the motion today that we should look at other various electoral and democratic reforms as well. The time has come, for example, to abolish the unelected, undemocratic and unaccountable Senate. I would abolish it and bring those checks and balances into the House of Commons by way of stronger committees, more independence for committees, less power for the Prime Minister's office and better reflection of the regions through proportional representation.
Others want to elect the Senate, but either way we look at it, all the polling shows only about 5% of Canadians support the existing Senate. Yet members of parliament decade after decade support keeping the other place the way it is. No wonder Canadians are losing confidence in the people elected to the House of Commons. This is another reason why we have to change the electoral system in Canada.
My time is up but I want to move the following amendment. I move:
That the motion be amended by inserting the word “immediately” after the word “House”.