h/t Anita Nickerson for above graphic It was a bid by NDP Nathan Cullen to put pressure on Trudeau to put electoral reform back on the table. All Liberals but two, and the ones listed below who didn't vote, voted NO to accepting the final ERRE report, including the Liberal MPs on the ERRE committee. The NDP, Bloc, CPC, and Green voted in favour. Two Liberals who kept their promise, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith@beynate and Sean Casey @SeanCaseyLPC , deserve our thanks.
4 consrvatives did not vote: Mel Arnold North - Okanagan — Shuswap Blaine Calkins - Red Deer — Lacombe Ed Fast ~ Conservative - Abbotsford Randy Hoback - Conservative ~ Prince Albert
5 NDP did not vote:
Niki Ashton - Churchill — Keewatinook Aski Fin Donnelly - Port Moody — Coquitlam Peter Julian - New Westminster — Burnaby
Pierre Nantel - Longueuil — Saint-Hubert Tracey Ramsey - Essex
Bloc Rheal Fortin and Independent Hunter Tantoo also did not vote.
And for all you non-facebookies, : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1c9AR6iLPH_zqH8N81iBhaqpeZJ5fkNlH-GbWIqpXVF8/edit. and : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iFymcYgyrU14QjyhOyewwLq1X0C6gwmg0hs5FcSVHj0/edit
"As people in this House know, I have long preferred preferential ballot..."
Yes. Here he is in 2014 explaining that preference at length. Jump to the 24:09 mark.
Excerpted :
"First of all on first-past-the-post, you’re absolutely right that it doesn’t matter if someone gets 31 percent of the vote, and the other parties only get you know 26 and 20 percent, and it’s all divided up, then they get to represent one 100 percent of the community, and that’s why I entirely agree that it has to move beyond first past the post. “But how we do that is very important. I personally and the Liberal Party has adopted a format of a preferential ballot, where the person who would be elected gets more than 50 percent of the vote in the community, so they represent the majority of the community. I think that a ranked ballot, a preferential ballot, is a strong way of changing our electoral system that I’ve been pushing and I’ve committed to look at once we form government.”
The problem with preferential or ranked ballot, also known as Alternative Vote, is that it's the only electoral system worse for voters than what we have now. As the second party of choice for supporters of the Cons, NDP, and Greens, the Liberal Party would be the obvious benefactor of a ranked ballot in a single member riding and would likely form the government in perpetuity. This point was driven home by expert after expert to the ERRE committee, some 88% of them, despite hopeful entreaties by the Liberal MPs to the 4% of experts they could cobble together in support of it. We had some earlier inkling the choice would be between preferential ballot or nothing.
On December 1 2016 after Monsef's math meltdown, the four Liberal MPs on the ERRE committee announced at their presser that they believed any change to our electoral system would be too "radical". Liberal Chair Francis Scarpaleggia explained :
"Perhaps if we chose preferential ranked ballot we could do that tomorrow.
Yes, the PM made that commitment but a lot of people thought he was talking about a ranked ballot. You could do a ranked ballot like that. [Snaps fingers] Nobody wants ranked ballot, so what does that leave us?"
Apparently nothing. Two weeks later on December 13 2016, an ERRE motion was up for a vote in the House. Approved by Scarpaleggia, it proposed to add the committee's own previous electoral reform e-consultation, which included specific questions on voting systems preferences including proportional representation, on to the Liberals absurdly vague and misdirecting MyDemocracy VoxPops quiz :
That, in relation to the questions on democratic values that the Minister of Democratic Institution intends to make available for Canadians' response on the websitemydemocracy.ca, the Committee encourages the Minister to reproduce and include in its entirety the questions within this Committee's e-consultation survey, either as a replacement for the other planned questions, or in addition to any other questions that the Minister wishes to include;
Five minutes later, all 173 Liberal MPs in the House had unanimously voted it down, including the four Liberals on the ERRE committee - Ruby Sahota, John Aldag, Matt DeCourcey, and Sherry Romanado, plus the Liberal Chair Francis Scarpaleggia - while the Cons, NDP, Bloc, and Green all voted in favour. Final vote : 173 No to 131 Yea. Justin Trudeau was not present.
Yet out on the hustings the past few weeks, he continued to reassure us that he had stated in 2015 that "our electoral system is broken", alongside a promise to make that election the last one under First Past the Post, and he was fully committed to keeping that promise.
So it looks like this was just a vote-grabbing campaign promise borrowed from the NDP and Green platforms to outflank them when the Libs were the third party in the House. Vote strategically for us this one last time, they said, and we'll make sure you never have to vote strategically again. Desperate to ditch Harper and excited at the prospect of an end to cynical party politics, Canadians did. When the Liberals got a majority in 2015, it looked like they could both keep that promise and control of parliament as long as electoral reform was restricted to their preferred preferential or ranked ballot option, but when that was no longer a credible choice, they scuttled the whole thing.
I wonder if they'll promise it all over again in 2019. This page below is still up on the Liberal Party website.
And congrats to Liberal ERRE committee obstructionists Matt DeCourcey and Sherry Romanado on your recent appointments as parliamentary secretaries at an additional $16,800 a year. .
Results of the public consultation on electoral reform in the Papineau riding
"most were favourable to the idea of a proportional and mixed-proportional voting system" Discussion of electoral reform in Canada suffered from an almost total four month legacy media blackout on the more than 40 Electoral Reform Committee meetings held in June through October and the over 300 witnesses who testified at them. Ditto the cross-Canada community consultations held by the committee, individual MPs, and Minister Monsef. That changed on October 19 when Justin Trudeau told LeDevoir that there was possibly less public appetite for electoral reform now that Harper was gone and consequently we might be getting proportionately Small Change rather than the promised Real Change.
Tweets like the above appeared today following Minister Monsef's Q&A at her Victoria BC electoral reform public consultation. Her remarks echo those of Justin Trudeau earlier this week, giving rise to the fear that the Liberals are backtracking on implementing electoral reform and their campaign promise that 2011 would be "the last election under FPtP". I've transcribed her responses to the two relevant questions from the audience in full below so you can judge for yourself. Shorter : She repeated Trudeau's recent remarks about people no longer clamouring for change under the new government, that implementing electoral reform depends on a broad consensus from Canadians and the ERRE committee, and that she's "very, very sorry" but she cannot advocate for proportional representation because 1) she has not heard PR asked for from "an overwhelming majority across the country" and 2) "political realities".. A refugee from Iran made a heartfelt plea to Mosef, refugee to refugee as he said, to bring in proportional representation, PR, and not to water it down, to repay the debt to this country. "That will your legacy to this country." Huge applause. Transcript of Monsef's response :
"To my Iranian-Canadian friend : I agree with you we didn't come here for the natural resources in this country; we came here so that we can be whoever we want to be; we came here so that we can have choice, and choices, and we have that because our democratic institutions have provided us with opportunities, means, and liberties.
So where I think your argument kind of lost me is you went from like the only way to do this is through proportional representation. In this room, there is a lot of appetite for moving towards PR. My job isn't to advocate for PR specifically; my job has been to go across the country and hear from a diverse range of perspectives. And most rooms are different - there hasn't been a consensus on any specific system. And that actually makes my job very very difficult. It puts more emphasis on the work of the committee because now they have to find the consensus that they couldn't find in the country.
It's why conversations and you ranking these principles is important because maybe it's not a pure proportional system, maybe it's not MMP, maybe it's a system that's never existed, maybe it's a hybrid that makes sense for Canada. I haven't arrived at that conclusion because there is no consensus. But what I am hearing is how much Canadians cherish that local representation, how much they want a more legitimate and effective system, how important inclusion and accessibility is. These are basic pieces that are really helpful.
So I can't promise you that I'll be advocating for PR because I haven't heard that from an overwhelming majority across the country.
But what I can promise you is that I'm hustling with my parliamentary secretary and we are advocating hard for reform, for reform that means improvement, that sets the stage for the next generation of leaders to come in and make the system better and I think that is my responsibility. And you're right I do have a great deal of debt to repay to this country - that's why I'm doing this and sometimes especially over the last month things have gotten a little bit crazy and absurd. Over the last month I have asked myself a few times - why are you doing this? You had a good job; people liked you; you got to make a difference and you got paid, you got to stay in Peterborough, evenings and weekends to yourself - what were you thinking? But it is true I have all these privileges because a lot of people have made it possible for me. I do have a significant debt to pay back and I intend to pay it back so I can get on with the rest of my life where I have maybe a bit more privacy and sanity, but I promise you that I'm doing this for the right reasons and at the end of the day, I want to make things a little bit better so more people feel involved to be a part of this process so that those silly pieces like the older woman in my riding what she had to deal with and went through - we can fix those things.
So I'm looking for that consensus - I haven't seen it across the country and now I'm waiting on the committee. I can't make you a promise. I'm very very sorry."
Question from audience : How can you possibly quell out fears about what Trudeau said about not needing a change in the election system? Those of us engaged in this process for months and months were really upset. Monsef :
"So it's a little bit frustrating in some ways because literally since May I've been saying what the Prime Minister has been saying. We want things to be better, we want reform. We're inspired by what we're hearing from Canadians like you. But we're not going to move ahead with reform unless we have that broad support from Canadians. We have a majority, sure we could ram through whatever we want, but we're not going to do that. We heard that loud and clear at the beginning of this. The Prime Minister remains I think he said deeply committed to electoral reform, as do I. We're now going to wait for this committee to come back to us. What he said was ... these rooms, this room is full right now but I gotta tell you in most rooms across the country it hasn't been standing room only.
People aren't clamouring for change the way they were under the former government. And I get that - people have other priorities like jobs, kids, and grandkids and house concerns and they care about things like the environment. But this does have a significant longterm impact and it does matter and like I said I'm pushing for this every day. We're finishing our tour right now hearing from Canadians who wanted to be part of this conversation. We're very serious about this and we're going to see it through. We really really hope that the Canadians that have come to us with a thoughtful consensus that they've been able to come to because we are not going to ...
Even though the Prime Minister has a preference, even though I am arriving at a preference of a specific system with certain elements, we're not going to move ahead unless we have support from Canadians. So yes we want change but we're not going to ram it through because that's just a political nightmare and anti-democratic so ..."
Audience : Didn't he say it would be the last election under FPtP? Monsef :
"Yeah and I was standing behind him when he said it in Ottawa. He said he'd bring together a committee to study the issue and if conversations like this were happening in the country during the summer of last year, you can bet anything that these rooms would be packed and people would be asking and demanding for change."
Audience : "Well they might be in four years. [cheers, claps] ... The majority in this room did not stand up and say Yes for FPtP. ... Yeah like 6 people ... In four years it could be a very different story - that's not the way to go." Monsef : What's not the way to go? Hard to hear audience responses here : Campaign promises ... people are still hopeful .. You promised last election under FPtP ... clapping Monsef :
"I'm not disputing that. I have a mandate to advocate and pursue and propose change. I'm not disputing that. What I'm adding here though is a reality that we're all aware of - If the Liberal Party were to say Hmmm there's no consensus among the committee, we haven't heard from all Canadians - I don't really think a referendum is a good idea but the committee might come back and say that it's the only way .... ok I know there's some scars in this room, please ... if reform does not have broad support of Canadians, we're right back in the same problem area that you just said"
Audience member : No we're not because the Liberal Party was elected on a campaign platform ... backtracking ... Monsef :
"Ok we're not backtracking - I'm explaining a political reality that what we said was Canadians are going to come and recommend something and then we're going to move ahead. We established the committee. We established the committee under traditional rules and people freaked out - oh these rules with the majority and the minority means you're going to ram through whatever change you want. That's not what we voted for - And so here we have this room full of people who feel like me, who feel like the Prime Minister, but that's not every room in the country and you have to take that into consideration.So again, my commitment to you, to everyone in this room, is every day we're advocating for change."
Audience member : Please make a decision that isn't a non-decision. Monsef :
"I'm hustling every day, like 24 hours a day for change. That's my job and I'm wholeheartedly committed to it. There are political realities around it that anybody in this room given what you've experienced with electoral reforms [STV vote in BC] is ignoring - well that's not really helpful or effective. My job is to take all of that into consideration. So my promise to you is I'll be advocating for change. .. on both sides of the aisle within both chambers because we're going to need the help of Senate as well."
Transcribed from livestream of the meeting at https://www.facebook.com/CdnDemocracy .
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. .
Notable because we don't often hear Conservative voices speaking publicly in favour of electoral reform. Sept 8, 2016. Colin Craig of the Manning Centre interviews President of Canadian Taxpayers Federation Troy Lanigan, on the benefits of proportional representation. Lanigan compares MMP with STV, which both prefer.
Yesterday ERRE committee members CPC Scott Reid, NDP Nathan Cullen, and GPC Elizabeth May sent a letter to Democratic Institutions Minister Monsefrequesting a move towards more concrete models of three different PR systems:
“Canadians will want to know how the various proposals for electoral reform would work and what they would look like in practice.”
They have asked Monsef to relegate some of her $10.7M public awareness budget to produce visual aids like potential ballots and electoral maps for three proposed systems - mixed member proportional representation (MMP), single transferrable vote (STV) and former Elections Canada CEO Jean-Pierre Kingsley's hybrid rural-urban system.
The committee begins their cross-country road trip, hopefully with these materials in hand, starting next week.
And no, I don't know why there's no signatory from a Liberal and Bloc committee member on the request for materials to Monsef.
PR proponents have criticized Monsef's cross-country road trip as being too strictly focused on 'values' to the relative exclusion of discussion on different electoral systems -which are more rigorously discussed and debated at MPs' electoral townhalls.
Last week IPSOS passed on their rather depressing survey news to the ERRE committee that only 3% of Canadians were following electoral reform at all closely and those 3% were mostly wealthy educated older dudes.
Pretty sure that's going to change in the next few weeks. Here in BC, there's over 30 electoral events - the ones from today on are listed below.
If you can't make any of these, you can host your own discussion group and make your own submission to the Electoral Reform Committee. FairVoteCanada supports any version of proportional representation and will provide you with materials for your discussion :
**A dialogue can be as small as two or three people getting together for coffee or as big as a community town hall, and anything in between! **You can also conduct a dialogue at a meeting of an organization you are already involved in. **The government has provided a list of questions they would like feedback on. All you need to do is discuss the questions in your group, have someone take notes, and submit your report to the committee by Oct. 7.
September 7th, 2016 - Federal electoral reform community dialogue tour with Minister of Democratic Institutions Maryam Monsef,7:00 - 8:30pm, Saturna Island Community Hall, 109 East Point Road, Saturna Island, BC
September 7th, 2016 - Saturna Island Electoral Reform Townhall with MP Elizabeth May, 7:00 - 8:30pm, Saturna Island Community Hall, 109 East Point Road, Saturna Island, BC
September 7th, 2016 - Electoral Reform Town Hall with MP Alistair MacGregor, 6:00 - 7:30, Cowichan Campus Lecture Theatre, 2011 University Way, Duncan, BC, RSVP
September 7th, 2016 - Town Hall in Terrace with MP Nathan Cullen, 7 pm - 9 pm, Terrace Arena Banquet Room, 3320 Kalum St., Terrace, BC
September 7th, 2016 - Electoral Reform Town Hall with MP Gord Johns, 7:00 PM, Parksville Community & Conference Centre, 132 East Jensen Avenue, Parksville, BC.
September 8th, 2016 - Federal electoral reform community dialogue tour with Minister of Democratic Institutions Maryam Monsef, 7:00pm-9:00pm, Kitimat Riverlodge, 654 Columbia Ave West, Kitimat, BC September 8th, 2016 - Town Hall in Kitimat with MP Nathan Cullen, 7 pm – 9 pm, Kitimat Riverlodge, 654 Columbia Ave West, Kitimat, BC
September 8th, 2016 - Electoral Reform Townhall with MP Gord Johns, 7:00 PM Florence Filberg Centre 411 Anderton Avenue, Courtenay, BC
September 9th, 2016 - Federal electoral reform community dialogue tour with Minister of Democratic Institutions Maryam Monsef, 7pm-9pm, Sandman Hotel, Vancouver City Centre Ballroom, 180 West Georgia StreetVancouver, BC
September 9th, 2016 - Town Hall in Smithers, with MP Nathan Cullen, 7 pm - 9 pm, The Old Church, 1st Ave at King St., Smithers, BC
September 10th, 2016 - Electoral Reform Town Hall with MP Rachel Blaney, 1:30 - 4:30 pm, Comox Community Centre, 1855 Noel Avenue, Comox, BC
-Fair Vote Canada is hosting a town hall on electoral reform with panelists from all political backgrounds, including NDP MP Murray Rankin, former Liberal candidate David Merner, Conservative commentator Bruce Hallsor and Green Party member Adam Olsen. Saturday, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm. Nellie McClung Branch of Greater Victoria Public Library, 3950 Cedar Hill Rd., Victoria, BC. Contact:Mark Jeffers
September 11th, 2016 - Electoral Reform Townhall with MP Sheila Malcolmson & MP Nathan Cullen, 11:30 am to 1:30 pm, Doors at 11am. Malaspina Theatre (Building 310) Vancouver Island University, 900 Fifth St Nanaimo, BC RSVP
September 12th, 2016 - Electoral Reform Town Hall – Have Your Say in MP Richard Cannings, 7 pm - 9 pm, Penticton library auditorium, 785 Main Street, Penticton, BC
-Office of Jonathan Wilkinson, MP Electoral Reform Town Hall, Monday , 7 - 9 pm Pipe Shop Building, 15 Wallace Mews Road, North Vancouver, BC. RSVP:democraticreformnorthvan.eventbrite.ca.
September 12th, 2016 - Mayne Island Town Hall with MP Elizabeth May, MP, 18:30, PDT Mayne Island Community Centre, 493 Felix Jack Road, Mayne Island, BC
September 13th, 2016 - Pender Island Town Hall with MP Elizabeth May, 18:00 PDT, Pender Island Community Hall 4418 Bedwell Harbour Road, Pender Island, BC
September 15, 2016 - Campbell River Town Hall on Electoral Reform with Elizabeth May and Megan Dias from the Centre for Democratic Institutions, University of B.C. 18:30 PDT, Campbell River Museum, 470 Island Highway, Campbell River, BC September 16th, 2016 - Salt Spring Island Town Hall with MP Elizabeth May, 18:00 PDT Multi-purpose Room, G.I.S.S. 232 Rainbow Road, Salt Spring Island, BC
September 17th, 2016 - Electoral Reform Town Hall with MP Rachel Blaney, 1:30 - 4:30 pm, Dwight Hall 6274 Walnut St, Powell River, BC
September 18th, 2016 - Dialogue on Electoral Reform from 3:00pm-5:00pm at Creekside Commons, 2201 Lambert Drive, Courtenay, BC
September 24th, 2016 - Electoral Reform Town Hall with MP Rachel Blaney, 1 - 3 pm, Port McNeill Community Hall, 1473 Broughton Blvd, Port McNeill, BC
September 24th, 2016 - Electoral Reform Town Hall with MPs Alistair MacGregor and Randall Garrison, 2:00 - 3:30, Community Commons Belmost School, 3041 Langford Lake Rd., Langford, BC, RSVP
And don't forget the Electoral Committee also wants to hear from individual Canadians via theirE-CONSULTATION.
If I missed your group or got something wrong, please leave me a correction in comments. Thank you.
