Re electoral reform

Helen Forsey | May 11, 2017

I appreciate your continuing coverage of the electoral reform issue, including your February outline of MP Scott Reid’s sensible comments, and last week’s story about the idea of “weighting” votes in Parliament rather than incorporating proportionality into the actual electoral system.

On the surface, the notion of “weighted” votes might seem attractive, but once the MPs were elected, it would be a nightmare in Parliament itself. Not only would it be a perpetual fountain of confusion and discord, with some MPs having many times the voting clout of others, but it would undermine the whole basis of parliamentary democracy.

As my father, the late Senator Eugene Forsey regularly pointed out, “Parliament is not just a voting place, it is also, pre-eminently, essentially, a talking place – a parlement. Parliamentary government is not just a matter of counting heads instead of breaking them. It is also a matter of using them. It is government by discussion, not just by majority vote.”

In parliamentary democracy, we elect MPs to represent us, and representation involves much more than just voting on bills and motions. It involves listening, discussing, negotiating, and re-thinking, in committees and in the House, and on any number of matters, not all of which even ever come to a vote. With the system Mr. Hart and his group are promoting, that representation would remain grossly un-proportional. Would parliamentary discussion be “weighted” as well as the votes? How? To what end? Would party discipline dictate the members’ votes regardless of the points raised in the discussion? How would that be determined? Etc.

And those questions and objections barely scratch the surface. The “weighted voting” proposal is simply a very bad idea.

Instead, let’s break the current impasse around electoral reform by holding a simplified referendum during the 2019 election, in which people would choose between just two options: keeping the “first-past-the-post” status quo or moving to a more proportional system. This proposal, from Democracy Alert in St. John’s, offers a way to move the issue forward – and incidentally, save face on all sides.

Up till now we’ve been tying ourselves up in knots trying to define a new system in all its details – a task that is far from simple and needs more time and work. What we need first is confirmation (or otherwise) of the consensus the multi-party Electoral Reform Committee found: that most Canadians want greater proportionality in our voting system. Let’s confirm that through a simple referendum in 2019, and then do the rest of the work, choosing or creating the best possible system to put in place for the election after that.

Sincerely,

Helen Forsey

Ompah