Posts Tagged ‘Canada politics’

The Queen’s Speech – brevity wins the day

I have previously written about the opening of a new parliament, or session of parliament, which begins with the Speech from the Throne, or the Queen’s Speech, as it is called in the United Kingdom.

A new session of Parliament opened 8 May 2013 in the UK, and HRH Queen Elizabeth delivered the Speech in the House of Lords. You can watch that event here, if interested.

One of the most striking differences between the Queen’s Speech and a Speech from the Throne here in Canada is the length of the speech. The Queen’s Speeches are remarkably brief compared to the Speeches delivered by Canadian Governors General.

Today’s speech totalled 845 words. The two previous speeches were of comparable length: the 9 May 2012 Speech ran 827 words, and the 25 May 2010 Speech was slightly longer, coming in at 901 words. But that is perhaps understandable – that speech marked the opening of the current parliament following the May 2010 general election rather than the start of a new session.

Recent Canadian Speeches from the Throne have been significantly longer. The most recent, delivered 3 June 2011, following the May 2011 general election and opening the current Parliament, was 3,677 words long. There were three Throne Speeches delivered during the previous Parliament. The first, which opened the 40th Parliament, delivered on 19 November 2008, totalled 4,218 words.  The Throne Speech to open the 2nd session of the 40th Parliament (26 January 2009) was a bit of an anomaly. It was only 749 words long. The Throne Speech to open the 3rd session, however, was a whopping 5,978 words (3 March 2010).

What we find is that the past three UK Queen’s Speeches average 858 words, while the average for a Canadian Speech from the Throne is 3,655 words – over four times longer.

The Queen’s Speech is normally a fairly specific and straight-forward overview of a dozen or so pieces of legislation the Government intends to bring forward in the new session:

A Bill will be introduced to reduce the burden of excessive regulation on businesses. A further Bill will make it easier for businesses to protect their intellectual property.

A draft Bill will be published establishing a simple set of consumer rights to promote competitive markets and growth.

My government will introduce a Bill that closes the Audit Commission.

My government will continue to invest in infrastructure to deliver jobs and growth for the economy.

Legislation will be introduced to enable the building of the ‘High Speed Two’ railway line, providing further opportunities for economic growth in many of Britain’s cities.

My government will continue with legislation to update energy infrastructure and to improve the water industry.

Canadian Speeches from the Throne tend to be far more generalised and include a lot of context – or window-dressing, as we see from the 2011 Speech from the Throne:

Our Government has made Canada’s North a cornerstone of its agenda. The strongest expression of our sovereignty comes through presence and actions, not words. Our Government will continue to exercise leadership in the stewardship of northern lands and waters. It is also committed to working with the Northwest Territories and the private sector to complete the Dempster Highway—by linking Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk—thereby realizing Prime Minister Diefenbaker’s vision of connecting Canada by road from sea to sea to sea.

Canada’s natural environment shapes our national identity, our health and our prosperity. Our Government has expanded protected lands and marine areas to an unprecedented extent, so that current and future generations can continue to enjoy them. In this, the 100th anniversary year of our national parks system, our Government will create significant new protected areas. It will work with provincial, regional, municipal, Aboriginal and community stakeholders toward establishing an urban national park in the Rouge Valley of eastern Toronto. Looking to the future, our Government will engage a broad range of stakeholders on the development of a National Conservation Plan, to move our conservation objectives forward and better connect all Canadians with nature.

Our Government is committed to developing Canada’s extraordinary resource wealth in a way that protects the environment. It will support major new clean energy projects of national or regional significance, such as the planned Lower Churchill hydroelectricity project in Atlantic Canada. It will engage the provinces, territories and industry on ways to improve the regulatory and environmental assessment process for resource projects, while ensuring meaningful consultation with affected communities, including Aboriginal communities.

In the UK, a session of Parliament runs from the State Opening of Parliament, which in the past was usually in November through to the following November. However, in 2010 the Leader of the House announced the Government’s intention to move towards five 12-month sessions over a Parliament, beginning and ending in the spring. Now, Parliament is prorogued every spring, usually some time near the end of April, and the new session opens in early May. Canadian parliamentary sessions are of an indeterminate length, and it is the Government which decides when to prorogue one session and begin a new one. For example, the current Parliament, the 41st, began on 2 June 2011, after the general election in May, and is still in its first session almost two full years later. This factor perhaps makes it easier (and necessary) for the UK government to outline its legislative agenda more specifically, since it knows that, realistically, there are only so many bills which can be dealt with in a one-year period. In Canada, since the Government doesn’t have to adhere to a preset tradition of one-year sessions, it can be much vaguer in outlining its legislative goals.

Personally, I must say that I prefer the UK approach. Speeches from the Throne are notoriously tedious to listen to. The much shorter and to the point Queen’s Speeches make it easier to determine if the Government has achieved what it set out to do by the time the session ends. The vagueness of Canadian Throne Speeches make it much harder to follow if the Government is staying on the course it set out – since it’s not exactly clear what that course is.

 

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Politicians still don’t understand the internet

Just over a year ago, I wrote a post outlining how far too many politicians simply don’t understand the internet in general, and social media in particular. Sadly, the situation hasn’t improved much.

Recently, a point of privilege was raised in the provincial legislature of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador, over one Member’s alleged membership in an anti-government group on Facebook. Several comments on the group’s page involved death threats against the Premier of the province. In his point of privilege, the Government House Leader noted that the Facebook group had a membership list and among the listed members was the MHA for St. John’s Centre. The Government House Leader argued that online, as in public, one would join a group “because you support the values and you support the objectives of the group and you support what the people of the group are doing.” He added:

I submit to you, Mr. Speaker, that the group and the members of that group of which there is a member sitting in this House today, who is endorsing and supporting that – threats to her [the premier's] life and threats to her home, implicit in that are threats to her family, to her children and her grandchildren. Mr. Speaker, that, in my view, is reprehensible and totally, totally unacceptable.

The Government House Leader finished by calling on the House to suspend the Member for St. John’s Centre because of her public support for and participation in the Facebook group and its activities.

The Member accused was not given an opportunity to speak. The Speaker recessed briefly, then returned with a ruling in which he reminded Members that should they choose to engage with social media, they had a responsibility “to use them wisely” and that they should hold themselves “to a higher standard than would be accepted and acceptable for the general public.”

He did admit that, upon examining the Facebook pages in question, while the Member for St. John’s Centre was listed as a member, it was impossible to determine “how this participation was initiated and accepted” nor was there any evidence that she made any comments on the site that would connect her to the offensive statements:

It cannot be clearly and unequivocally stated that the Member for St. John’s Centre was herself carrying out an implied or actual threat; therefore there is no prima facie case of privilege.

Despite this fact, the Speaker still found a contempt against the House and asked the Member to apologize, which she refused to do: “I will not apologize for something that I have not done. I am sorry; I cannot apologize to the House.” She was asked twice more times to apologize and refused to do so each time, forcing the Speaker to suspend her for the remainder of the day.

Then, a week later, the Speaker in turn apologized to the Member, noting that after having the finer points of how Facebook actually works explained to him – notably that individuals can “find themselves attached to a group without their explicit consent”, his finding of contempt was “erroneous”.

This is not the first ruling the Speaker has made on a matter involving social media. Almost a year ago, a similar point of privilege was raised in the House of Assembly, this time over a comment made on Twitter. A Member had tweeted the previous night, after the House had adjourned, that another Member – whom he did not identify – had lied in the House during that day’s debate.

As in the case above, the Speaker heard the point of privilege and then ruled immediately. The ruling was somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, the Speaker seemed to accept, or at least recognize, that comments made outside of the House are beyond the Speaker’s power to act on. He stated that had an accusation of lying been made in the House during debate, he would have immediately demanded that it be withdrawn. If the Member had made the comments while outside the House, perhaps on an open line radio program, it would have been regrettable, but the Speaker would not have been able to act on it since it was outside of his jurisdiction – in other words, not a proceeding of parliament. However, the fact that the tweet was made after the House had adjourned seemed to be the only factor preventing the Speaker from acting:

had this accusation of lying been sent while the House was sitting so as to escape being sanctioned for unparliamentary language while still making the accusation, I believe it would be a prima facie case of privilege.

In other words, had the tweet been sent while the House was sitting, even if the member himself made it from outside the Chamber, the Speaker would have found a breach of privilege, meaning he would have considered the tweet a proceeding of parliament.

A number of Speakers in other jurisdictions have been called upon to rule on comments made on social media, or have issued statements on the use of social media by Members. In these cases, the general consensus is that anything said on social media is not part of proceedings of parliament, therefore the Chair should not be expected to rule on allegations of improper conduct on social media. Also, comments made on social media are not protected by parliamentary privilege, consequently, Members should conduct themselves accordingly.

The Newfoundland and Labrador social media incidents are reminiscent of a Twitter-related incident which occurred in the Legislative Assembly of the Australian state of Victoria in November 2011. In that instance, a Member had made critical comments about the Speaker on Twitter, and those tweets were then brought to the Speaker’s attention. The Speaker demanded that the Member in question apologize, but wouldn’t specify what the apology was for because he didn’t want to read the offending comments into the official record. The Member consequently refused to apologize. The ensuing debate was quite spirited and raised some important points, including:

  • If the Speaker ruled on a comment made outside of the chamber, that would set a precedent;
  • There weren’t any standing orders or previous Speaker’s rulings what would support the Speaker’s position. Forcing members to apologize every time they offended another Member on social media would set a dangerous precedent;
  • The Speaker couldn’t seek an apology since the comment wasn’t made in the House. Had it been made in the House, he could ask the Member to withdraw the comment;
  • Demanding a Member apologize for something without specifying what the Member must apologize for would again set a precedent;
  • Without knowing the seriousness of the alleged insult (since the Speaker wouldn’t explain), how could appropriate sanctions against the Member be applied?

The matter ended up referred to the Legislative Assembly’s Standing Orders committee, which released an interesting report in December 2012 on the use of social media in the Legislative Assembly and reflections on the Speaker, which you can read here.

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BC 2013 Political Party Platform Comparisons

Many people are now looking for a site comparing the platforms of the political parties contesting the upcoming British Columbia election to be held on 14 May 2013.

This blog cannot engage in a discussion of the policies of political parties, either at the provincial or federal level. However, as it has done in the past, in the case of both federal and other provincial and territorial elections, it can refer you to other sites that can do that. The list will be updated as needed.

BC political party platform comparisons:

Other useful election-related links:

Elections BC

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On by-elections

A very interesting difference exists between Canada and the United Kingdom when it comes to the matter of calling by-elections.

A by-election occurs when a seat in the House becomes vacant furing the course of a parliament because the MP has resigned, passed away, or the incumbent becomes ineligible to continue in office. When this happens, an election is called in that constituency only, to fill the seat. It is possible to hold more than one by-elections on the same day if there are several vacancies to fill.

By-election procedure to fill a vacancy in the Canadian House of Commons

Under the Parliament of Canada Act, when a seat in the House is vacant, the Speaker of the House of Commons informs the Chief Electoral Officer by means of a Speaker’s warrant. If the Speaker is absent, or if it is the Speaker’s seat that is vacant, two members of the House of Commons may address the warrant to the Chief Electoral Officer.

After receiving the warrant, section 57 of the Canada Elections Act authorizes the Governor in Council to fix the date on which the Chief Electoral Officer is to issue the writ. The date of issuance must fall between the 11th and 180th days after the Chief Electoral Officer receives the warrant from the Speaker (or the two members of the House). The Governor in Council also fixes the date for election day, which cannot be earlier than 36 days after the Chief Electoral Officer issues the writ. (source: Elections Canada)

The “Governor in Council” referred to above is the Governor General, acting on the advice of the federal cabinet. In other words, it is actually the Cabinet (and in reality, the Prime Minister) which decides the date for the issuance of the writ. The earliest date possible for a by-election is 11 days after the Chief Electoral Officer receives the warrant from the Speaker. The latest date possible is 180 days – in other words, six months – after the warrant is received. The actual number of days the seat might remain vacant can exceed that, however, since the official countdown begins only after the Chief Electoral Officer receives the Speaker’s warrant announcing the vacancy, and not when the seat is actually vacated by the MP. As well, the date for the by-election cannot be earlier than 36 days after the CEO issues the writ. The Parliament of Canada Act (section 28) states that when a vacancy occurs:

“the Speaker of the House shall, without delay, (…) address a warrant of the Speaker to the Chief Electoral Officer for the issue of a writ for the election of a member to fill the vacancy.”

And going by the chart below, the Speaker’s warrants are issued very soon after the seat becomes vacant. The delay can occur at the next stage in the process – waiting for the Governor in Council – the Prime Minister – to choose an actual date for the by-election to be held. Sometimes, the PM won’t delay to announce the date. In other cases, they may put off the decision as long as they possibly can.

By-election procedure to fill a vacancy in the UK House of Commons

Traditionally the Chief Whip of the political party whose MP held the vacant seat will begin the procedure for a by-election. This is known as ‘moving the Writ’ and takes the form of a motion in the House of Commons. This isn’t always how things proceed, however. For example, in the case of the 2010 by-election in Oldham East and Saddleworth, a seat which Labour had won in the 2010 election, it was the Liberal Democrats who moved the writ. The Labour candidate had been stripped of his seat by the courts which declared his victory void because he had knowingly made false statements attacking his Liberal Democrat opponent’s personal character during the 2010 general election.

A new Writ is moved within three months of the vacancy occurring. There have been a few instances of seats remaining vacant longer than six months before a by-election was called. Seats have also been left vacant towards the end of a Parliament to be filled at the general election. If there are several vacant seats then a number of by-elections can take place on the same day. (source: UK Parliament website)

Because the timing of a by-election is decided by the party which held the seat when the vacancy occurs, by-elections in the UK tend to occur quite quickly since the party is anxious to see if it can hold the seat.

The following charts look at by-elections called in the current parliaments in both Canada and the UK.

By-elections Canada, current parliament (since May 2011)

 

Constituency Date of Vacancy Date of Notice of Vacancy Date of Writ of By-election Date of By-election # of days seat vacant
Labrador 14 Mar 2013 19 Mar 2013 7 Apr 2013 13 May 2013 60
Victoria 31 Aug 2012 6 Sep 2012 21 Oct 2012 26 Nov 2012 87
Durham 31 Jul 2012 1 Aug 2012 21 Oct 2012 26 Nov 2012 118
Calgary-Centre 30 May 2012 12 Jun 2012 21 Oct 2012 26 Nov 2012 180
Toronto-Danforth 22 Aug 2011 30 Aug 2011 6 Feb 2012 19 Mar 2012 210
Average # of days seat vacant 131

UK By-elections, current parliament (since May 2010)

 

Constituency Date of Vacancy Date of Writ Date of By-election # of days seat vacant
South Shields 12 Apr 2013 15 Apr 2013 2 May 2013 20
Mid-Ulster 2 Jan 2013 11 Feb 2013 7 Mar 2013 64
Eastleigh 5 Feb 2013 7 Feb 2013 28 Feb 2013 23
Croydon-North 29 Sep 2012 8 Nov 2012 29 Nov 2012 61
Middlesborough 13 Oct 2012 8 Nov 2012 29 Nov 2012 47
Rotherham 5 Nov 2012 8 Nov 2012 29 Nov 2012 24
Cardiff South and Penarth 22 Oct 2012 23 Oct 2012 15 Nov 2012 24
Corby 29 Aug 2012 23 Oct 2012 15 Nov 2012 78
Manchester Central 22 Oct 2012 23 Oct 2012 15 Nov 2012 23
Bradford West 2 Mar 2012 6 Mar 2012 29 Mar 2012 27
Feltham and Heston 10 Nov 2011 25 Nov 2011 15 Dec 2011 35
Inverclyde 9 May 2011 8 Jun 2011 30 Jun 2011 52
Belfast West 26 Jan 2011 17 May 2011 9 Jun 2011 134
Leicester South 1 Apr 2011 6 Apr 2011 5 May 2011 34
Barnsley Central 8 Feb 2011 9 Feb 2011 3 Mar 2011 23
Oldham East and Saddleworth 5 Nov 2010 16 Dec 2011 13 Jan 2011 69
Average # of days seat vacant 46

If you’d like to see how the moving of a Writ plays out, you can watch the procedure for the by-election in Eastleigh from 7 February 2013. It doesn’t take very long – about a minute (it ends at the 9:35 mark).

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The preferential ballot favours the party with the most first preference votes

I have written several posts looking at the growing popularity of the preferential ballot/the alternative vote (AV) here in Canada – see this recent one, for example. I even attempted a redo of the 2011 Canadian federal election using the preferential ballot rather than our current FPTP. As I explained in that post, and in others, the big problem in attempting to forecast how the election would have played out using AV was the absence of data concerning voters’ preferences. Some polling firms would (and still do) regularly ask people which party was their second choice, but no one ever looked at voters’ potential 3rd, 4th, etc. choices.

However, a new poll by Abacus Data has done just that. According to Eric Grenier, in this article in the Globe and Mail, the poll asked respondents to rank seven parties from 1 to 7 (in other words, it used full preferential rather than optional preferential). I cannot find this data on the Abacus website. Mr. Grenier examined the numbers and posits that using a preferential ballot “would limit the ability of the Conservatives to win elections”:

With a preferential ballot, however, the Conservatives would come out further ahead. They would lead in 147 ridings on the first ballot (after distributing the marginal support for the smaller parties), compared to only 108 for the New Democrats, 76 for the Liberals, four for the Bloc Québécois, and three for the Greens (primarily due to an anomalous result in the poll in Atlantic Canada).

The Conservatives would have majority support in 60 ridings and win those automatically, while the NDP would win 23 seats on the first ballot and the Liberals 11. But that Tory advantage would disappear once the instant run-off was conducted.

The Conservatives would lose their first ballot lead in 30 ridings, and be reduced to only 117. The New Democrats would move ahead in 18 more seats and take 126, while the Liberals would win 17 more ridings and increase their total to 93. The Greens would hold on to two of the three seats in which they led, while the Bloc Québécois would lose all four.

I am not entirely certain how he comes to that conclusion. The last paragraph quoted above is particularly confusing to me.

Despite Mr. Grenier’s assertions at the outset of the article that the preferential ballot “is used in many jurisdictions around the world”, the only really comparable example available to us is Australia. Full preferential (where voters have to rank every single candidate on their ballot for the vote to count) is used at the federal level to elect the House of Representatives, and in some states, while a couple of states use optional preferential, where voters can choose to rank as many or as few candidates as they want. Indeed, many opt to rank only one candidate and optional preferential becomes a de facto FPTP ballot. This is what happened when AV was used in some provinces here in Canada in the past.

What Mr. Grenier seems to overlook is that the preferential ballot, in particular optional preferential, always favours the party which receives the most first preference votes – at least going by Australia’s long history with this form of voting. Grenier rightly notes that the Conservatives “would have majority support in 60 ridings and win those automatically”. However, things are a bit more complicated after that. Going by Australia’s experience, Conservative candidates would not, as Grenier posits, “lose their first ballot lead in 30 ridings” based on second preferences. It all depends on how close those Conservative candidates are to the 50%+1 needed to win the seat under AV. The closer they are to that mark, the fewer votes transfers they require. Consequently, a Conservative candidate with 45% of the vote on the first ballot count, would most likely still win the seat because they need far fewer votes to boost them over the 50% mark. Even if they were further from the 50% target, say at 40%, but the 2nd place candidate was well behind, say at 30%, the Conservative would still most likely win. Only in instances where two candidates were quite literally neck and neck on the first ballot count would the outcome be up in the air.

Readers interested in preferential voting should regularly read Antony Green’s Election Blog. Green is an Australian elections expert who blogs about both federal and state elections in that country, which, I reiterate, is really the only jurisdction at all comparable to Canada which uses the preferential ballot. As Green explains in this post:

At the 2010 Federal election, 64 of the 150 seats were won by a candidate with a majority on first preferences, and a further 75 won by the highest polling candidate at the start of the count after the further distribution of preferences. Optional preferential voting would have had little impact on these 139 contests.

However, in the 11 contests where the candidate leading on first preferences did not win, optional preferential voting could have changed the result.

(…)

The lesson here is that optional preferential voting always advantages the party with the highest first preference vote.

In other words, in the 2010 federal election in Australia, a majority of seats (139 out of 150) were won by the candidate who was ahead after the first count. Sixty-four were won by a majority on the first ballot, and 75 were won on subsequent ballots – by the candidate who’d been in first place on the first count. That is using full preferential. Only in 11 instances did the candidate who’d been leading on the first ballot fail to actually win the seat. Had optional preferential been used instead, in only 3 cases would the candidate in the lead after the first ballot have failed to win.

It is good that a polling firm here in Canada has finally started to explore voters’ preferences beyond their 1st and 2nd choices, but I don’t think Mr. Grenier fully understands how AV tends to play out – at least based on what happens in Australia.

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The real problem is MP irrelevancy

Recently, Canada’s federal Official Opposition proposed measures for improving decorum in the House of Commons. These measures would require changes to the Standing Orders in order to increase the Speaker’s authority to discipline unruly MPs:

who use harassment, threats, personal attacks, or extreme misrepresentation of facts or position in the House, particularly regarding Statements by Members and Oral Questions, including:

i.  Revoking questions during Oral Questions from parties whose Members have been disruptive
ii. Issuing a warning to Members for a first offense
iii. Suspending Members from the service of the House for one sitting day for a second offense; five days for a third offense; and twenty days for a fourth offense
iv. Suspending Members’ sessional allowance for the duration of their suspension from the service of the House

Reaction has been varied. Sun Media’s David Akin pointed out that new rules aren’t required – if MPs want to stop this sort of behaviour, they can simply stop it. He also suggests that if the rules governing broadcasting of House proceedings were relaxed to allow reaction shots, that too might lead MPs to think twice about behaving boorishly:

The rules require that whenever the Speaker stands, the cameras may only show him. When he is not standing, the cameras may only show the MP who is speaking.

If TV networks – Sun News Network, CPAC, CTV, CBC, etc. – were able to control the cameras, we would certainly zoom in on sleeping MPs, on MPs giving others the finger, and so on.

Knowing that their hijinks would be beamed into the nation’s living rooms would surely be the best corrective.

I am not convinced that reaction shots would change much. The cameras in UK House of Commons do not stay focused on the Member who has the floor, and this does not stop other MPs from gesturing, making faces at, or heckling their counterparts on the opposite side. Akin is closer to the mark when he ends his column with:

But more unworkable and impossible-to-enforce rules?

Newsflash: They won’t work.

The problem isn’t really not enough rules, but that over the years (decades) the rules have been changed in ways that increasingly weaken the opposition and empower the government side – essentially rendering backbenchers – and the legislature – largely irrelevant. And I refer not only to the Standing Orders of the House of Commons, but also Canada’s Elections Act, as Aaron Wherry of Macleans explains in this post. The real problem in the Canadian House of Commons is that backbenchers are not free to ask questions of interest to them, they are given scripted questions by their party Whips. Ditto for most of the highly partisan Members’ Statements – I am certain most MPs would prefer to use their Member’s Statement as intended – to speak of something of interest to them and their constituents. Instead, they are given prepared, highly partisan statements by their party leadership.

What would be needed, more than new penalties the Speaker could impose on disruptive Members, would be rule changes to strengthen the Opposition, and to ease the control party leaders have over their MPs. A lot, maybe most, of the heckling and boorishness occurs because MPs other than those on the front bench are frustrated.

While the clip from the UK’s Prime Minister’s Questions in the above link might not show it, overall, the UK House of Commons is far more respectful and decorous than its Canadian counterpart. And the  main reason for that, I believe, is because backbenchers in the UK have far more freedom than do their Canadian counterparts. Part of that is due to sheer numbers – there are 650 MPs in the UK House of Commons – the Conservative party alone has almost as many MPs as does the entire Canadian House of Commons – and so it is simply impossible for the whips to exert the same level of control over backbenchers that Canadian party whips do. As well, MPs have more control over their party leader. For example, in the UK Conservative Party, a vote of confidence in the party leader can be triggered by 15% of the party’s MPs. This means that if 46 sitting Conservative MPs write letters indicating they are unhappy with Prime Minister David Cameron as their party leader, a confidence vote is held. If Cameron were to lose that vote, he would have to resign as party leader. He would not be permitted to run again for the post of party leader either. The Liberal Democrats require that a majority of sitting MPs pass a motion of no confidence in the leader to trigger a leadership contest, but the defeated leader is allowed to stand again. Labour has no such non-confidence provisions.

The UK House of Commons has also embarked on a series of reforms in recent years which have served to strengthen the House vis à vis the executive. I have blogged extensively about many of these (see, for example, my “Fixing Ottawa” series, first post here). Governing parties in the UK do not expect that bills that they put forward will go through un-amended – or that they will even pass, which is not the case here in Canada. Because the opposition parties in the UK know that they will most likely be able to amend any government bill, there is less need to resort to tactics to try to stymie Government business in the House.

I know some will argue that if a party “wins” an election, then it has a mandate to govern and to get its legislation through the House. This argument would have more weight if our electoral system actually reflected how people voted. I don’t know how anyone can argue that a party elected to majority government with less than 40% of the popular vote (and often dismal voter turnout) has a real “mandate” to push through any piece of legislation virtually unopposed. And no piece of legislation is ever perfect – amendments should be welcomed, not defeated at every turn.

The problems in the Canadian House of Commons are mostly due to the excessive control parties have over their Members, and to years of changes to the Standing Orders which have only served to strengthen the Executive at the expense of the legislature. Fining an MP for being disruptive during Question Period won’t change anything. The problems go much deeper than that.

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Electoral reform – not hot with Canadians but still worth pursuing

Canada’s federal Liberal Party is currently in the midst of a leadership race. During a debate held on 19 January 2012, the issue of electoral reform was raised a few times. The party has adopted an official position endorsing preferential voting (or the Alternative Vote), and most of the candidates stated that they backed that option.

On Twitter, respected Canadian pollster Nik Nanos tweeted:

#LPCldr electoral reform – not likely hot with Canadians – Cdns want to hear about jobs and healthcare.

This comment reinforced two points for me.

The first is my strong opposition to trying to implement electoral reform via a referendum. Mr. Nanos is entirely correct – the majority of Canadians don’t care about electoral reform. Even among political geeks, electoral reform tends to be a bit of a fringe issue. This is one (certainly not the only) reason why a referendum on electoral reform is such a bad idea if you seriously want said reform to pass. Most people will not follow the debate, and so won’t really know what they’re being asked to vote on. And even those who will be more aware will be asked to choose between a system they know well, even if they’re not entirely happy with it, and one they’ve most likely never experienced. I like to use this analogy:

Electoral Reformer: What’s your favourite soft drink?
Average voter: 7-Up.
Electoral Reformer: 7-Up, yes, that’s pretty good, but you know what? I’ve got this drink that is way better than 7-Up. Do you want to have that instead?
Average Voter: Can I try it first before deciding?
Electoral Reformer: No, you just have to trust me. It’s way better than 7-Up. And if you vote for this new one, we’ll get rid of 7-Up forever. Trust me – it’s better.

How do you expect someone to vote when asked to choose between something they know and something totally new and foreign to them? Of course most people will stick with what they know. Three provinces in Canada have held referendums on electoral reform (one province has held two) and the reform was defeated each time. The Canadian media seems to be largely opposed to electoral reform, and the press was dominated by columns and opinion pieces warning of the chaos that would ensue if we dropped FPTP.

The second thing is, while electoral reform is not a priority issue for most Canadians, that doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be pursued. Just because something doesn’t crack the average voter’s Top 10 List of Important Things doesn’t mean it’s not important or necessary. Improving our democracy shouldn’t be contingent on whether or not it’s a popular issue. It should be pursued because it is necessary and the right thing to do.

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Preferential voting isn’t the solution some think it might be

There have been a growing number of columns and articles in various Canadian media over the past few months bemoaning the state of our parliamentary democracy and proposing various changes which might improve the situation. More often than not, electoral reform is mentioned – either in the column itself, or by a reader commenting on the piece.

There does seem to be a growing recognition or acceptance that the First-Past-the-Post voting system doesn’t quite work the way people would like. I won’t say it doesn’t work the way it should because it works exactly as it should. It simply isn’t the ideal system for multi-party democracies.

Inevitably, in these discussions, someone proposes some form of proportional representation, usually Mixed-Member-Proportional, where most MPs would be elected the usual way, but then each party’s numbers would be topped up with list MPs to more closely reflect the party’s actual percentage of the vote. And also inevitably, many other people chime in denouncing any form of PR because it leads to coalition government which is of course completely unstable – just look at (insert name of favourite basketcase country here).

The voting system change that seems to garner (or be garnering) the most support is the very one the UK rejected in the 2011 referendum – the Alternative Vote (AV), or preferential voting. As I’ve explained in the very, very many posts I wrote during the lead-up to that referendum, under AV, voters rank the candidates in order of preference. To be elected, a candidate has to get over 50% of the votes cast. If no candidate tops 50% after the first count, then the candidate with the lowest vote total is dropped from the ballot and the votes for that candidate are redistributed based on the second preferences indicated by voters. This process continues until someone ends up with over 50%. See this post I wrote back in 2011 to explain to British readers how the vote would work.

AV isn’t used in a lot of places. Australia is the best example available of a western democracy which uses it. At the federal level, they use “full prefential voting” to elect the House of Representatives (a completely different system is used to elect Senators – see this handy guide to voting systems used in Australia). That simply means that voters have to rank every single candidate on the ballot. I believe they can leave one candidate unranked, and that will be counted as their last choice, but if they leave more than one candidate unranked, the ballot is rejected. At the State level, some states also use full preferential to elect their Legislative Assemblies, while others use “optional preferential”. Under this variant, voters can rank as many or as few candidates as they want – this was the model proposed in the UK. Under optional preferential, voters can treat their ballot as a FPTP ballot if they so desire – voting for one candidate and one candidate only.

The Alternative Vote appeals to many because it is fairly simple (not quite as simple as FPTP, but certainly far less complex than other voting systems out there), and it would address the issue of MPs being elected with minority support. As I’ve also repeatedly blogged, the majority of MPs in Canada win their seat with less than 50% of the vote cast in their riding – sometimes a lot less. AV would put an end to that, in theory, at least.

It is really important to understand that this is the only advantage or benefit AV has over FPTP. In many ways, it can lead to even more distorted results than FPTP currently does, e.g. a single party winning even more seats than it might have under FPTP. It is not at all proportional, so it won’t put an end to majority governments formed by a party with much less than majority support, meaning many voters will continue to feel as if their votes don’t count.

Each form of AV also presents other problems. Full preferential, where a voter would have to rank every single candidate on the ballot paper, would force many – probably most voters -  into making what can only be described as artificial choices. Some voters simply don’t have a second choice – they vote for one party and one party only, and would have no desire to even attempt to rank any other candidates. Other voters might have an easier time ranking the two or three major parties on the ballot, but here’s the big problem. Most ballot papers in Canada have several candidates listed, often as many as 10 or so. Apart from the candidates representing the three or four major parties in the country, there are also a large number of candidates representing fringe parties most people have never heard of, as well as candidates running as independents. Leaving aside the one-party-only people, for everyone else, it would be a very trying experience, if not even a complete joke, to try to rank the fringe and independent candidates. And never mind trying to rank candidates you’ve never heard of, what about having to rank candidates you dislike equally? Think about this for a minute, about how many candidates were actually listed on your ballot the last time you voted. Now imagine having to rank every single one of those individuals in order of preference in order for your ballot to count.

So go with optional preferential – problem solved. Indeed. But let’s remember that the only advantage AV has over FPTP is that it is supposed to ensure that the MP elected is elected with over 50% support in that riding. While most think that means “50% of the votes cast”, if you’re using optional preferential, what you end up with is someone elected with 50% of the votes still in play, which may be a very different number from the total number of votes cast. Under optional preferential, voters can choose to cast their vote for one candidate only, and indeed, many do just that. This is a phenomena known as “plumping”. Optional preferential has been used in Canada in the past, in three different provinces, and I have a post looking at what happened in those provinces during the time they used optional preferential. As you can see, the plumping rate was quite high – sometimes over 60%. That means only a minority of people were actually ranking more than one candidate. I am willing to guess that at best, most voters who do bother to rank will rank only two or three candidates. If the majority of ballots can’t be transferred after the first count, the one advantage AV has over FPTP pretty much disappears.

As well, optional preferential can end up costing parties seats because of voters treating their ballot as a FPTP ballot. See this post by Australian elections expert Antony Green on the recent election in Queensland. There is also evidence that optional preferential disadvantages smaller parties (and independents) – just as FPTP does. As Green points out in this post, wherein he re-does the 2010 Australian federal election using optional preferential rather than full preferential, “optional preferential voting always advantages the party with the highest first preference vote.”

It may interest some proponents of AV to know that the State of Queensland is currently conducting an inquiry into its electoral law, and an important focus of that is whether optional preferential should be retained (discussion paper PDF here). From page 37 of that discussion paper (emphasis added):

A key issue with OPV is that it has the potential to become a de facto ‘first past the post’ system. Preferences can be quickly exhausted where a large number of voters choose to vote ‘1’ only. This is particularly problematic where a large number of candidates are contesting a seat. In such a circumstance, it would be possible for a candidate to be elected with only a small proportion of the vote, which could leave the majority of the population unrepresented.

As part of its analysis of a survey of ballot papers from the 2009 state election, the ECQ found that approximately 63.03% of ballot papers were marked ‘1’ only. At the 2006 election, 62.15% of surveyed ballot papers fell into this category. Up until the 2001 election, the number of ballot papers marked ‘1’ only had been significantly lower (20.7% in the 1995 election).

Meanwhile, others in Australia are calling for a move towards proper proportional representation.

While I agree with most that AV/preferential voting might be the easiest electoral reform to implement here in Canada because it isn’t that different from FPTP, there are some very important issues associated with it that need to be carefully considered. It won’t be the panacea many seem to think it might be.

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Election Watch 2013

There will be some noteworthy elections coming up in 2013.

AUSTRALIA

Unlike most parliaments in the UK and Canada, which normally last 4 to 5 years, the Australian House of Representatives sits for a three-year term.The next election will be held on 14 September 2013. The 2010 election resulted in a hung parliament, with both Labor the the Coalition tied with 72 seats each. Labor ended up forming a minority government, with the support of Green and Independent MPs.

Recent polls (12 December 2012) have Labor trailing the Liberal-National Coalition in terms of overall popular support, 36% to 54%, and in terms of first preference votes among committed voters, the Coalition leads there as well, 46% to 32% for Labor. However, when asked who would make the better PM, Liberal Party leader Toby Abbott trails incumbent PM Julia Gillard 34% to 43%.

For all things pertaining to elections in Australia, both at the federal and state level, I strongly recommend following Antony Green’s blog. For a general overview, you might find this article interesting.

CANADA

There won’t be another federal election until October 2015, but there are a few provinces which may be heading to the polls this year (one definitely will be).

British Columbia

British Columbia will be electing a new parliament in May of this year. The incumbent Liberals are not doing well at the polls, and Premier Christy Clarke’s decision not to hold a fall sitting probably won’t help matters.

Ontario and Quebec

Ontario’s last election was in October 2011 while Quebec’s was in September 2012 but both resulted in hung parliaments. Ontario ended up with a minority Liberal government, but Premier Dalton McGuinty unexpectedly prorogued the Legislature in October and simultaneously announced his resignation as party leader. The Liberals chose a new leader on 26 January 2013. The House will return on 19 February 2013. While the new leader has stated she is determined to make the minority parliament work, one can never rule out an election.

Quebec ended up with a minority Parti québécois government. The government’s budget passed by one vote in late November. Polls show a close three-way race between the PQ, Liberals and Coaliation Avenir Quebec. Minority parliaments rarely last much more than a year, so the situation in Quebec bears watching.

Nova Scotia

Nova Scotia’s last election was in 2009. It is one of the few provinces which does not have fixed election dates, but since the government is coming into its fourth year in office, an election is likely in 2013. An election must occur by June 2014.

Nunavut

The last election in Nunavut occurred in October 2008, and so the current parliament is entering its 5th year. Nunavut does not have fixed election dates, so an election will be held some time this year, no later than October 2013.

UNITED KINGDOM

UK local elections

The 2013 United Kingdom local elections are due to take place on Thursday 2 May 2013. Elections will be held in 35 English councils, including all 27 non-metropolitan county councils, the 5 unitary authorities covering ceremonial counties, and 3 other unitary authorities, and to a single Welsh unitary authority. What will be interesting to watch for is how the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) performs. The party has surged in recent polls, often polling ahead of the Liberal Democrats, and recently finished 2nd in two by-elections for parliamentary seats. In the 2011 local elections, UKIP took control of Ramsey town council, and maintained its seven councillors across England, and one in Northern Ireland.

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The length of two swords

Recently, the brilliant UK actor Philip Glenister (Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, State of Play, Mad Dogs, Hidden, etc.) was interviewed on the Andrew Marr show in connection with his latest role, that of Chief Government Whip in the play “This House“, which is set in 1974, when Labour had a shaky minority government.The discussion turned to the innately adversarial nature of politics in the UK House of Commons, with Marr noting that the play was in some ways an attack on the British parliamentary tradition, that of two sides against each other, and that underneath, there was a dream of a better way of doing things, a call for politics to be more consensual. Glenister noted that UK was “one of the few democracies, just by the layout of our parliament… it’s in a rectangular shape as opposed to in the round. It’s only one of two in the world.”

If Glenister is correct, and there are only two democracies in the world with rectangular Chambers which force government and opposition to face off against each other on opposing sides, then the Canada is the other one. The Canadian House of Commons, the Senate and most of the Canadian provincial and territorial legislatures are also rectangular, the exceptions being the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba, the Legislative Assembly of Nunavut and the Legislative Assembly of the Northwest Territories.

What is being implied here is that layout of the Chamber, government on one side, opposition parties on the other, makes our politics more adversarial because it imposes an “Us vs Them” feel from the outset. This is the same argument put forward by architects in this very interesting article, “The Shape of Debate to Come“.

However, it is debatable to what extent the shape of the chamber might influence how adversarial or consensual debate will be. As Professor White notes in the above article, countries which end up with a more consensual approach to politics also tend to use some form of proportional representation rather than First-Past-the-Post:

But, in an email, he said there was “pretty much zero” chance of more co-operative behaviour in Canadian legislatures. And he put the differences in approach in legislatures such as Wales and Scotland more down to mixed electoral systems, not just first-past-the-post.

He said: ”Unquestionably the opposing rows of benches in standard Westminster parliaments reinforces the adversarial nature of the place; for my students I liken it to opposing armies or sports teams squaring off. At the same time, I see seating arrangements as very much secondary to underlying political culture and prevailing political norms.

“The Manitoba [legislature], which is semi-circular, has exceedingly nasty, adversarial partisan politics, and the US Congress these days is hardly a paragon of non-partisanship.”

Because PR makes it very difficult for any one party to form a majority government on its own, this means that coalition government tends to be the norm in countries which use some form of PR, and that reality alone will require parties to work harder to find some sort of consensus. As Prof. White points out, despite sitting in the round, politics in both Manitoba and the US Congress are very partisan and adversarial, and both jurisdictions use FPTP. The Australian House of Representatives is horseshoe-shaped, and politics Down Under is every bit as partisan as it is up here, particularly in the current minority parliament. Australia uses the Alternative Vote to elect its MPs, a voting system which requires voters to rank the candidates on the ballot in order of preference, and to win the seat, a candidate must gain over 50% of the vote, either outright, or through transferred preferences. AV, like FPTP, is not at all proportional, which may explain why political debate in the House of Representatives is partisan and adversarial.

This summer, it was reported that the UK Parliament could be closed for five years for extensive refurbishment, with MPs and Lords “convened in a replica chamber or a conference centre for the duration of the repair work, which could start in 2015.” This immediately alarmed some. The Spectator’s Fraser Nelson raised the threat of some advocating that a new, refurbished chamber would be “a chance to move the MPs to a lifeless, European style semi-circular chamber that supposedly encourages them to co-operate.” Fraser comments on how deathly boring debate is in the Scottish Parliament, which is circular. He does not mention that Scottish Members of Parliament (MSPs) are elected using Mixed-Member Proportional representation (MMP).

But is the electoral system alone enough to determine how consensual or adversarial politics will be in a given jurisdiction? Thomas Carl Lundberg, in his paper “Politics is Still an Adversarial Business: Minority Government and Mixed-Member Proportional Representation in Scotland and New Zealand“, concluded that while both nations introduced MMP in part to bring about a “new politics”, in the end, “the impact of institutional engineering upon the behaviour of politicians has been limited.” New Zealand adopted MMP in 1996, Scotland in 1999. New Zealand has seen the formation of mostly minority governments under MMP (albeit minority coalition government rather than single-party minority government) supported by other smaller parties through confidence and supply agreements, while Scotland has experienced two terms of majority coalition government, one term of single-party  minority government, and most recently, to the surprise of most, a single-party majority government.

The reasons why MMP has had limited success in curbing adversarial politics in Scotland and New Zealand, according to Lundberg are varied. Long before New Zealand adopted MMP, it had a very strong two-party system (Labour on the left and the National Party on the right) and a long history of single-party majority government. With the introduction of MMP in 1996, that didn’t really change. Politics remained quite adversarial between Labour and the National Party, but both of the main parties learned to work with the much smaller parties in order to form governments.

Scotland on the surface may appear more consensual, but there are other tensions at work. Scotland has a true multiparty system, that is one in which “there are three to five relevant parties which are not separated (polarised) by a large or intense ideological distance” (which isn’t the case in New Zealand). Rather, Scotland’s party system “is characterised by two significant cleavages” – class divisions and “the process of building the UK (with England at the centre dominating the periphery composed of Scotland, Wales and Ireland) in the latter.” The two largest parties in Scotland are Labour and the Scottish National Party – both are centre-left, and they have a long, adversarial relationship dating back before devolution, or to quote the former leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats: “there is a level of visceral hatred between the Nationalists and Labour to this day. So, it just transferred from London to Edinburgh … we just so massively underestimated how important it is for people to have good, personal relationships across all parties.”

Simply put, how adversarial or consensual politics might be in a given democracy will depend on many factors. While the shape of the debating chamber and the voting system used to elect members undoubtedly play a part, changing one or both will not necessarily bring about more polite politics.

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