Mr. Speaker, I move that the second report of the Special Committee on Electoral Reform, presented on November 28, 2016, be concurred in.
It is with great pleasure that I rise this morning to perform what could colloquially be called a rescue mission of sorts. We have seen the government launch a very expensive and broad survey that has been met with a great deal of ridicule from a large number of Canadians.
The report I am presenting today was passed by the electoral reform committee, the same committee the minister first threw under the bus but now says did great work. It was the second point she made that was true. We were an all-party committee that worked very hard through a number of important questions about our democracy, and we came out with a report of several hundred pages, the most comprehensive report on Canadian democracy in Canada's history. It looked at all the elements, the pros and cons of various changes that are proposed, all in an effort to help the Liberals keep a Liberal campaign promise. It was extraordinary work. I think I can speak for all committee members in saying we got along very well. We felt very enriched by how Canadians invested in us, and we got to hear from some of the best experts, not just here in Canada, but right around the world.
I will be sharing my time with the member for Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston. I neglected to mention that.
The member moved a motion, so I thought it appropriate he be afforded some time to speak as well. His motion reads:
That, in relation to the questions on democratic values that the Minister of Democratic Institutions intends to make available for Canadians' responses on the website, MyDemocracy.ca, the Committee encourages the Minister to reproduce and include in its entirety the questions within this Committee's e-consultation survey, either as a replacement for other planned questions, or in addition to any other questions that the Minister wishes to include;
and that the Committee report this motion to the House.
The committee is now doing that today, to bring forward debate in an attempt to rescue what has been derided from all corners, not just from average, ordinary Canadians who tried to participate or did fill out the survey, finding it incredibly frustrating, confusing, and insulting to their intelligence actually because the survey never comes to the point of actually asking the question that is in front of us, which is “What do you want to do with the Canadian voting system?” I am not a rocket scientist, but that seems like a pretty obvious question to me when talking about changing the Canadian voting system, rather than some of these vague questions that I will read out in a minute.
The notion before us is that there needs to be a reset button done of this whole process. The government is spending a large amount of taxpayer money through a sole-source contract to one firm. There was no consultation whatsoever with other members of Parliament, or other people outside that little inner circle. They produced a survey that confuses, confounds, and insults Canadians, with such gems as, “There should be parties in Parliament that represent the views of all Canadians, even if some are radical or extreme.” What kind of false choice is that? Canadians need to either say yes, they would like all the views of Canadians represented in Parliament, but gosh, what if some of them are extreme or radical? That is a false choice if I have ever read one.
There is another gem here, “A party that wins the most seats in an election should still have to compromise with other parties, even if it means reconsidering some of its policies.” What does that mean? Of course Canadians want parties to compromise. Of course they want parties to reach out and governments to actually engage members of the opposition, even their own backbench who are not in cabinet, to come to the best solutions, because no one party has all the solutions to the challenges we face, particularly when we get to an issue like voting, which has at its core an element of partisan interest that we are seeing on display from the government, unfortunately.
The Prime Minister has said he actually has a preferred system. The minister said she has a preferred system as well, but she will not tell us what it is. The only time the Prime Minister has actually taken a moment to say what voting system he would like is one the committee heard would not only make the problems in our current system dramatically worse, with more unfair voting, more wasted votes, and more false majorities. It also as a by-product would probably keep the Liberals in power forever. What a coincidence that is, that the current Liberal Prime Minister favours that system.
The Liberals said they had to offer all these false choices in order to gauge out and tease out what Canadians really felt about it, that they could not ask a straightforward question. However, they did ask straightforward questions like, “The voting age for federal elections should be lowered.” They did not even include “if the following crisis were to ensue”, or even “if chaos would follow”.
They also said, “The day of a federal election should be a statutory holiday.” That's a straightforward question. There is no binary, there is no poll, there is no false choice.
“There should be a limit to the length of federal election campaign periods.”
If we go through the questions, and Canadians did, they were a source of some significant humour on social media. I will give the government that. We often need levity in this place because we deal with serious things and people say that politics is boring. The response from Canadians was not boring. Rather, it was quite funny. However, when a government is being mocked, it is not a good day. Canadians can disagree with a policy that government has, they can take a countering view, and that is respect. When we get to the level of fundamental mockery, Canadians do not respect anything that the government is doing at all. That should be a warning sign.
Carole said, “The questions were unclear and several repeated themselves in a backward fashion. They certainly could have been better written.”
Will said, “I did the survey anyway, but was struck by the nature of the questions, which did not seem to want to address the various alternatives to the [first-past-the-post] system directly. I wondered why.”
Barbara said, “I filled it in. But felt like the questions were so circuitous and aggressively either/or that I knew less at the end.”
We have to keep in mind that the government will say that 150,000 Canadians filled it out, assuming that the experience of those Canadians who went through this was a great one, when we know for a fact that it was not. Rather, it was the opposite.
We also know this fact. The minister misspoke yesterday in the House when she said that people could fill this survey in and not provide all that incredibly personal information at the end. She neglected to mention that then the survey does not count. To me that seems to be a strange thing if the government wants to know the opinions of Canadians.
The one question the survey did not ask is whether or not they are Canadian and if they could vote in federal elections in Canada. We would think that if the government is surveying Canadians with respect to Canadian values toward the Canadian election system it would include the questions, “Are you Canadian?” and “Can you vote in our elections?” Those would be important ones, and people should have to tick those boxes before they answer these other vague and preposterously stupid questions.
Clark said, “I thought I'd be able to give my opinion on different forms of voting, but was presented with vague, meaningless (and repeated!) statements, where I was often unable to actually answer in a way that actually reflected my 'values'.”
The very definition of a bad survey is one where we go through it and are unable to express what it is that we care about.
The government goes on and on about values. Here are a couple of important values.
With respect to integrity, here is a question that could have been on the survey, “Do you think the Prime Minister should keep his promise?” I know it is a tough one.
With respect to fairness, this is another question, “Do you think every vote in Canadian elections should count?”
What we have said today is that the all-party committee, working with the analysts in the House of Commons, who are the best, put together a survey that we offered before to the government. It did not hear us, so maybe today it will. The survey had such radical questions as, “Voters should elect local candidates to represent them in Parliament.” Do you feel strongly about that? Do you feel not strongly about that? That way there is no confusion.
We asked about, “...the number of seats held by a party in Parliament reflects the proportion of votes it received across the country.” People did not have a problem filling out their opinions on that. Some people said that it is very important, and other people said it is not. We did not add any chaos element. We did not add any skewing to try to drive people in one direction or the other. We had enough respect for people and their intelligence to just ask them the question.
We asked whether, “If I vote for my candidate in my riding who does not win, my vote is wasted.” We heard at committee over and over again from people who said, “I'm a good Canadian. I participated in the elections, but I live in riding X, and this riding never supports the party that I represent”, be it a Conservative in Toronto or a New Democrat on the east coast, ridings that for so long have voted a certain way and voters feel unheard, because they are.
As I said, this is a rescue mission. We need to reset this process for the government. It has not heard the overwhelming wave of feedback and cynicism that has been heaped upon it because Canadians are frustrated with governments that come forward and say, “We're going to consult”, and then we get to that consultation meeting, we try to add our input, we read bogus questions, and we read a skewed survey. We read questions that will lead to bad data, as a leading Canadian pollster told us.
This is an opportunity for the government to make good on its promise to work with the opposition. This is its opportunity to make good on its promise to truly consult and listen to Canadians in a respectful way.