Electoral reform?
Comments (11)
Monday, October 1, 2007 | 04:31 PM ET
CBCNews.ca welcomed University of Victoria political science professor Dr. Dennis Pilon, who wrote the book The Politics of Voting: Reforming Canada's Electoral System on Thursday, Oct. 4.
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Should we change the way we elect our legislative representatives?
It's a question that Ontarians will face when they head to the polls on Oct. 10th, with the inclusion of a referendum question on the ballot. Stick with the traditional electoral system, known as first-past-the-post? Or choose an alternative method such as mixed-member-proportional (MMP), where each party also receives a number of seats based on the percentage of overall votes it earns?
It's a debate that other provinces have had before — B.C. and P.E.I. held referendums on proportional representation in 2005. And it's an issue that many reform-minded federal politicians have championed as well.
This discussion is now Closed. View the questions.
Chat Questions (11)
Neil Williamson
I've heard that MMP favours the smaller parties, does MMP tend to favour any specific type of area (denser population areas, for example)?
Host Bob Sudeyko:
Does MMP favour smaller parties?
Dr. Pilon
No voting systems favour smaller parties. That's a truism of PR and plurality systems. All voting systems favour larger parties because of the way that the allocation mechanisms work. On the other hand, if you compare a PR system to a plurality system (so the MMP system to our current system) then, yes, the threshold of election is lower. It's a more competitive system. Yes, there's a chance that smaller parties can gain access to the legislature.
Allison Smith
Given the meager public education effort put forth by Elections Ontario and the highly unusual super-super majority requirement, I would like to ask Dr. Pilon:
Does he feel that this referendum is being set up to fail and, if so, why?
Dr. Pilon:
The fact that this education campaign has been a disaster, I think, raises some concerns in my mind about how much the government really cares about making this thing work. [And] the fact that the McGuinty government took so long to establish the Citizen's assembly and that the decision came out so late. Basically, the decision came out last May, and then we have a vote in October? That doesn't leave hardly any time for discussion.
Then the fact that Elections Ontario has decided to use this rather bloodless campaign where they talk about the mechanics of the systems. The people don't need to know the mechanics of the systems. People need to know "why should I care?" about this issue.
There are lots of questions that can be raised about how sincere the politicians have been. I mean the super majority rule [requiring 60 per cent of the vote endorsing the option, as well as a majority in at least 60 per cent of the ridings] as an example. There's no precedent in our history of either voting system reform or referendums for a super majority rule other than British Columbia [referendum].
This seems to me to be pure politician protection act. It's all about making sure that it's going to be very difficult to change this system.
Brett Tremblay
Toronto
We hear that MMP is good because it will let parties like the Greens introduce their views into the legislature, but what is the risk of it also giving objectionable parties a legitimate platform to air theirs?
Dr. Pilon:
The risk in democracy is always that somebody is going to say something that you don't like. But I think the risk is worth it. The difference between a PR system and our system is that in a PR system objectional views are limited to the number of people who support them. But under our system, if various views can gain support in a local area, they can be dramatically over represented.
Now, I realize that there are different opinions about some of the regional politics in Canada but to give you an example (and I'm not trying to equate this party with any of these other parties people have mentioned) but the Bloq Quebecois is a party that is dedicated to breaking up the country. That is a party that has been dramatically overrepresented in our current system. But under a PR system would be limited to their proportional amount of the vote.
In Europe, it's an interesting kind of trajectory. Now and then, parties emerge, [such as] anti-immigration parties. What they find though is they can't get any allies in the legislature. And eventually the people who support that party drift away back to other parties that can actually get things done.
Chris Sanderson
I have heard the argument made that MMP will lead to an increased likelihood of minority governments. Is there evidence to support this argument?
Dr. Pilon:
If we use for example present voting intentions in our current system, well, people almost never give one party the majority of their support. The last time in Ontario that a party got more than 50 per cent of the popular vote was 1937. So, if people keep voting the way they have, then, yes then it is quite likely that under MMP, we will see either minority or coalition governments.
Mark VanderPloeg
Burlington
How will the political parties choose the members to sit in the seats awarded by proportonial vote, will they be candidates that ran unsuccessfully or something else?
Dr. Pilon:
The parties would come up with their nominations for local candidacies and they would also come up with their party list nominees. And they could come up with that list in any number of ways.
When we look at other countries, in some cases, the parties haven't done it in a democratic way. But increasingly over time they all have, as the public has become more aware and the media have put more attention on it. In almost all cases, parties come up with some kind of open and transparent democratic way of structuring that party list of nominees.
Danielle Charlton
Guelph
What do you know about the accountability of list members compared to local candidates in ridings?
Gary Dale
There have been a lot of people claiming that proportional representation leads to unstable and ineffective governments and that it gives excessive power to fringe parties.
How many jurisdictions in the world are currently using some form of proportional representation and what, in general, has their experience been?
Rob McDonald
What is wrong with our current system? Why would MMP be better?
Dr. Pilon:
It's called a representative democracy, so the standard for representation should be held very high. Yet our [current]system fails in this. The key thing we know that people do when they go to vote is they vote for parties. And yet our system can't seem to represent what people have said with those votes. At the most basic level, I think our system fails at its objectives, and I think that's a good reason to change it.
I wouldn't want to say its undemocratic. I just don't think it's democratic enough. It's a pre-democratic holdover. This system wasn't so much invented as just sort of kept in place. Because it serves the interests of those who could make that decision. We've moved well beyond the period where this voting system could accommodate what people want out of their democracy. So it's time for us to move on and modernize our electoral equipment.
Andrew
How will a "list member" MPP be accountable to the public?
Dr. Pilon:
Well, there's only one mechanism, and that's not to vote for the party on the party list. A lot of people seem to have this idea that they should be able to veto every single person that goes into the legislature. Now that's not really very democratic. What's important is people can choose the representation that they want. Not try to get other people not to have their representation.
In New Zealand, we had a case in which a party was acting up and the voters didn't like what they were doing. Well in the next election, they got seriously punished. They almost didn't get back into the legislature. So the beauty of this [MMP] system is, because it's so much more responsive to shifts in voter opinion, it's much easier for voters to punish parties than under our current system. And I think that will have the effect of punishing the politicians as well.
Jacqueline Sharp
Toronto
1) Can you elaborate on the role of the list MPP versus the riding MPP? Some people say that the list MPPs would be uninvolved in ridings and only involved in policy issues, but others say that in countries that use MMP the list politicians open riding offices and the public usually doesn't know in practice which politician in their area is the local one and which is the list one. What sort of things do the list MPPs do in other countries?
Dr. Pilon:
In the other MMP countries, a number of roles have emerged. One of the roles that have emerged is that the list members can be focused more on policy concerns. In some cases, they may take up a national issue, or a particular policy area that the party wants someone to really focus on. Anybody who studies what goes on in legislatures knows that politicans are amateur policy experts. They can't come up to speed on all the details. the beauty of the list side of the MMP system is that it can create a situation where a politican can become more expert and that can kind of balance out the power between the bureaucracy and the politician.
Another thing that's happened in the MMP systems is that we've seen different politicians shadow different ridings where they didn't elect someone but they had a lot of support. Sometimes the gap between winning and losing might be 10 or 15 votes. In that case, the party that came second has a strong incentive to put a list member into that area, open up an office, and offer to service that electorate. And the reaction of the public has been very positive to this.
2) What is the difference in practice between a minority government under our current system, and a coalition government under MMP?
Dr. Pilon:
It's different because the incentives for party behaviour are different under our system than under a PR system. Because our system exaggerates the support for the largest party, there's a strong incentive for a minority government to go back to the electorate whenever they think their poll numbers are up.
But in a PR system, there's not really that same incentive. Because the results are going to be pretty mathematically accurate, if a party decides to go back to the polls prematurely they're probably not going to get any benefit. So that means the minority governments under PR are actually more stable than the minority governments under our current system.
Allan Falconer
Under a MMP system would a list MMP be allowed to cross the floor to another party as done under the FPTP system?
Host Bob Sudeyko:
Are there rules that would define how that works?
Dr. Pilon:
Not that I'm aware of.