Mr. Speaker, it is an honour for me to rise to discuss this topic. I am very familiar with it, as are the other committee members. I will be sharing my time with another committee member, the hon. member for Saanich—Gulf Islands.
Like all members of the committee, I am very proud of this report. It is really an excellent piece of work. It moves the ball forward on what is a complex and oftentimes technical issue. It is today's most up-to-date and comprehensive compendium of analysis and insight on electoral reform from a Canadian perspective. It is a wonderful piece of work.
If it is a wonderful piece of work, it is because the committee did a fairly thorough job within obviously some constraints. We had to report by December 1, which gave us about five months to do our work. We heard from 196 witnesses during that time.
The committee held 57 meetings between the beginning of July and the end of November. A total of 567 people participated in the open mic sessions on electoral reform, and the committee heard from 763 witnesses and received 574 briefs in all.
Many MPs chose to consult their constituents. In fact, 174 MPs responded to the call to consult their constituents. Some members did so by holding a town hall meeting, or even several such meetings. Others sent out questionnaires to find out what their constituents thought about the subject.
The committee travelled across Canada, stopping in each of the 10 provinces and three territories.
We visited 18 cities or municipalities, including three cities in Quebec. On Vancouver Island, we met with first nations representatives, and we also held meetings in Victoria. We travelled 31,000 km. All that to say, we did a very thorough job.
I would like to salute the work of the committee members, some of whom have been in and out today, obviously the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands and the member for Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, who is extremely knowledgeable about the issue of electoral reform. He has a very high level of technical understanding of the issue. I would like to give the House an example.
Witnesses who are experts on electoral reform were piped in from Germany. One of the witnesses, Professor Pukelsheim, developed a system called the Double Pukelsheim, which is some kind of electoral system. The member for Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston had actually heard about that system before the witness even appeared.
Let me read something to highlight how complex the topic of electoral reform can be. We think it is quite easy. We think it is a choice between first past the post and list PR like we find in Israel and Italy, but it is a much more complex subject matter than that. I will read a press release from the Parti Vert'Libéral du canton de Fribourg:
The Vert'Libéral party of the Canton of Fribourg, the PVL, adopted a position with respect to the complementary consultations on the new voting system for the Grand Council. The PVL is pleased to note that the appointed expert, Professor Jacques Dubey, is of the opinion that the bi-proportional system proposed earlier this year, the “double Pukelsheim”, rectifies the problems with Fribourg's voting system identified by the cantonal court.
I read that to highlight how complicated the issue can be, and it was further highlighted in the report by the invocation of the Gallagher Index.
In my life, I have taken mathematics courses. I am no mathematical genius by any stretch, but I took some university-level math courses and nonetheless I even found the Gallagher index formula a bit daunting. Electoral reform is complex issue, but the Special Committee on Electoral Reform embraced the issue in all its complexities and did a marvellous job.
Any electoral reform has to be based on the foundation of citizen values. Why? We heard from committee witnesses that there was no perfect electoral system. In a sense, there is a relativistic element to electoral systems. In other words, the electoral system that suits a particular nation is a function of the democratic values of that nation. Those democratic values are shaped by national identity and experience.
What the minister is seeking to accomplish through her survey questionnaire is something that was not really in the committee's mandate to accomplish. Nor was it within the committee's means. It was preoccupied with the technical aspects of electoral reform. If Canadians look at the report, they will see we detailed a number of systems and variations on each system.
Coming into this exercise, I thought there were majoritarian systems and proportional systems, but there are mixed systems. Within a system, there can be variations that attempt to adapt to the geographic realities of a particular country. We were focused on that. However, ultimately electoral reform has to be based on what Canadians want, and what they want in an electoral system will always be a function of values. That is the point of the minister's exercise through the MyDemocracy.ca questionnaire.
It has been a little disingenuous of some members of the opposition to suggest that the questions in the questionnaire are not relevant. Anyone who knows anything about sampling or creating surveys of the public knows that in order to eliminate bias, some questions must be proxies for the issue we are trying to get at. Otherwise, it is very easy for the individuals answering the questionnaire to essentially answer it in a biased way that they think maybe provides the answers expected of them. Therefore, a lot of these questions are essentially proxies.
Opposition members have also asked why we do not take some of the questions the special committee had in its survey questionnaire, which were fundamentally more complicated and more technical, and cut and paste them onto the minister's questionnaire. That is a bit disingenuous. Anyone who prepares surveys knows that a survey has its own integrity, that it has its own core methodology. We just cannot borrow here, there, and everywhere for political reasons because we will get a mishmash that, at the end of the day, will tell us nothing and will not be particularly useful to our purposes.