Tag Archives: Elections Canada

Roundup: Rebutting the reformers’ complaints

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If it were possible for someone to write a column that was basically one long subtweet, then I’m pretty sure that it’s what Andrew Coyne did with his column on electoral reform, with me as his unspoken target – particularly as he parroted several of my arguments (that no one else seems to be making) without actually getting their substance correct. So here we go.

When proportional representation advocates complain that the allocation of seats among the parties in the legislature does not resemble their relative shares of the votes cast — with the especially unhappy effect of allowing a minority of the voters to rule over the majority — first past the post’s defenders reply: why should it? Members were elected in 338 separate riding elections, not in a single nationwide vote.

Yes, and that’s pointed out for a number of reasons – that the vote share figure that reformers cite as evidence is not actually real (hence its use as evidence is meaningless), and the fact that each MP is elected to a single seat in a separate election has a particular meaning that gives them individual agency rather than making them a thrall of a particular party. This is an important consideration in the electoral system because it gives a clear line for how MPs are empowered, which is what we keep insisting we want. It also demonstrates that if the complaint is that MPs aren’t empowered, it’s because it’s their own choice or ignorance – not the electoral system that is at fault.

When reformers point out the imbalance this creates between voters — in a given election it typically takes many more votes to elect a member from one party than another — first-past-the-posters look positively mystified: everyone gets one ballot. And when the former observe that under first past the post the votes cast for anyone but the leading candidate in a riding are “wasted,” in the sense that they do not contribute to electing anyone, the latter lose all patience. How could any of the votes have been wasted, they ask, if all were counted? The candidate who was elected may not have been everyone’s choice, but he still represents everyone.

Here Coyne adopts the same specious math that the Broadbent Institute was pushing over Twitter yesterday, which ignores how ridings actually work, and that elections are 338 separate events, and mashes the figures together and divides by 338, pretending that it’s a number with meaning when it’s not – just like the popular vote. It’s pretty much like bringing a unicorn to a logic exam. As well, he doesn’t make a compelling argument about why votes are “wasted” because it ignores the broader political ecosystem. It has little to do with the fact that the MP who won the seat represents everyone, but that the vote itself is but one small piece of political engagement. Casting a vote is not the end-all-be-all of political engagement. Rather, the system is built for people to be joining parties and engaging at a grassroots level to develop policy and for riding associations to act as interlocutors between the local community and the caucus, even when they don’t have a local MP in that party. As well, the percentage by which the MP won the seat is a figure that matters. If it’s by a slim margin, then those votes against are certainly not “wasted” – they have a meaning in the message that it sends to the MP about where his or her support lies. That matters.

To reformers’ complaints about how the system works, in other words, the answer commonly offered is: that’s how the system works. It is as if that were not just the system we have now, but the only system there is. And of course if you assume that then yes, reformers’ objections become literally incomprehensible. They might as well object to the weather. If only one member can be elected per riding, then obviously it’s silly to talk about wasted votes, or to complain that voters who supported another candidate are not represented. That’s life. Suck it up. The resulting parliament was not proportional? That’s not how our system works.

No, that’s not why one has to point out that it’s how the system works – one needs to point that out because you need to understand how the system works before you go about changing it, which usually means breaking things and making them worse. It has been proven that every time we tinker with our system, we make it worse, which leads us to want to tinker with it more, breaking it even further. Why? Because people don’t understand how the system works, so they assume that it’s broken, particularly if they get emotional that it doesn’t do what they think it should. This is the whole premise of my book – that we need to stop and understand how and why things work the way they do before we go about messing with the system some more because history has shown repeatedly that tinkering makes it worse. Ignorance is literally killing our democracy, and no matter how well intentioned its reformers tend to be, they almost always make it worse.

At any rate, it’s worth debating. Some might argue that single-member ridings give constituents a clearer sense of who to take their problems to, and who to hold to account. Others might reply that, with several members competing to represent them, constituents might get better service: if one didn’t answer your letter, another might.

From here, Coyne goes off about how maybe multi-member ridings would be better, possibly sprinkled in with single-member ones where they would be too large (hello, all of rural and remote Canada), which immediately brings up questions about how that could possibly be considered a more fair system. And while he touches ever so briefly on accountability, he gets the premise wrong – an MP’s job is not to “service” one’s constituents. It’s about holding the government to account. This, however, is lost on the reformers, whose fetishisation with fantastical notions about “representation” overshadow all other aspects of how the system works in its broader ecosystem. Yes, representation is a part of it, but it is not the totality, and yet that is what all of their reforms are geared toward with no regard for the bigger whole.

So no, it’s not about whether other systems are possible – it’s about not making things worse because you don’t understand how things work now. That’s a very different thing entirely.

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Roundup: Constitutional conventions are constitutional

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There was another example of the shocking level of civic illiteracy in our elected officials yesterday as Green Party leader Elizabeth May again trotted out the canard that political parties aren’t in the constitution. She was making a perfectly good point of privilege around the way that independent MPs and those from not officially recognised parties are being adversely affected by rules changes that are being carried forward from the last parliament, and that’s fine, but she’s shockingly wrong about the constitutional status of parties. Why? Because while political parties are not literally in the Constitution Acts of 1867 or 1982, they are part of the grounding framework of our system of Responsible Government, which is in and of itself a constitutional convention – part of our unwritten constitutional inheritance from the United Kingdom. It shouldn’t need reminding but apparently it does because apparently nobody learns civics any longer, but constitutional conventions are constitutional. In fact, they are just as enforceable as elements of the written constitution. And lo and behold, the preamble to the 1867 Act is:

Whereas the Provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick have expressed their Desire to be federally united into One Dominion under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, with a Constitution similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom

This is exactly where our Responsible Government framework lies. The UK has an unwritten constitution, and its constitutional conventions have stood the test of time, and this is precisely why May and others who follow her logic are dead wrong. Parties are at the heart of Responsible Government because it’s how a government gains and maintains confidence. The system simply cannot hold with hundreds of “loose fish” all vying for attention and reward. (If you try to bring up the party-less territorial governments, smack yourself upside the head because you simply cannot scale up a consensus model from 19 members in NWT or 22 in Nunavut to 338 in Ottawa. It is a complete impossibility). Does that mean that we don’t currently have problems with the powers accumulated by party leaders? No, we absolutely do, but that’s also because we tinkered with the system of selecting those leaders, presidentializing them with massive membership votes rather than caucus selection that keeps them accountable in the Responsible Government tradition. But parties are absolutely essential to the functioning of our parliamentary system, and the fact the written portions of our constitution are silent on that fact is indicative of absolutely nothing. If one relies solely on the written portions and not the constitutional conventions, they are wholly ignorant of our system of government, and need to be called out as such.

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Roundup: Enter Peter Harder

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Those seven new independent senators are now sworn in and installed, and it seems the Conservative spared no time in trying to insist that they were all secretly Liberal partisans, particularly the new “government representative,” Senator Peter Harder. In response to questions during a restored non-ministerial Senate QP, Harder said that he was recommended for appointment by the Institute for Research on Public Policy, and that he had no communication from the government about it. He also claimed he didn’t intend to be partisan, but be a kind of bureaucratic presence who could field questions on behalf of the government, while relaying concerns to cabinet on occasion. Harder also said that the new practice of bringing ministers to the chamber to answer questions would continue, and be expanded to 40 minutes, which is not a bad thing. What I am a bit more concerned about is the fact that Harder is talking about making amendments to the Parliament of Canada Act to start formalizing some of these changes that Trudeau has imposed on the Senate, but I’m not seeing much in the way of collaborating this with the other efforts to modernise the Senate’s operations. That this would be a discussion around the cabinet table and not involve senators themselves, based on Harder’s statements, is concerning because it does seem like meddling in the way the Senate operates – something Trudeau has already been doing with little regard for the consequences – despite the fact that none of them are in the Senate, particularly under this new regime. I don’t want to go so far as to say that he’s meddling in the Senate’s privilege, but it’s getting close to the line in some cases. The Senate is the institutional memory of parliament, and is supposed to have a longevity for a reason, which is why Harder insisting that it’s not unusual for governments to tinker with the Act to reflect stylistic preferences rubs me the wrong way. I also have some sympathy for the concern that “government representative” is a fairly American term that’s not really reflected in our Westminster traditions (though perhaps Australia’s “Washminster” system may find a more analogous term. We’ll see what Harder starts implementing soon enough, but I do retain a sense of scepticism.

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Roundup: The modernization agenda

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Conservative Senator Thomas McInnis, chair of the new modernisation committee, took to the op-ed pages of the Chronicle Herald to talk about just that – their process of modernising the Upper Chamber by non-constitutional means. While much of the op-ed is pretty standard stuff, he did say a couple of things that intrigued me, so I’ll make brief mention of them. First is that as they contemplate changes and incorporating the increasing number of independent senators, that they need to recognise that since the Senate is not a confidence chamber, it doesn’t need to organise itself on party lines in the same way that the Commons does. This is an important point, because as much as it is an important concept to have a government and opposition side in our Westminster system of government, the role of the Senate means that it doesn’t need to hew as closely to that model. Now, I do still think that the Government Leader in the Senate should have remained a cabinet minister for the sake of there being someone who can answer for the government in the chamber, as well as to properly shepherd government legislation through the Chamber (the minister-in-all-but-name model that Harper used for Claude Carignan was very much a poor idea that limited the exercise of Responsible Government), the fact that the Senate is not a confidence chamber does blunt my criticisms to an extent. McInnis also dropped hints about one of the modernisation committee’s goals being to strengthen the role of being an “effective” representative for regions and provinces. This is interesting because I do wonder if it means that there will be a push to form regional caucuses within the Senate, as is occasionally brought up. I’m not sure how it would really work – essentially having four or five party-like structures (Ontairo, Quebec, the Maritimes, and the West each being 24-seat regional divisions, plus the additional six seats for Newfoundland and Labrador and one each for the territories could either fold into one of the other regional caucuses or forming a caucus of their own), and how they would then translate that into the committee memberships and so on, but it is an idea that has been mentioned before, so we’ll see what kind of appetite there is for it, or if the new Independent Working Group will hold more sway in terms of keeping the current structure but giving more power to independent senators for committee memberships and the like. With there being no opposition MPs from the whole of the Atlantic provinces, this is where the Senate’s regional role becomes more important – and they have been flexing those muscles when ministers have appeared before them in the new Question Period format – but it remains to be seen how this will translate into workable reforms. Suffice to say, these are conversations that are being had, and we’ll see what the committee reports back in the weeks ahead.

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Roundup: Points for process

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From all accounts, the First Ministers meeting in Vancouver got off to a terse start. Premiers were unhappy over the regional bickering over Energy East and discussions of carbon pricing, while Indigenous groups were grousing that they should also have been at that table when it comes to coming up with a plan on combating climate change. By lunch, word around the place was that Trudeau was digging in his heels and was ready to impose a national carbon price on the provinces if they continued to balk and not work together to come to some kind of framework. And, by those same accounts, something changed after lunch and they struck a more conciliatory tone, and even though the meeting ran overtime, they came up with the Vancouver Declaration on Clean Growth and Climate Change, which was essentially an agreement on process. They have six months now to form four working groups and when they meet again in September, the expectation is that there will be more concrete plans, but carbon pricing mechanisms will be part of it – though there seems to be some indication that somehow carbon capture and storage will be seen as some kind of mechanism related to climate mitigation, despite the fact that thus far it’s been an expensive failure of a concept (but hey, Brad Wall is fully committed to it). And then even more grousing happened from the opposition, where the Conservatives complained that there was too much uncertainty for market investment (though not really if you consider that carbon pricing is coming, which the energy sector has actually been demanding and building into their projections), and the NDP moaning that there are still no targets or timelines (to which one wonders if they would have simply imposed them and told the provinces to deal with it if they were in charge, as with their vaunted plans for a cap-and-trade system despite the fact that BC has a successful carbon tax). So if nobody goes away happy, does that mean it was some measure of success? Perhaps, but one shouldn’t diminish the fact that there was a victory for process, because (and it can’t be stated enough) process matters. Democracy is process. So if you have a process laid out, it means that you can move ahead in a coordinated fashion with a plan and a road map and go from there. That may be an understated ending to the conference, but we’ll have to see what the next six months bring.

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Roundup: A vote for support

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We have the motion on the Order Paper now for the debate and eventual vote on the newly refocused mission in Syria and Iraq, and to the relief of those of us who care about things like Crown Prerogative and the powers of the executive, it’s crafted simply in the language of supporting the mission. This is critical, because asking for authorisation is a giant can of worms that nobody really should want to even contemplate opening, but even with this language, it’s going to cause headaches going forward. To recap, asking for authorization is something that launders the prerogative and thus the government’s accountability. When something goes wrong, they can shrug and say “the House voted for the mission,” and to varying degrees, the Harper government did this, particularly with relationship to Afghanistan. These non-binding votes are a rather unseemly bit of political theatre that purports to put the question to MPs – because apparently they need to have buy-in when we send our men and women in uniform into danger, or some such nonsense – and it gives parties like the NDP a chance to thump their chests about peacekeeping and pandering to pacifistic notions (and does anyone seriously buy that nobody is trying to stop the flow of money, arms and fighters to ISIS without Canada butting to the front of the line to finger-wag at them?), and parties like the Conservatives a chance to rail that they were doing so much more when they were in charge (when they weren’t), or when they were in charge, to pat themselves on the back for everything they were doing (when really, it tended to be a bare minimum at best, or a symbolic contribution at worst). Of course, all of this could be done with a simple take-note debate without a vote, which is how it should be, because a vote implies authorisation, and that’s how the NDP have read each and every vote in the past, and they will loudly remind everyone in QP and elsewhere about it. Trudeau has been trying to keep expectations measured by saying that they recognise the role of the executive in making these decisions – but he went and proposed a vote anyway, muddling the role of MPs in this situations like these. That role, to remind you, is to hold the government to account, so if you’re going to have a vote on a military mission, then one might as well make it a confidence vote because foreign policy and control of the military is at the heart of the Crown’s powers. (These authorisation votes that aren’t confidence measures are playing out in the UK right now, which is making a mess of their own system, for the record). Trudeau should have known better than to continue this pattern of confusion and left it at a take-note debate, like it should be. A vote, whether it’s an actual authorisation or just a declaration of support, only serves to make the waters murky, which we need our governments to stop doing before they do lasting harm to our system of Responsible Government.

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Roundup: Forcing internal reform

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With the Senate back in session, the uncertainties of how it will operate in this new environment are starting to make themselves be seen. With each passing day, the lack of Senate Question Period becomes a little more awkward, and until new government legislation starts coming down the pipe, much of their debates right now are about just how they plan to organize themselves. Part of these are the debates about breached privileges – not only the continuation of the investigation of the prima facia breach from the previous parliament about the leak of the AG report, but also Senator Housakos’ complaint that the lack of a government representative doesn’t allow senators to properly do their jobs, and a new complaint today about how the rights of independent senators are being breached in the way that committees are currently organising themselves. In this case it was Senator Wallace, who recently left the Conservative caucus of his own volition, essentially complaining that he couldn’t get a committee assignment that he’d asked for (and the only one that was offered to him he turned down). And it’s already been raised in this parliament that the way committee assignments are determined are a problem for independent senators, and it’s a debate that needs to be had – particularly if there is to be a new batch of independent senators on the way in (though I don’t expect them all to remain independent, nor should they, really). And until some real work starts to land on the Senate’s docket, these kinds of organizational debates are going to dominate for the weeks to come, which may start to reshape how the organisation functions as a whole. If Trudeau did one thing in his non-constitutional Senate reform promise, it was to force the chamber to reform itself from within. One just hopes that the end result hasn’t broken it for the sake of better optics.

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Roundup: A refresher on the GG

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With a minority government likely in the offing – possibly Conservative, possibly Liberal – we’re seeing a spate of new articles about post-electoral scenarios and the role of the Governor General. While some of them get it more or less right, (my own offering a couple of weeks ago here), into the middle of this, Duff Conacher of Democracy Watch sticks his nose in and starts making trouble of his usual sort – deliberately misconstruing the system to his own ends. And then, unfortunately, As It Happens picked it up and ran with it without someone credible to counter it. Fortunately, Philippe Lagassé was already ahead of that game earlier yesterday morning, followed by a smackdown of Conacher later in the evening. I’ll leave you to it.

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Roundup: Crafting an image

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The National Post had an interesting feature looking at the construction of Justin Trudeau’s image over the course of this election, with his carefully chosen images like the boxing, or the canoeing, and so on. Of course, Trudeau had this set out since he began the leadership contest, with an official photographer who has followed him around everywhere since. And yes, there is a deliberate crafting of the image he has been putting forward – vital, positive, authentic, all chosen to look natural and not artificial. This is nothing new, and what the piece didn’t mention was that Stephen Harper has been busy doing the same thing for the past number of years. Harper has a team of photographers and videographers on staff who have similarly been engaged in crafting an image of Harper that he has been trying to build, albeit it’s one of him being leaderly but not glamorous or robust. Where the divergence has been is the way in which Harper has crafted this image to such a controlling extent that he has gradually been shutting out legitimate news media and photojournalists and then distributes handout photos from his own photographers instead. Which, as we know, is not journalism but stenopgraphy. It’s gotten to the point where he has been self-generating “news” videos (the 24/Seven series) in order to bypass the press. Trudeau, to his credit, has not yet begun engaging in this kind of behaviour, and has been far more open to media availabilities and photojournalism, where media cameras are at the same events where his photographer is. That remains an important distinction – sure, he may have some great shots as part of his campaign media, but the real media is still there too, and that’s an important distinction.

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Roundup: Resurrecting the “barbaric” issue

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Not content to ratchet up the niqab issue alone, the Conservatives decided yesterday to go full-on culture war, and dredge up their Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices legislation from the previous parliament, and not only tout what it does (almost all of which is duplicative and unnecessarily antagonistic), but they added the promise of setting up a “tip line” for when people suspect these “barbaric cultural practices” like child brides, polygamy or female genital mutilation are taking place. Never mind that there’s already a tip line in place – it’s called 911 – it seems ripe for reporting on neighbours as a general xenophobic policy that ties up police resources that are already stretched thin. While the Twitter lit up with an attempt to turn the #BarbaricCulturalPractices into an exercise in sarcasm, there are more serious issues underlying the Conservatives’ use of the word. Back when the bill was being debated, Senator Mobina Jaffer, herself a Muslim woman and a lawyer, utterly dismantled the bill from its use of the loaded term “barbaric” to its hypocrisy in targeting polygamy by foreigners but not the community of Bountiful in BC, to the way in which it actually denies the protection of those who were forced into marriages, to the way in which the government improperly uses the defence of “provocation” to try and make a point about honour killings. It’s a masterful bit of legislative scrutiny that deserves to be read again in light of what the Conservatives are trotting out for electoral gain, and in order to put the whole issue into proper context. (That it also demonstrates the value of the work that senators can do its an added bonus).

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