Reid Happy With Consensus Report, But Government Response, Not So Much

Jeff Green | Dec 07, 2016

Lanark Frontenac Lennox and Addington MP Scott Reid, co-chair of the special committee on electoral reform, came to the role as someone uniquely suited to the task. He researched electoral systems for the Reform party in the 1990’s, and sat on a parliamentary committee studying electoral reform in 2004 – 2005.

A year ago, as the special committee was being contemplated, Reid said “I think the government has set itself a difficult timeline” given all the legislative hoops that need to be gone through in order to implement a new voting system. He also began what has become a very public fight with the government over his, and the Conservative Parties’, insistence that in order to change the electoral system the public needs to be formally consulted through a referendum.

At the time Minister of Democratic Reform Maryam Monsef said, “the government is committed to a robust consultation and I will not prejudice the outcome of that process by committing to a referendum.”
Later, Government House Leader Dominic Leblanc went further, saying “our plan is not to have a referendum, our plan is to use parliament to consult Canadians.”

A year later, the special committee that was eventually set up submitted a 300 page report to Parliament.
Among its recommendations are three key ones. The first is that a new system be created on one of the models of proportinal representation, wherein the riding system is modified in some way to ensure that the country-wide popular vote for each is reflected in the number of seats that party has in the legislature. For a party such as the Green Party that receives about 5% of the vote, it would mean they would have about 15 seats among the 338 in the house instead of the 1 seat they currently have. The committee did not provide the precise form of proportional representation, leaving that to the government to determine.

This would give the government a wide set of options as there are many variations of proportional representation systems, some of which do not tie the popular vote to seat count very well.  The committee also recommended that whatever system is proposed must score highly on the Gallagher index, a mathematical model that determines how likely a system is to yield a result in which the number of elected officials from each party corresponds to the popular vote.

The third key recommendation is that the new system be subjected to a straightforward referendum, with two  options, the current system and a proposed new system.

Reid said that one of the ways that he promoted the consensus that was eventually developed came through a letter he wrote to other members of the committee early on in the process. The letter pointed that if members of each of the parties’ on the committee stuck to their basic party policies on electoral reform, a compromise was possible.

“Both the Green’s and the NDP had policies in favour of proportional representation, the Conservative Party policy did not specify a preferred system but insisted on a referendum, and the Liberal Party had a policy that only said a new system needs to be developed and implemented,” he said.

The majority, 72% of people who appeared before the committee and supported change, favoured proportional representation, which was also the favoured option in public consultations

In her response to the committees recommendations, Minister Monsef said she was disappointed that the committee had not been able to do what it had been asked to do, recommend an electoral system. She has since backed down from those comments, but the government has said it is not considering a referendum. Also, if and whether a new system is to be developed and brought to Parliament for consideration by them is up in the air.

Reid told the News on Tuesday that it was clear to the committee when they were finalizing their work that their recommendations would not find favour with the government.

“One of the reasons we did not come to a final detailed proposal was that we knew the more specific we were about the system the more opportunity we would give the government to reject it. We thought that it would be less of a risk to leave the details for them to work out, with the benefit of the detail in our report, which looked critically at a number of options,” he said.

He added that he was not completely surprised by the government response.

He said he was surprised, however by the survey that was launched last week with a postcard campaign to every household in the country and through the website Mydemocracy.ca.

“The Minister said she was disappointed that the committee had not been specific enough, and at the same time they sponsor a survey that asks only very general, background questions. I asked the Minister last week to add questions about our concrete proposals to the survey, but that has not happened.”

The survey has sparked controversy since it was launched, and was the subject of a prickly interview on CBC radios As it Happens between Carol Off and the President of the Company that developed the survey.

See editorial And the Survey said ... (Part 2)