Referendumpster fire

CPC MP and ERRE committee member Scott Reid held a presser today to lay out the CPC position on electoral reform : No referendum, no Consent to electoral reform.

Mr Reid cites the results of a householder CPC MPs sent to their constituents. Shocker : 90.6% of them voted for a referendum.

Wikipedia : 

"In Canadian politics, a Ten Percenter is a party political flyer that MPs have the right to mail — at no cost to themselves — to households in their own ridings, equivalent to 10% of the households in their constituency. They may also send the same flier to all of their constituents if they change 50% of the copy." 

Complaining that members of the public who show up to ERRE road show meetings are "self-selective" and therefore not representative of Canadians as a whole - a complaint also repeated in committee by ERRE Lib MP Sherry Romanado - Reid calls his survey of 59 Conservative ridings out of a total of 338 possible ridings "the largest sampling of views on this issue to date." Ok but 30% of ridings surveyed were in Alberta. Nothing "self-selective" there.

The 81,000 votes from across Canada returned to the Conservative office or the local riding MP include up to 4 votes permitted per household. To put that in context, 81K is the same number of voters found in the ridings of Ottawa West or North Vancouver. 
In Scott Reid's own riding of Lanark-Frontenac-Kingston with 77,808 voters, 1400 responded to his electoral referendum questionnaire ... which works out to a 1.8% response rate. 
So, you know, good effort, Cons.

Now Scott Reid has been personally in favour of implementing a proportional electoral system like STV since 2001 and his fellow ERRE member CPC Gerard Deltell also favours PR , but alas their hands are tied by the 2004 CPC founding charter which specifies that any electoral reform must be preceded by a referendum. Apparently their Bill C-23 Fair Elections Act didn't count.

Reid also reported he thinks a five-party committee consensus to proceed with a PR system is possible, that a public referendum on PR would pass, and that Elections Canada CEOs JP Kingsley and Marc Mayrand have said there is time before the next election in 2019 for both a referendum and a new electoral reform system provided the new system is not unduly complicated in the redrawing of ridings. 

So why are the CPCs the fly in the electoral reform ointment?

Reid notes that Minister Monsef has not proposed any specific model to replace FPtP or pledged to accept the committee's consensus position, supposing they reach one after this referendum ultimatum. 
Reid :

"Up til now, she has only said she'll take it under advisement so we can move towards that model. What I don't want to have happen is this : have the committee move towards some kind of conclusion and then the government says 'thank you very much, we're doing something else' because we have an ironclad commitment about 2019 and then impose a system that favours the governing party. That would obviously be completely unacceptable and I am anxious at all costs to make sure that doesn't happen."

I get this concern. I do. The dreaded Alternative Vote, a non-proportional system considered capable of keeping the Libs in power forever because the Libs are everyone's presumed first and/or second choice on a ranked ballot in a single seat riding, is right there in the ERRE committee road show handout and was included in the public e-consultation on the ERRE site.  

But after months of sending out householders like the one pictured at the top here - sent out prior to the committee rejig in May which allowed the Bloc and Elizabeth May a seat at the ERRE table and reduced the number of Liberals on committee from a majority of six down to four Libs plus the chair - together with your failure to hold town halls in your communities to inform yourselves and voters about possible alternatives to FPtP, and the fact your official seven page Conservative Caucus submission to ERRE today is about nothing but holding a referendum ...  well, Cons, you failed miserably at reaching out further afield than just to your dog-whistled fear-mongered householder base here to achieve that all-party consensus you claim to aspire to.

h/t Pat McGrail and James Valcke for the householder viz.
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Craig Scott's testimony at ERRE #23

Notes from his presentation at the electoral reform committee today because Kady didn't blog this morning's meeting and the ERRE committee is taking about two weeks to post transcriptions. 

Craig Scott - law professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, former NDP critic for democratic reform

16 of 31 Liberals voted for MMP/PR electoral reform in the House in December.

MMP is the best of two worlds - local representation and fairness both addressed. 
MMP takes both local and regional candidates more seriously than any other form of PR or FPtP because voters can vote for preferred candidate and party separately. Local candidates vote is based on the candidate's work in their community without worrying about strategic vote. Regional MPs have to look at bigger picture of national issues because we currently have deficit of attention to national vision.

Any PR system would address these FPtP faults : 

~false majorities result in less diversity of opinion, 

~some regions unrepresented in Parl, ie NDP swept 80 seats in Quebec in 2011 with 40% of vote.

~exacerbates regionalism, ie Alberta IS Conservative

~feeds into unduly executive-dominated Westminster system of parliament via false majorities

~ silo-vision re legislation, rather than have to encounter different points of view

~tends away from consensus and collegiality and towards adversarialism and hyper-partisanship and organizing for next election.

Alternative Vote is ranked ballot within single member districts, and is in Liberal Party Policy Book.

Nothing in AV counteracts FPtP problems and it exacerbates disproportionality.

If last election had been under AV, Eric Grenier says 224 Libs would have attained seats instead of 185 seats under current system.

AV does not fulfill committee mandate of making every vote count because it never gets to counting the second candidates after the first round.

Compromise to get to multiple goals is to use the Jenkins Model of MMP allowing ranked voting on the local election side only or STV model with more local attention.

Naysayers are saying this committee is set up to be a "noble failure" due to deadlock impasse. This committee is formed the way proportional representation committees will be formed in the future. You guys can be proof that a system like this can work. 

End of notes from Scott.

I'm rather alarmed to learn from the IPSOS poll discussed at yesterday's meeting that only 3% of Canadians are following the issue of electoral reform at all closely - older, more educated, affluent males - and that only one in five Canadians are aware of it at all. 
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Libs falling off electoral reform bandwagon

Electoral Reform Committee member Liberal Sherry Romanado floated the idea of implementing "federal solutions" "without changing the voting system itself" at ERRE meeting #16 yesterday. She was pitching how to achieve at least some of the committee's mandate set in motion by Justin Trudeau's campaign promise to make 2015 the last election under FPtP.

This is one step further along from her more usual complaint that any version of proportional representation multi-member ridings would mean people would be confused as to who their MP is.

Liberal John Aldag asked “Is FPtP the only solution for Canada?”, while Liberal Ruby Sahota recommended giving voters the simplest voting system possible, presumably if not FPtP then its even worse majoritarian cousin, Alternative Vote. 

Liberal Chair Scarpaleggia wrapped up meeting #15 earlier with a nice paeon to the status quo, opining that a government's majority power under FPtP is not absolute - no, it is kept in check by "the courts, provinces, the media, and unions". 
You'll notice that other parties did not make his list. 
Scarpaleggia :

"Our system doesn't give absolute power to a party that has less than 50% of the vote, it just gives a stronger hand to one party to negotiate the obstacles in its way in trying to exercise national purpose."

National purpose that does not include obstacles like proportional representation.

Between Libs falling off the electoral reform bandwagon, the Cons and Bloc still banging on about referendums and moving the whole issue forward to be voted on in the 2019 election, and the inordinate amount of time wasted discussing internet voting - which Elections Canada has said we will definitely not be getting for the next election - it really is not looking good for electoral reform at the Electoral Reform Committee at this point. 


Fun fact : From the e-voting proponent witness : "Estonia is the only country to deploy internet voting in a national election." 

I wonder why that is.
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