Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan.
I want to start first by thanking the committee for the tremendous hard work it has done. I watched my colleagues spend a good portion of their summer either in meetings in Ottawa or travelling across the country. I know they all performed their work with diligence. To be quite frank, I was very dismayed when I heard the minister be so dismissive about the work they had done. That was shameful. She did apologize, so we do need to move on, but it was an extraordinary thing to say to the members of the committee who had worked so hard during the summer, and also to Canadians across Canada who had participated in the process.
What was very fascinating about the majority report is it actually ended up, in a very unusual way, reflecting what happened in the riding of Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo in terms of what the major recommendations were. The riding I represent is a very large riding in the middle of British Columbia. It turned out that there were two independent processes that happened. One was a local group of community members who got together, many of them with affiliations to the NDP, to the Green Party, and to the Liberal Party. I also had a process, independent from them. I was really looking at things perhaps at a hundred-thousand-foot level. I had a number of town halls, mostly in the rural communities. To be quite frank, in the middle of summer it was not very well attended in terms of engagement. They were beautiful summer days, and talking about electoral reform was not as high a priority as perhaps enjoying the very short summers we have.
However, I did reach out, with a mail-out and a telephone survey. I had three questions. I am not someone who designs survey questions, but I think they were logical and made sense. My first question in the telephone survey was, “Are you aware that we're actually talking about the issue of changing how we vote?” Asking about awareness is probably a good start. Out of that, I was actually surprised. Some of the work over the summer had started to penetrate. This went out to 8,000 homes. It was answered by citizens across the riding. Sixty-eight per cent of the respondents actually had an awareness that there was a discussion going on around electoral reform.
The next question I asked was, “Do you believe that we should be changing our system?” Again, it is a pretty simple question, “Are you happy with what we have or do you think we need to change it?” Again, I am not an expert in survey development, but these were intuitive questions. Forty-one per cent thought we should have changes to the system. Fifty-eight per cent said it was fine the way it is. Thirty-two per cent did not have an opinion.
My third question was about a referendum, of which 66% of the people who responded to the survey said they believed there should be a referendum. That is actually pretty similar to a lot of the responses from different groups' surveys across the country.
Independently, at the same time, the citizens' group had had more granular sessions where they had sat down with people who had a real interest in the system. They had conversations with them about if we are going to change the system what the system should look like. This was led by a former Liberal candidate. He was the one leading the charge, and he was very interested in sitting down and talking with the people. What came out of the work they did was interesting. Their recommendation was very strongly for a proportional representation system. The people who had attended were very keen on electoral reform, so the response around the issue of a referendum was perhaps smaller, but certainly I felt I had reached out to many.
What we ended up with in our riding was the two principles that came together in that majority report: a referendum and a proportional system, exactly what happened with the committee in terms of how we need to move forward.
I think the committee and the numerous town halls from across the country gave the government a road map for moving forward with a referendum on proportional system.
It is really kind of surprising that all of a sudden, at the nth hour, the dissenting report by the Liberals says that this is confusing and complex, and that we do not need a referendum. All the other parties are trying, as my colleague from Skeena—Bulkley Valley said, to help the Liberals fulfill their promise, and it is the Liberals' dissenting report for a majority committee that sort of put the kibosh on it. It was very interesting.
All of a sudden, the Liberals have postcards being mailed across the country. I would suggest that the step they have put in the process is, first of all, a little dubious and is muddying the water a little. The committee had offered to provide some questions, and if the government was putting out a postcard linking people to a survey, there are a few things the committee would recommend. We have looked at this all summer.
There are some questions we think the government should ask. Further, the survey does not link to the report of the committee, which to me is absolutely stunning. People can go to MyDemocracy.ca, and there is no link to see what the committee said but there are links for other things. It did not incorporate logical questions.
It incorporated perhaps logical questions about age and where to vote, but not around the issues the minister criticized the committee about. She said that the committee did not get to the details and the nuts and bolts. In the same sense, she has sent out a survey that in some ways, quite rightfully, has been widely mocked because she is not asking the basic questions and she criticized the committee for not getting to around a specific model.
The committee gave the minister some very strong directions. It is actually very bizarre that we end up in this position with no link to the work of the committee, and there are questions that sometimes miss the point.
I have other concerns about the survey. I mentioned that it did not link to the work of the committee. I had a friend call me last night. She said that she went on the website, cleared her browsing history and went on it again. She made sure she answered the questions. They were in a different order, but she answered them the same way each time. She came out with a different assessment each time, in terms of what kind of voter she was.
She asked “What is this?” That was her question. She was sending me notes and asking what it was all about. She thought it was just crazy that she was answering the questions in the same way, and was getting different results. That did not really make any sense. This person who has a bit of an interest in this topic just cleared her browsing history and kept on going.
Earlier we heard that the parliamentary secretary thinks it is perfectly all right that people from across the world can answer the survey if they choose to. It is pretty easy to look up a postal code. It is pretty easy to answer the survey. I have real problems with that. I cannot believe in this. I have no confidence in anything that actually comes out of this survey.
The minister indicated that personal information is not required. The personal information being asked is how much one makes and for their email address. Why does the government want the email addresses? I have some concerns. The minister said people could do the survey anyway, but what she did not tell us is that those responses would not count.
I think Parliament has done the work that it can and should do. I have always said, and this is my own personal belief, politicians and political parties not only have a vested interest, they have a conflict of interest, and they had guidance. It needs to go to a referendum.
