Tag Archives: Democratic Reform

Roundup: The lobbyist’s Senate speculation

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Courtesy of the Hill Times comes a hot mess of an article that speculates that the new independent Senate is going to have a much more active policy role upfront in the future, which…I’m not so sure about. The thesis of this former MP-turned-lobbyist is that the Trudeau gang knows exactly what they got into with their Senate reform plan (err, I’m really, really dubious about that based on what I’ve seen to date), and the loss of top-down Senate management means that Senators need to be brought into the legislative process from the conceptual stage rather than in their current role as revising and amending. Okay, so while his point that no government can take the Senate for granted anymore is true to a certain extent, most governments have paid a price when they did and found that the Senate wasn’t willing to put up with it. And it’s this particular passage that really makes my skin crawl:

Mr. Jordan said that with new dynamics in the Red Chamber, Senators could prove to be a useful ally of opposition parties and lobbyists, especially in majority governments when governing parties can pass any legislation they wish in the House of Commons. So, if an opposition party or a lobby group wants to stop the government from doing anything, their best bet would be to reach out to Senators.

“You could now go to the Senate and rally support,” Mr. Jordan said. “Make your case.”

It feels a little too much like Jordan, a lobbyist himself, is licking his chops at the prospect. It also undermines the role of the Senate as a kind of constitutional safeguard, who has the power of unlimited veto and of institutional independence to say no to a prime minister with a majority when there is no other option to stop an unconstitutional bill, not to become a partisan competition with the Commons. In fact, the Supreme Court reference stated explicitly that it was not the role of the Senate to be that competitor, and yet this is what Jordan both envisions and says that Trudeau must have known when he started making his push for a more independent upper chamber. (Again, I have my doubts). Turning the Senate into the tool of the opposition and lobbyist allies is antithetical to its nature and its purpose, and for him to start putting this kind of nonsense out there is not helpful, whether as a point of speculation or as a meditation on where senate reform is headed. And if anything, it proves that Trudeau didn’t know what can of worms he opened when he kicked his senators out of caucus, but here we are.

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Roundup: Patterns on the witness list

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The electoral reform committee returns next week, and so far I see a lot of proponents of proportional representation on the witness list, not that this surprises me in any way, as well as an academic proponent of a referendum on electoral reform – also not a surprise. So look forward to plenty of glowing recommendations about how electoral reform will solve all of our political ills.

In the meantime, if you’re looking for some background reading the Library of Parliament has some updated publications in store – one on the history and evolution of our electoral laws, and another that provides an overview of our current electoral system and those employed elsewhere. That one I found particularly lacking, especially in the language it used to describe the current First-Past-the-Post system, adopting wholesale the arguments about “disproportionate” seat counts (logical fallacy), the supposed advantages of “regional parties” or “regional strongholds” with no discussion of brokerage parties, and buying into the arguments about voter turnout without being critical about them (this is a broad problem across all western democracies no matter the electoral system). The rest was an overview of other electoral systems, examples of their use in other countries, the history of electoral reform initiatives in Canada, and some adjacent issues like mandatory voting, online voting (with zero mention about the concerns of the secrecy of the ballot), and lowering the voting age.

What was missing from this tepid report was any discussion on the impact of these electoral systems, such as government formation or accountability, which boggles my mind. It’s literally taking a piece of a complex ecosystem and treating it in isolation with no regard for how it will affect all other aspects of it, which is a huge part of the electoral reform discussion. What kind of government you get after you vote in that system is kind of a big deal. And even bigger deal is how you get rid of that government in a subsequent election, which is not easy to do in most systems other than FPTP because the tendency is for a big central party to just shuffle around their coalition partners, and that can be an even bigger headache, delivering policies that only a tiny fraction of the population voted for. You’d think this would be relevant to an examination of electoral reform proposals, but apparently not according to the analysts at the Library. You’ll excuse me if my faith in this government’s process has just sunk even lower.

(Hat tip to blog reader PierreB for pointing these reports out)

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Roundup: Values versus mechanics

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I am just about at my limit for hot takes on both Brexit and electoral reform here in Canada, and lo, the Citizen has an op-ed out that combines the two of them. How scintillating! Except not. After dire warnings about what Brexit did for referendums, we get an appeal for a discussion on “values” rather than mechanics when it comes to discussing electoral reform.

Nope. Nooooope.

When I’ve finished banging my head against my desk for the sheer ridiculousness of the piece, I’ve got a couple of bones to pick with it.

The mechanics of any electoral system are important to understand what it produces in terms of government, kinds of parties and representatives. The guide also discusses design variations, which could be good if citizens were being asked to design a system. But citizens are not being asked to do that when they hold these informal meetings. And an obsession about design mechanics only perpetuates the wrong-headed nature of the conversation. It’s like arguing over the options on a car before you’ve chosen the model.

The problem is that nobody is actually talking about the mechanics. Sure, you have a couple of people griping over MMP versus ranked ballot, but nobody is talking about the bigger picture. There is no obsession about design mechanics – it’s all been about feelings and “fairness,” and this fantasyland notion that somehow parties will be forced to be more cooperative under whichever system is eventually chosen (which is utter tripe) or that voters will somehow turnout more (also tripe), and nobody talks about what it means that you are no longer voting for an MP in a direct and meaningful way that gives them direct agency. Mechanics matter, and nobody is discussing it, so I don’t know where this prof is getting the idea that there’s an obsession with it.

The focus of these town halls should be on what values matter most to Canadians in an electoral system. I think citizens care less about the allocation of seats than they do about how each system embodies principles such as accountability, fairness, simplicity and inclusiveness.

Wait – how much ink has been spilled to date over the allocation of seats? It’s the very first thing that the sore loser brigade starts whinging about. So yes, apparently Canadians do care about it insofar as they misunderstand how the current system works and are being told that it’s unfair based on the fantasy number of the popular vote (which we’ve already established is not a real number). Also, nobody is talking about what actual accountability means (like being able to turf a government) rather than the fuzziest of notions about your MP responding to you as a voter. And there’s that “fairness” word again, which is that emotive word that people whinge about without understanding how the system works – just that the party they support didn’t get as many seats as they feel they deserved, based on numbers that don’t exist in reality.

Should an electoral system offer greater voter choice, create effective parties, be simple and practical or offer fairness of representation? These are ideals that both reformers and non-reformers can rationally discuss without getting lost in the weeds of how votes are transferred under single transferable vote.

And here we get to the part where we apparently want a discussion about unicorns, because that’s all these ideals are. Everyone wants a magical electoral outcome, but they don’t actually understand how the system works now, so this is all about wish fulfilment and fantasy projection. This is why a discussion about mechanics matters. We can talk values until doomsday, and it will be worthless because unless you have a solid conception about what your vote actually means from a mechanical perspective, then it might as well be pixie dust.

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Roundup: Approval voting and numbers with meaning

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While everyone has been enthralled with the electoral reform debate (no, not really), and been gripped with substance over process (no, not really), there was an op-ed in the Citizen last week that I never really had a chance to talk about amidst a number of other things going on, so I thought I’d take a moment now to address it. The issue: the electoral system known as “approval voting.”

So what is it? Basically you take the same ballot you have now, and you mark it for as many people as you want to. Supposedly this discourages strategic voting because you can vote more than once and can vote for both the person your heart wants to vote for, as well as the one you hope to defeat the person in there now. And okay, sure, it’s simple, and sure, it gives you that emotional thrill about being able to vote for more than one person (which I don’t think is that big of a concern for most people, but maybe I’m wrong), and if you do something silly like vote for everyone on the ballot (because they’re all winners for participating?), then it basically cancels out the vote and doesn’t come out any worse off. But I keep going back to the basic question: what problem is this trying to solve?

If that problem is the emotional dissatisfaction with electoral outcomes, then I’m not sure that this is the problem that we should be addressing, and I also have to wonder about the unintended consequences of picking such a system. And what could those be? Really, the quality of the data that an election produces, and what that data tells us about the election. Because believe it or not, that actually matters. What percentage a candidate received matters a lot. It gauges support, it sends a message about how solid or tenuous their support is, and about how much support their rivals have, which could mean clues for them as to how to better organise in the following election, and who to target. If the number of votes cast is divorced from the number of electors, what kind of message are we able to send? That would seem to be a pretty important consideration to me, and to a lot of people running, I would imagine.

I also have an issue with how this portrays what a vote means. In our system currently – and yes, this electoral system purports to keep the system otherwise intact, along the lines of “one simple trick to make the system more emotionally satisfying!” – when you cast a ballot it is to decide who will sit in the seat that represents your geographic area. And this is where a lot of electoral reform nonsense falls apart – it becomes about feelings rather than the fact that there is one seat and you have to help decide who fills it. How casting votes for multiple people to fill that one seat seems to defeat the purpose in many ways, and admission that it’s too difficult to make a decision so let’s cop out and muddle it so that I don’t feel so bad when I do it. But democracy is about making choices, and we should make it clear that it’s what it is, and just what that choice is (i.e.: Who is filling this one seat, rather than who is going to form a government, because that is decided once a parliament has been assembled). We’re not making that clear, and we’re constantly talking in terms of horse race numbers and leadership politics, and not about the actual choice that faces people, and I think this is something we should be paying more attention to, and being more vocal and precise about, so that we don’t wind up with yet more pie-eyed schemes that are designed to make us feel better while not actually doing what we’re supposed to. And this isn’t something that I’m seeing in the discussions on electoral reform – just a lot of pouting about “fairness” based on made-up numbers that don’t actually mean anything, and approval voting would make the numbers that do mean something, mean even less.

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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: More awful electoral reform questions

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Another day, another meeting of the electoral reform committee, which produced yet more kinds of awful. Marc Mayrand, the outgoing Chief Electoral Officer, gave a few facts to MPs, like the fact that a referendum (if the enabling legislation were changed) would cost about $300 million to run, or the fact that Elections Canada could be ready in time for a 2019 election under a new system, provided that everything was settled by May of next year. (Note: This may be overly optimistic considering the constitutional questions raised by some kinds of voting systems). But some of the worst moments were around questions raised to both Mayrand and his predecessor, Jean-Pierre Kingsley, about things like online voting.

No. No, no, no, no, no. The problem with online voting has zero to do with encryption technology and everything to do with the secrecy of the ballot, and anyone who confuses the two needs a smack upside the head. The secrecy of the ballot is ensuring that nobody sees who you are voting for, so that you can’t be rewarded or punished for it, you know, like in the era of “rum bottle politics.” And you can’t ensure the secrecy of the ballot with online voting. “But what about mail-in ballots?” you ask. Well, the proportion of those is so small that it’s a compromise that we have to make. Online voting is not comparable.

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This particular intervention is complete nonsense. Does David Christopherson not take the phone calls of his constituents unless they can prove that they voted NDP? Does he not present their petitions in Parliament? Oh, so he does? Then they don’t “get nothing,” and it’s fundamentally wrong for anyone to suggest otherwise, and proof that they don’t know what it means to be an MP.

And then there’s this specious and utterly wrong nonsense, because it’s fundamentally dishonest. Do you know how many voters it took to elect Elizabeth May? 37,000 votes. We have ridings, where people decide who gets to sit in each seat. We don’t apportion seats based on the number of votes they receive, and to try and present it as such in order to prove some point is basically lying. And yes, this is the kinds of discourse that this process is bringing out, so well done everyone.

And then there are the editorials and op-eds. Christina Spencer is not at all impressed with how this committee has gotten started (and I can’t say that I blame her – it’s been pretty awful). Kelly McParland thinks the Liberals are counting on apathy in order to get their preferred electoral system through (hence their reluctance for a referendum), while Michael Den Tandt thinks the insistence of “focus grouping” their electoral reform consultations is really a shell game of “trust us” while they push ranked ballots through. Colin Horgan suggests that the “electoral reform toolkit” is an attempt at making the conversation appear to be more grassroots.

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Roundup: Monsef’s terrible “event toolkit”

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Maryam Monsef appeared before the special committee on electoral reform, and it went about as well as you could expect, from her frankly juvenile (and wrong) opening remarks, to the predictable questions from those there – the Conservatives demanding a referendum, the NDP demanding to know whether the fix was in for ranked ballots, and Elizabeth May making outrageous remarks in her boosterism for proportional representation. Oh, and the Liberals at the table wondering just why she cares so much. No, seriously.

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What was perhaps most surprising and yet odious about the whole affair was the 38-page “event toolkit” that Monsef unveiled at the appearance, which is designed to help facilitate discussions on electoral reform. (National Post summary here if you don’t want to read the whole thing). And it’s ridiculous and terrible. Laughably so, especially with the step-by-step instructions on how to host one and advice like creating a “special hashtag” for your event.

Event planning aside, the few pages devoted to different electoral systems are actually terrible because they miss the point. They all stem from a kind of discussion that fetishises “representation” and talks nothing at all about accountability, which is half of the gods damned equation when it comes to why we vote at all. It is not enough that we vote for a person and can be all warm and fuzzy about what that “representation” means to us (which is where a lot of the unicorn thinking of electoral reformists tends to wind up), but rather, it must also provide us with a means of holding those who are already in place to account. That means an ability to vote them out, and the only time that the word “accountability” is mentioned is on the page of the “guiding principles” that Monsef purports that the exercise is to he held under, and even then, the mentions do not get to the point. The principle of “preserve the accountability of local representation” and asking “how could any proposed reforms affect MPs’ accountability to citizens” does not actually make it clear that the ability to hold an MP or a party to account is a fundamental principle of our democratic system. Instead, we are treated to the usual “more democracy” kinds of rhetoric that are bogging down our whole understanding of our electoral system. It’s why I treat this whole exercise with suspicion, and those fears are being validated.

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Roundup: Use your Australian comparisons wisely

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If it’s not the leadership omnishambles in the UK that’s holding our attention, it’s the indecisive election result in Australia. While that would be something in and of itself, we find ourselves with pundits eager to take some lessons from Australia, only to completely balls things up along the way. To wit, Kelly McParland writing in the National Post delivered this hot mess yesterday which manages to conflate every possible thing in Australian politics in order to prove a point – not necessarily a bad point – but went about it in entirely the wrong way. So, for Mr. McParland’s edification, let’s break it down a little.

First of all, the “six prime ministers in six years” has virtually nothing to do with the ranked ballots in Australia. The system of caucus selection of leaders there (which is how leaders should be chosen, as I’ve argued elsewhere numerous times) has gone to extremes, creating a culture of paranoia and betrayal. But that’s not the fault of the ranked ballots since it’s a different process. That parties will spill leaders shortly before an election in the hopes of having a more appealing leader is party politics enabled by the ability to have spills, rather than the ranked ballot effect. Conflating them is not helpful.

The ranked ballots themselves allow for more small parties to exist independent of “big tent” brokerage parties because ranked ballots discourage tactical voting – something McParland neglects to mention while returning to the Canadian canard that the Liberals only want ranked ballots because they think they’ll clean up by getting everyone’s second place votes. That has led to the need for the Australian Liberals (read: conservatives) to require a coalition partner to govern, which is a consideration to make if we want ranked ballots, but it is a giant conflation to mix this in with the stability of their system and leadership woes.

The problem of the Australian Senate is the bigger nub of the argument, but which gets lost in the rest of the McParland’s confusing mess. The Australian Senate is chosen by single-transferable proportional voting, and the system has been effectively gamed in the previous election so that a bunch of marginal players got seats and subsequently created a huge problem in their upper chamber, requiring more tinkering of the system to be forced through and the Prime Minister calling for double-dissolution (so that both chambers be elected at the same time – a rare occurrence usually reserved for political crises) in order to break the legislative deadlocks. Those tweaks appear to be causing even more problems with this election, but we may see how it all shakes out in a few weeks. (Note that these ballots tend to be the size of placemats, because of the way they’re structured with the enormous number of parties running). And while the problems with these marginal parties being given outsized powers of persuasion in the previous parliament are very valid points to make, it gets lost in the sea of conflations that plagued the rest of the piece.

So I get McParland’s point about electoral reform advocates needing to be careful what they wish for, and can even agree with it to a large extent, this was utterly the wrong way to go about it.

Meanwhile, here’s a primer about Australia’s lengthy counting process – so lengthy that their Senate preferential distribution process could take over a month. Closer to home, here are some of the ways in which the electoral reform committee plans to engage with Canadians.

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Roundup: Specious arguments about political bullying

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As someone who writes a lot about our democratic system (true fact – I have a book about it coming out in March), I read a lot of really dumb things that people try to assert in order to make a point. The Citizen had an op-ed yesterday that pretty much takes the cake for specious reasoning when it comes to asserting that our electoral system somehow turns everyone into petty bullies. That’s right – it postulates that First-Past-the-Post is responsible for The Elbowing that happened a couple of months ago. No, seriously. It’s such a moronic argument that I. Can’t. Even.

Here’s the thing – trying to blame the electoral system is a losing proposition because trying to prove the counterfactual amounts to pixie dust and unicorns. Electoral politics can get nasty because that’s the nature of competition, and even in systems that are supposedly built upon consensus models (such as the legislatures in the NWT and Nunavut), there is just as much bullying among MLAs that takes place as in the oppositional system we have here. There is all manner of fractious and nasty politics in countries that have proportional or ranked ballot systems because it’s almost like we’re all human beings or something. Add to that, trying to put the blame on the logically fallacious notion about “false majority” governments (which don’t exist because the popular vote is not a real thing – elections are not single events but rather 338 separate and simultaneous events that you can’t simply mash into a single statistic and expect it to be meaningful) doesn’t automatically turn the victors into bullies because it posits that either “true” majorities or minority governments would not be the same. That’s of course false, as large majorities can turn triumphalist and run roughshod over opposition parties just as much, and minority parliaments can be petty and nasty as parties clamp down in order to ensure that the government isn’t toppled, as our own recent memory shows. None of this has anything to do with First-Past-the-Post, and pretending that another system would force parties to work together forgets that it simply means shifting from one model of horse-trading and bargaining to another model, where there tends to be more extreme elements jockeying for power instead. So, to be quite frank, if this is supposed to be “kicking off” a discussion on electoral reform, it might as well be a tale that includes a vampire or two because it’s just as fantastic.

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Roundup: Idle Brexit musings

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While everyone continues to talk Brexit over the weekend, and you have a curious number of Conservative MPs here in Canada almost irresponsibly tweeting gleefully over it, I am forced to wonder if they are not in fact trying to demonstrate enthusiasm for referenda in general, given their daily caterwauling for one on electoral reform in this country. That could be why their messages are so focused on the democratic result of it, as opposed to the substance of what the Brexit vote actually represented. But that’s just idle speculation, so take of it what you will.

Of course, talk of how referenda are terrible at determining issues of substance is also part of why that’s been on my mind, because I am leaning more to the side that the issue of electoral reform would require a referendum because of what it proposes to do, and I don’t trust that the government is going to get useful answers from a series of townhalls and a report from a committee whose composition has been gamed to look “fair” when the person doing the gaming has a specific goal and output in mind. Of course, an electoral reform referendum would be subject to its won particular brands of demagoguery, particularly considering that we have an appalling lack of civic literacy in Canada, and when nobody can accurately depict the current electoral system, we’re going to be subject to some propaganda on the change side of the referendum whose fictions will be as bald-faced as that which the Leave side promised in the Brexit campaign, not that it will matter to the casual voter because it plays into emotions about things that feel and sound “fair” without actually grasping the situation (which is a solution in search of a problem). The last referendum on electoral reform in Ontario largely failed because the government of the day was ambivalent, but the current federal government is not, and that worries me. So it’s something to consider.

Meanwhile, the meltdown happening in the UK’s Labour Party, with a problematic leader who refuses to resign in the face of a full-blown caucus revolt is another object lesson in why membership selection of party leaders is a terrible, terrible system because it gives those leaders an excuse to refuse to be held to account, citing a “democratic mandate” as Jeremy Corbyn is doing right now. And no, adopting the provisions in Michael Chong’s Reform Act where caucus can vote to remove a leader is not actually the solution because it entrenches that parties must elect leaders by way of their membership, and that disconnect between selection and removal creates enormous problems in terms of the legitimacy of the removal process. Accountability matters, and needs to be balanced with democracy. Membership selection of leaders does not provide the needed accountability, and the horrifying lesson of a leader who won’t be held to account is playing out right now and should give everyone pause about the system that we blazed the trail for in this country.

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