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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Does this poll make my electoral ass look big?

Apparently half of NDP voter respondents are either very or somewhat satisfied with our current First Past the Post electoral system - really? - but 71% of them are definitely or probably in favour of a referendum. Does this seem at all likely to you?

On Sept 28 I attended the travelling public Electoral Reform Committee in Vancouver. 

One of the witnesses was Mario Canseco, VP of InsightsWest, who presented the results of his company's Sept 14-16 weighted online survey of 1029 Canadians on electoral reform. The committee was given his brief but since then the questions and data behind the brief have been published online. It is not mentioned who commissioned the poll.

This was the big news at the time to the committee : Overall, nearly two-thirds of poll respondents are very or somewhat satisfied with keeping our electoral system the way it is and 68% definitely/probably want a referendum.

As there was no media present *yet again* at the committee, it's unlikely anyone will take a look at the survey, now being quoted online by referendum and FPtP fans with names like XXX the Deplorable. Here's the data info on the First-Past-the-Post question :

Let's leave aside for the moment whether First-Past-the-Post is accurately described here.

If I understand this data correctly, half of respondents who voted NDP in the 2015 election are very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with First-Past-the-Post. How likely is that? Or that 72% of Liberals are? Or that only 9% of Canadians overall are very dissatisfied with a system in which just over half of their votes - 9,106,936 of them - were wasted.

Moving on to what electoral system should replace FPtP for the apparently only 22% of Canadians with any interest in doing so : 

It seems twice as many Conservatives (26% based on their vote in the 2015 election) are strongly in favour of Party-List PR than are their NDP (11%) and Liberal (12%) counterparts. Who knew? 

Notable that between 20% and 38% in the different categories were unable to give any opinion either positive or negative on the three alternative voting systems presented to them.

Meanwhile a whopping 71% of NDP respondents and 65% of Liberal respondents told the pollsters they are in favour of holding a nationwide referendum :

So how does Insights West recruit these respondents? According to their website, you sign up with their survey panel by email : 

"You can earn between $0.50 to $5 for some surveys, for others you will be entered into sweepstakes draws with chances to win gift cards from a variety of Canadian retailers."

At the ERRE meeting on Wednesday, Mr Canseco said the respondents are not advised ahead of time what survey they will be taking but that after it starts the different voting systems are explained to them. 

Mr Canseco is tweeting his survey online. I have tweeted my questions as to what I interpret as anomalies in his survey back at him but he has yet to respond. If any poll nerds out there can explain them to me, I'll enter your name in the Creekside sweepstakes draw.

The Electoral Reform Committee is running its own e-consultation with Canadians until this Friday at midnight EST. They put a background paper online if you want to brush up first. The survey takes 15 to 30 minutes and can be completed over several sessions if you prefer.  

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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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Dear Jason Kenney and Scott Reid

Watching you two in the ERRE committee dragging your feet on implementing electoral reform, I'm reminded of your pioneering work arguing passionately and intelligently in favour of it in the HoC in 2001.

Here's you, Jason Kenney, deploring that "Canada is now the only multi-party advanced democracy in the world that has a system of voting designed in and for 16th-century England" and arguing in favour of "a greater reflection of the diversity and plurality of political views" : 

And you, Mr. Reid, you left no doubt as to your position on our current FPtP system :  

"I will start by making the objection that the system in Canada really is broken at this point" 

and called for "a special all-party committee to examine the merits of various models of proportional representation" :

All excellent points, Mr. Reid!
Three and a half hours later you were on your feet again making a pitch for the Single Transferable Vote System 

Presumably this past advocacy in favour of changing our voting system to some form of proportional representation explains why the only objection to it available to you now is to keep banging on about referenda instead.  

I ask the ERRE committee to enter Mr. Reid and Mr. Kenney's excellent arguments in favour of electoral reform into the current record.
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Off to the polls

Most recent polls above from yesterday's Globe & Mail.

Take a good hard look.

The Cons currently hold 127 of the 308 seats in Parliament, the Libs have 95, Bloc Quebecois - 48, the New Democrats 30 and the Greens have one. Three seats are held by independents, and four are vacant. Harper needs 28 more seats to get his majority.

Coverage from away :

Xinhua from China : Why Canadian prime minister calls early election

"Dragged by a slowdown in the U.S. economy and the high energy cost, Canada's economy has been sluggish this year and may plunge into a recession in 2009. An election campaign next year would be a nightmare for Harper because crabby voters tend to blame the sitting government for the bad economy and punish it by their ballots.

Harper chose to launch the election campaign on Sept. 7 also because he wanted to avoid three by-elections scheduled on Sept. 8. The Conservatives are very likely to lose in all three of them, further reducing their lead in parliament over the Liberals."

CNN : Canadian PM employs loophole in potential power grab

"Robert Bothwell, director of the international relations program at the University of Toronto argued the move was political.
"Harper is going for a majority government. That's really the only issue," he said.
Observers also say Harper wanted a ballot ahead of the U.S. election. Bothwell said if Democrat Barack Obama surges in the next month in the United States, it will help Canada's opposition Liberal party."

Back here in Canada Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe doesn't sugarcoat it much :

"The Conservative Party stands for big oil, guns and a right-wing American-style ideology that threatens women's right to abortion. Like George W. Bush, Stephen Harper has done everything in his power to sabotage the Kyoto Accord [to reduce greenhouse gas emissions],” Mr. Duceppe said."

So we're getting our 5th general election in 11 years and the 3rd in just over 4 years.

Aren't you glad we still have our antiquated undemocratic first-past-the-post system and not one of those notoriously unstable types like STV or MMP which result in frequent elections?

Ontario votes No

Today, Ontario voters considered the many advantages of their current first-past-the-post electoral system :

1) that massive 'majorities' can be won with a minority of the vote
2) that a vote for one party counts many times more than a vote for another party
3) that some parties with wide popular support are not represented at all
4) that women, minorities and youth are under-represented
5) that parties are not forced to work together to achieve consensus
6) that voter turnout is low

and then 63% of them voted to keep it.
A referendum on abolishing elections altogether would presumably attract a similar proportion of devotees.

Update : Speaking of de-votees, Skdadl points out in comments that voter turnout this time was just 52.6%
CBC : "The turnout was worse than a previous record low of 54.7 % set in 1923."
And why is that? Because they didn't have the MMP system.
And round it goes....

UPDATE : Peter Black, Vote MMP! Ottawa campaign manager : "Well, 37% voted for MMP and the press called it a resounding defeat. Only 42% votes for Mr. McGuinty and the press call it a resounding victory. That's first-past-the-post for you!"

MMP and the MSM

Just exactly what is it about the above chart that's so fucking difficult to understand?
The first line is the percentage of votes for each party.
The second line is the number of seats awarded them by our current First-Past-the-Post system.
The third line is how those votes would have been redistributed as seats under MMP.

That's it. Under MMP, Canada would join the hundreds of other countries in the world who already enjoy proportional representation in which every vote counts and seats are won on the basis of how people vote.

So why does a recent SES poll of Ontario voters, who are due to vote on this for Ontario on Wednesday, show only 26% support for MMP, compared to the 54% in favour of keeping the First-Past-the-Post status quo?

The Mainly Sloppy Media has a lot to answer for here and G&M's Ian Coutts tops the lot. First he takes a swipe at the legitimacy of the Ontario Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform, who, incidentally, voted 98 to 6 in favour of MMP :

"Numbering 103 people in total, one from every riding in the province, they were drawn from many walks of life, not experts but ordinary people - just like the ordinary people who voted for Brian Melo over Jaydee Bixby on Canadian Idol this year."

Then he goes on to argue that Someone might form the Annoy Your Neighbour Party, win a seat, and become kingmakers; but even worse, once people realized their vote would actually count, tragically more of them would vote. I'm not kidding :

"And you know what? Once people see that their vote makes a difference, that their party can get in and make changes, they will come flocking back to the electoral arena."

In an earlier column, he contradicts this, arguing that the claim that MMP results in a higher voter turnout - and it does - isn't true after all anyway. Just look at New Zealand, he says, where voter turnout actually went down :

"In 1995, the first election after MMP was brought in, voter turnout was sharply up, from 79.6 % in 1993 to 83.6%, but it has generally continued declining after that, and was at 80.1% in 2005."

Only 80% ???


Note that wiggly line across the top of the graph.
You have to go all the way back to 1896 to find Canadian voter turnout as low as it is now - 64%

The main reasons people give for not voting are that politicians are crooks and liars who don't address their concerns, and their vote doesn't make a difference anyway.

Or, as Rick Mercer puts it : the two reasons elected politicians don't do what they promised to do during their election campaigns are :
1) you already voted for them .....and
2) you already voted for them

Most likely to feel this way are women, youth, and minorities - all of whom are under-represented in the current provincial and federal FPtP systems.

In the 2006 federal election, the Cons got 36% of the 64% who voted.
What's 36% of 64%? ... 23%
We're being governed by the guys who got 23% of the possible vote and who apparently feel justified in behaving as if this was a majority.
In Ontario, winning 40% of the vote means the winner takes all. This increases the importance of a handful of swing vote ridings so they are the ones catered to during an election. In a very real sense, aside from those who live in those particular ridings, no one else's vote counts.

In my inbox is a pro-MMP petition signed by Stephen Lewis, Linda McQuaig, Bob Rae, David Suzuki, Olivia Chow, Stompin' Tom Connors, Andrew Coyne, Elizabeth May, Mel Hurtig, Joy Kogawa, Rafe Mair, Judy Rebick, and Rick Salutin.

On the other side are the guys who are quite happy to have a minority hog an unfair proportion of political clout.

Your choice, Ontario. Don't screw this up.

Bonus : Electoral system pop quiz

Electoral system pop quiz

Here's two lists of selected countries. One group elects their government using a first-past-the-post winner-takes-all system and the other group uses some variation of proportional representation. Which group do you think Canada, the US, and the UK fall into?

Group 1
Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Botswana, Congo, Dominica, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Swaziland, Syria, Uganda, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

Group 2
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Cambodia, Chile, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Venezuela.

Yup, our first-past-the-post system puts Canada, along with the UK and US, in Group 1.
We really need to get on this before 2008.

Update. To the person who emailed me to complain that I had cherry-picked the two groups to highlight a black countries vs white countries bias : No, the two groups highlight a generally right vs left bias.
I just got tired of hearing it said that if we have a similar electoral system to the US and UK, we're probably doing alright.