Craig Scott

[Election of the Speaker, February 24th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I rise along with my colleagues to speak to Motion No. 489, which I also will be supporting to go to committee.

This motion makes sense, in the sense that it would effectively create an efficiency-based change to our current system to elect Speakers. We currently do it through an exhaustive ballot approach, with multiple ballots. The alternative vote, or preferential voting approach, effectively compresses all of that and asks individual members to indicate in advance whom they would prefer as people fall off the list, until somebody acquires 50% of all of these votes.

I obviously accept, as my colleague who is introducing the motion noted, that there are differences. The mere fact that we vote ballot by ballot gives us time to talk to others and perhaps change our views, even though that is affected by the fact that the ballots are secret, and so the very purpose of multiple ballots seems to be defeated in our current system.

I see this as, effectively, an efficiency measure that makes a great deal of sense from that perspective. The other points that my colleague mentioned on clarifying such things as tie-breaking are also valuable.

I would like to also emphasize that the use of alternative vote—and I will use “alternative vote” and “preferential ballot” rather interchangeably—is not uncommon when it comes to electing individuals who have a functional role to play that is meant to bring together disparate elements within a given organizational setting. Examples are party leaders, presidents of associations, and Speakers of Houses. Lots of examples were given about how this method is also used in other countries, either the multiple ballot approach or the preferential ballot.

The key point that was brought up by my colleague is that we should not be thinking about this as a majority vote system; it is actually a consensus system. It is all about achieving broad support and allowing somebody to cross the 50% threshold, but with a whole series of votes that are second, third, and fourth choices. Therefore, it is a falsehood for us to say this is a majority system in any strong sense; it is all about creating consensus, even though almost always the people who are elected in this system probably have more of a plurality of votes than other candidates, but it is possible for somebody with fewer initial votes to leapfrog them. Nonetheless, it is erroneous to be referring to this as a “majority system”. It is first past the post, whoever gets past that 50% mark, but the 50% is actually not about first choices, and that is important for us to know.

The reason I want to make that clarification is that my colleague whose motion this is ended with a few references outside of the context where I said it is not unusual to have this. He gave the example of Australia, where the House of Representatives is elected according to an alternative vote or preferential ballot. That drags us into the realm of whether alternative vote is a valid way to elect multi-party legislatures, and here I just wanted to spend a bit of time explaining why support for this method in electing a Speaker in no way, from my perspective, translates into support for alternative vote as a way of electing, for example, members of Parliament, unless alternative vote is built into a broader system that accommodates the other needs of a fair voting system.

From my perspective and that of the NDP, obviously that would mean proportional representation. Alternative vote on its own, which currently is the policy of one other party in this House, is actually a regressive way to change our electoral system, and I will not even use the word “reform”. I want to ensure that we stay within the firm boundaries of electing Speakers as why we are open to AV here.

It is very important to note that in 1998 the Jenkins Commission in the United Kingdom made a number of findings. It basically said that alternative vote in the setting of multi-party legislatures, where members are elected in order to serve within a party system as well as represent their constituents, actually can produce and often does produce greater disproportionality than our already problematic single-member plurality system.

I want to be on record as saying that the alternative vote support that I have here is for the idea of electing leaders of parties for Speaker in this context, but I honestly think that there are so many other reasons that AV is not appropriate in other settings that we should confine it to the current context.

[Democratic Reform, February 11th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, as justices Rothstein and Moldaver of the Supreme Court said in the contested election decision on Etobicoke Centre, “The procedural safeguards in the Act are important; however, they should not be treated as ends in themselves”.

As I think the minister knows, the right to vote is protected by the Charter of Rights, the only limits being citizenship and where a voter lives. Given these facts, why does the minister think this legislation, particularly removing vouching, is actually constitutional?

[Democratic Reform, February 11th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the Neufeld report to Elections Canada outlined procedural problems that the Elections Act calls “irregularities”. These are due to staff making mistakes on election day, like a small mistake in filling out a form when a voter is being vouched for. However, Neufeld never even came close to saying these irregularities constituted, led to, or represented a serious risk of fraud.

Why is the minister constantly misrepresenting these statistics?

[Petitions, February 10th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to present this petition from Toronto—Danforth residents who are supporting the passage of the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands' bill, Bill C-442, the national Lyme disease strategy act, which would convene a national conference to deal with this under-treated and under-recognized disease in Canada.

I would also like to mention that one of the signatories is David Leggett, a long-time sufferer of this disease, who has led the education campaign among Canadians.

[Democratic Reform, February 10th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the government promised legislation a year and a half ago. It has introduced a bill that is quite likely unconstitutional and that could prevent tens of thousands of people from voting. Why does the government not hold public hearings across the country to ensure that this bill is tailor-made for Canadians and not for the Conservatives?

[Democratic Reform, February 10th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the government is trying to shut down debate on legislation that would change the way elections are run in this country.

It is shutting down debate on a bill that is supposed to combat electoral fraud but that instead would target Elections Canada and ordinary Canadian voters. It would also give Conservatives an unfair advantage.

Would the government at least allow Canadians to have their say on it? Will it support the NDP's proposal for cross-country hearings on Bill C-23, the unfair elections act?

[Democratic Reform, February 10th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the government is shutting down debate on legislation that changes the way elections are run in this country. It is shutting down debate—

[Fair Elections Act, February 5th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, that is a very interesting example, another important anecdote. Society is built upon anecdotes like that.

However, I think the important answer is that we do not need to amend the act to catch that. There are already at least two provisions in the Canada Elections Act that deal with the criminal illegality of trying to divert people from voting.

Adding the impersonation offence is a matter of adding specificity to something that is already there in generality. This is also what my colleague, the Leader of the Opposition, was getting at with his questions in question period today, making sure that the government side understands that nothing in the bill, in terms of newly framed crimes, means that the existing act does not already cover the kind of behaviour cited by my colleague.

[Fair Elections Act, February 5th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, it is an important piece of information that goes back to what I said would be important at committee. We have to get down to the level of evidence. The minister, I will concede, is very good at presenting the case as he understands it, but we have to ensure that it is grounded in evidence of the kind that would justify infringing on a constitutional right, the right to vote, which drove the Supreme Court's reasoning in the Etobicoke Centre case.

[Fair Elections Act, February 5th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, it is important to return to some of the wisdom in the Supreme Court of Canada's judgment in the case involving Etobicoke Centre, in which it said that we had to be extremely careful about disenfranchising voters, especially in the name of procedural irregularities. In fact, that rationale and reasoning obviously benefited in a fair way one of our colleagues in the House, because he kept his seat for the reasons the court gave.

I would simply say in response to individual anecdotes like the member gave that if there were evidence of a scientific sort or an even more generalized anecdotal set of evidence that this is a serious problem, then it has to be presented at committee so that we can understand it. At the moment, we are looking at a rampant anecdotes that do not seem to correspond with the sense of people in the system. I would also say that my colleague, the democratic reform critic for the Liberal Party, did ask a straightforward and important question about whether reworking and trying to figure out better ways to vouch would not be better than, to use a worn-out cliché, throwing the baby out with the bathwater.