Mr. Speaker, preferential ballot and single member districts is the system that the Prime Minister has preferred from before the last election. He has, I think I can accurately say, dissed every other system. He condemned MMP as being too confrontational. He has condemned first past the post repeatedly. I am not sure, though I have not looked to see, if he has dissed STV in the same way. Anyway, he has talked about the wonders of single member preferential balloting, and well he should.
Éric Grenier, a young pollster in this country who publishes some very interesting stuff, produced a report indicating that in the last election the ranked ballot system would have given the Liberals 224 seats. To be clear, the complaint about the current system is that with 39% of the vote, the Liberals had 54% of the seats. Under a ranked ballot, in a similar number of districts, if we assumed that the second preferences of voters, as stated by another pollster, Nik Nanos, are accurate, the Liberals would have translated 39% of the vote into 73% of the seats.
However, let me be clear about this. That is not the reason that the Liberals want this. They want this because they anticipate, and well they might given the way they are managing the economy, that they will not win 39% of the vote in the next election. They anticipate that they will win less. The question is how they translate 35% of the vote into a majority of seats. It would be done by a means of preferential ballot. It only works for the Liberals because they are the party at the centre and they attract second preferences from other parties. They would design a system so that with 35% of the vote, it could still win a majority. If this system goes in and they get 35% of the vote, they will win a majority. Better yet, because the votes are not being counted as percentages anymore, that will all be hidden.
Seeing that we are giving ideas to the Liberals, who claim they have no opinions of their own on this subject—it is disingenuous, but they claim it—let me suggest a further thought. Let me point to the Manning conference a couple of months ago. There are different kinds of preferential systems. There is what is known as optional preferential. That is where voters can mark as many numbers as they want on the ballot. If there are six candidates running for, say Speaker of the House of Commons, to use a preferential system that exists and that I in fact designed, voters can rank one, two, three, and then just stop. That ballot is alive as long as one of the preferences is still on the ballot.
Another system is called mandatory preferential. This one is even better from the Liberal point of view. This one says that if voters do not mark off every single choice, the ballot is considered what is called informal or invalid. If we have that system, anyone who fails to fill out every choice, even the ones they do not like, has their first preference tossed in the garbage.
This is thanks to Nik Nanos, another pollster, who on election day asked voters who their first, second, third, and fourth choices were, or if they had no second choice. He found that 16% of Liberals had no second choice; 10% of New Democrats had no second choice; 13% of Greens had no second choice; for the Bloc, 15% had no second choice; and 46% of Conservatives had no second choice.
Now, we can engage in a massive advertising campaign trying to explain that people have to vote for everyone. However, if even 10% of those people did not get the message and we spread that 10% across the parties, the effect would be that many Conservative candidates who win a majority of first preferences with more than half the vote will still lose. That is a very realistic scenario, and I do not think it is unrealistic to assume that only 10% would fail to get the memo.
If the Liberals are looking for ways to steal the next election, optional preferential does the trick. If they are looking for ways to steal every election, then I would seriously recommend to them the mandatory preferential that I just described.
Turning to a referendum, what is the reason for having a referendum? I want to make this quite clear, and one can check my writings on this subject to see that I have not been a defender of first past the post. I have been a defender of democracy, of a referendum for deciding this issue.
Let me now read from a paper that I wrote in 2001 on this subject. I said, in advocating a referendum, “just to be on the safe side, the existing first-past-the-post system [should] be included as one of the alternatives which voters could select on a preferential ballot”. I was actually saying that we should have a preferential referendum in which one chooses between all of the different options.
This would ensure that even if the designers of the system had done their job poorly and selected a range of entirely unacceptable options, the worst that would happen would be that Canadians would return to the status quo.
This is not the worst option available under this system. The worst option is that the governing party steals the next election, just as the Australian government did in 1918. That was an outrage. It did not destroy Australia as a country, but it reduced its stature as a democracy. That is the danger that we are facing here.
Do I think that the Liberals are going to try to steal every future election, as one reporter asked me? I think they just care about the next election, frankly, but they are trying to steal the next election.
Anyone who thinks that it is constitutional to design a system that would have the exclusive purpose, the primary purpose, or even a partial purpose, of disenfranchising Canadians, because that is the point—it is not about which party will benefit—is very naive. It is about which voters will be effectively disenfranchised through the choice of a system which has predictable results. Anyone who thinks we can do that and not violate section 3 of the charter, the part of the charter that says we all have the right to elect members of Parliament, is very naive indeed.
I hope that the government has thought through the constitutional implications of the road it has been going down since it adopted this idea a year ago next week in its election platform. The government is moving to very dangerous, very unconstitutional, very undemocratic ground, and it will discover that the Canadian people will not stand for it. It will not matter whether it will have the support of one other party and it is accomplished.