Canada’s Democratic Deficit

Low voter turnout has plagued Canada’s elections for decades, and people are increasingly apathetic towards the democratic process. In this episode we host a discussion to ask whether Canada has a democratic deficit. Are democratic institutions accurately representing the “will of the people” and are they providing goods & services that people value and want? This goes beyond the trend of voter turnout, to consider a wide range of democratic institutions, such as: Party financing, lobbying, the welfare state, the electoral system, and much more!

In our first segment, Dr. Bryan Evans from Toronto Metropolitan University will join us to discuss the role of democratic institutions in understanding chronic low voter turnout. He will touch on the role these institutions play in determining social outcomes, the influence of corporate lobbying and its effects on public interest advocacy, the working class, structural causes/influences, and the legitimacy of democracy & democratic institutions in public perception, among others.

Our second guest, Mr. Réal Lavergne, is past president of Fair Vote Canada, a national citizens’ campaign for proportional representation (PR). Our discussion will focus on the differences between First Past the Post and Proportional Representation, whether and how proportional representation changes democratic outcomes, and why Canada has never seen meaningful electoral reform, despite 100 years of promises. Thanks for tuning in and we hope you enjoy the show!

Produced by Maria Cvetkova and Connor Fraser

Connor Fraser: Good morning, and welcome to Beyond the Headlines on CIUT 89.5 FM. I'm your host, Connor Fraser.

Maria Cvetkova: And I'm your host, Maria Cvetkova.

Connor Fraser: Low voter turnout has plagued Canada's elections for decades, and people are increasingly apathetic towards the democratic process. In this episode, we host a discussion to ask whether Canada has a democratic deficit. Are democratic institutions accurately representing the will of the people? Are they providing goods and services that people value and want? This goes beyond the trend of voter turnout to consider a wide range of democratic institutions such as party financing, lobbying, the welfare state, the electoral system, and much more.

Maria Cvetkova: In our first segment, Dr. Brian Evans from Toronto Metropolitan University is going to join us to discuss the role of democratic institutions in understanding chronic low voter turnout. He'll touch on the roles that these institutions play in determining social outcomes, the welfare state, the influence of corporate lobbying and its effects on public interest advocacy, the working class, and the legitimacy of democracy or democratic institutions and public perception, among others.

Connor Fraser: Our second guest, Mr. Réal Lavergne, will join us around 11:30 a.m. Réal is past president of Fair Vote Canada, a national citizens' campaign for proportional representation, and our discussion will focus on the differences between first-past-the-post and proportional representation, whether and how proportional representation changes democratic outcomes, and why Canada has never seen meaningful electoral reform despite 100 years of promises. Thanks for tuning in and enjoy the show.

Maria Cvetkova: Our first guest, Dr. Brian Evans, is a professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at TMU. Prior to his appointment to a faculty position, he was employed as a policy advisor and policy branch director in the Ontario government across a variety of organizations. Currently, his research interests are concerned with corporate lobbying, public interest advocacy, and democratization of the state. Today we're sitting down with Brian to talk about democratic institutions and whether or not we can explain disillusionment and apathy through these lens.

Hello, Brian. Thanks so much for coming on to the show. We really appreciate it.

Bryan Evans: Thank you very much for inviting me.

Maria Cvetkova: All right. I'm just going to start you off with an easy one. Why is voter turnout declining in Canada?

Bryan Evans: Okay. It's a big question and not unique to Canada. It's a general phenomenon throughout all of the liberal democratic countries to one degree or another. But to begin to answer your question, we have to look in the rearview mirror and have a bit of a historical backdrop to how did we get here? If you go back to the Great Depression of the 1930s, World War II, we came out of that period in Canada, the United States, Western Europe, Australia, etc., with a lot of confidence, a lot of confidence in what government could do.

In many cases, they had guided their country through the Great Depression, the New Deal in particular in the United States. Then World War II demonstrated in Canada that government could actually competently lead the country through war and to victory together with allies, naturally.

Then at the end of that period, a broad narrative was we are never going back to the Depression, we are tired of insecurity, and we've learned that government can provide a floor and a degree of security which had hitherto fore not been known. That period carried on for a good 30, 35 years. If you think about the development of the welfare state everywhere, Canada was somewhat laggard in coming to that. But incrementally after 1945 and really taking off in the 1960s, all kinds of programs that we take for granted practically today emerged. We think of Medicare, public education, post-secondary education, the whole slew of social services, and the role of the state in managing the economy, managing particular outcomes.

That gave people a big interest in what government did and who got into government and who did not get into government. As we all know, in the 1980s, well actually in the 1970s, but really in the 1980s, that whole paradigm began to unravel. We now call it the neoliberal era. I'm old enough to remember we didn't have that word. We knew things were changing, the paradigm was changing. We didn't have any idea to what or for how long.

But that was a period of the shrinking of the public sector, of privatization, and uneven, but ongoing austerity in the public sector. The shrinking of public budgets, the shrinking of public expenditures relative to need. Together with that came tremendous economic change, the growth of inequality, polarization socially and economically, which is never good for liberal democratic engagement. Not at all. It creates a whole variety of morbid symptoms if we can call it that.

Then how the operations of the government began to change, the centralization of power in the executive, the shrinking of the deliberative function of parliament, where did anything actually really get debated, or did people simply yell at each other? And all the key decisions being made by the PM or the premier, or whatever it may be.

And then the third element I put into that would be, and the second half of the show will touch upon this, the homogenization of political parties, where they are intensely partisan, and yet the ideological differences between them have probably never really been smaller. That's kind of the long version of, why do people not participate? Why do we have declining voter outcomes? Increasingly people don't see, or a large part of the population don't see a point to it.

Maria Cvetkova: It's interesting that you said, does anything even get debated, or do they just yell at each other? I think that touches on an important concept. To me it seems politics has kind of assumed a negative connotation in the public's eye. Democracy, however, sounds more positive. Do you think people want democracy over politics?

Bryan Evans: That's an interesting way of putting it, and maybe looking at it in a rather kind of superficial way, sure. But how do you have democracy without politics? It's impossible to separate the two, right? Democracy by definition is about politics, and politics is about working through all of our differences, whether they're big or tremendously huge, that you have in a very differentiated, uneven, unequal society like we have in Canada.

Connor Fraser: Brian, I want to jump in here with a question, and I'm going to circle to the end of the questions that we had for you. But you talked about inequality and how the legitimacy of democracy has somewhat eroded over time, and there's growing inequality and unwillingness of the state to address the structural causes.

Why in your opinion, have our democratic institutions been inadequate at addressing this inequality that you see as kind of at the heart of people's discontent with the democratic process right now?

Bryan Evans: It goes back to the historical backdrop I drew out a minute ago, where you look at that period beginning in the 1980s, the 1990s, now we call it the neoliberal era, which we're in today. You have a fundamental strengthening through that period, including the day that we're in today, over the 40-year period, where economic interests, in particular, have effectively captured the key strategic locations of the state, central banks, departments of finance, etc.

You have together with that, a diminishing of any kind of alternative perspective regarding economic policy, economic development. To make that a little bit concrete, let's talk about public ownership, or maybe I should say we don't talk about public ownership anymore. In the 1970s, we had a very lively debate in Ontario and Canada about the role of crown corporations in economic development, and what kind of a role that they should play, or if you're from an alternative point of view, not play. We had a debate in the country, a very public one, and it's gone.

We've gone through the financial crisis of 2008, where effectively many governments nationalized the financial sector, and beyond that quietly turned it all back over to private ownership. We've gone through a pandemic, which revealed all manner of inadequacy, right down to vaccine production nationally, to PPE not being available.

Again, what never really got raised in a serious manner would be to what degree could public ownership, in the Canadian case, crown corporations, fill that vacuum of vaccine research and development and production, of personal protective equipment, etc., which we badly needed and had difficulty acquiring.

Connor Fraser: That makes sense and I think it really gets back to the heart of what economics is all about, which is alternatives and options, opportunity costs, right? We had an interesting lecture by Timothy Snyder from Yale at the Munk School about two months ago, and his lecture was just all about this, alternatives, and people capturing the narrative, and basically saying there is no alternative to the present situation. But you say, it's really important to flesh out these alternatives, alternatives to private ownership of things that could be public assets, like CN Rail, Air Canada, Bell, which are all privatized.

Bryan Evans: That's exactly true. I mean, you look at telecom, telecoms should be a public utility, and why do I say should be? Look, we all need them. How do you function today without a computer, without internet, a cell phone, etc.? These are essential to daily life and yet we have turned it all over to the private sector, the for-profit private sector, often in the Canadian context, oligopoly, if not monopoly situations, and then we're left wondering how do we make that all work, again, in the context of profound inequality, economic inequality, where increasingly large parts of the population simply do not have access.

Maria Cvetkova: I'd like to bring it back to lobbying, actually, and I have my own opinions on this, but since your current research interests do center on corporate lobbying and public interest advocacy. How do we manage lobbying so that public trust in democracy is maintained? Is it able to be managed in that way at all?

Bryan Evans: Oh, definitely. Transparency would be the word. The registries that we have at the federal level, and for a number, not all, but a number of provinces, do not reveal enough information. There are all manner of ways in which to not even have that bit of information registered on the public lobby register. For example, if you're invited by a cabinet minister or a government to come in and have a chat about an issue, that never appears, right? That just doesn't appear.

Prior to being appointed to an academic position, I worked in government, the Ontario government and we met all kinds of people coming from different parts of industry or different economic sectors to talk about legislative regulatory reform one way or the other, depending on the government at the time, and none of that would ever be captured.

So, there's nothing inherently wrong with lobbying. It's always been there, will always be there in one fashion or another. But how it can be dealt with is much, much greater transparency and capturing all of the different situations in which one can meet with important government, whether they're political or bureaucratic officials who are in a position to make decisions, to shape outcomes. That would go a huge way forward.

I mean, I don't want to belabor it too much, but the Ford family $1,000 a ticket stag and go, if I'm getting that correct. Is that lobbying in a narrow definition? No. Did lobbying happen? Well, you have to think, unless one is horribly naive, a few discussions happened which had to do with government decision-making.

Connor Fraser: On this topic of lobbying, Brian, I'm curious to know your opinion about the recent decision of the lobbying commissioner, or their proposal to reduce the length of time from four years to two years before a high-level political adviser can lobby their former candidate. Is this decision in the public interest, or is it a step backwards?

Bryan Evans: Well, it all depends. There are other ways around that, too, right? The four-year prohibition, there are ways to get around that. It's not horribly difficult. Bringing it to two? It doesn't help because one key part of lobbying is the revolving door. By revolving door, I mean people come from government, go into the private sector in one way or another, and may come back into government at another point in another function. It's well documented in the academic literature studies of lobbying that it's primarily about who you know. It may not be that you have an incredibly expert knowledge on a particular file, and you might. But it's overwhelmingly driven by the ability to get a meeting, to have a call returned.

So by reducing that period of time, no matter how problematic that provision was and is to two years, it only kind of fuels this sort of revolving door, who-you-know networking, which is at the heart of professional lobbying.

Connor Fraser: Just to quickly circle back with a question, we were talking about Canada's lobbying system and how there seems to be a lack of transparency, but how do you see it comparing to other countries, like our peers and the OECD? Do any of them do it really well with respect to lobbying that we could take an example from?

Bryan Evans: Yeah, the Americans.

Connor Fraser: Really? That's interesting.

Bryan Evans: The lobbying industry in the United States is absolutely huge. It's huge because one, it's a huge budget, and an awful lot of it is connected to defense procurement and production, an awful lot of it. So rather different from Canada in whatever level you want to look at. But there's been, many, many decades of opportunity in the United States to regulate lobbying better than what we do. I don't know exactly, but it may be a function of the division of powers they have, which we do not have anything remotely like that.

But also just the fact that the scope of lobbying in that country is such that it caught the attention of lawmakers, who then developed the means in order to capture and make more transparent. Maybe not entirely transparent, but certainly more transparent than we have in Canada. Our federal lobbying registry is as good as it gets in Canada, and it's terribly inadequate. If that's the Canadian gold standard, then it's pretty bad.

Maria Cvetkova: It's interesting you brought up the American system, because I would love to talk about party financing, and I hope we can talk about it for just a few minutes. I'm not too familiar with the rules and regulations around party financing in the US. I think there aren't any? Is it a free-for-all? But here in Canada, for example, there was quite a period of time where the government was providing financing to political parties until Harper scrapped that in 2015, I think? Any thoughts on that?

Bryan Evans: Again, the Canadian context is very different from the American and you're right compared to Canada, the American situation is practically a free-for-all. All kinds of different ways, in terms of political action committees and that kind of thing, of bundling huge amounts of money, amounts of money that in Canada would make your jaw drop, right, compared to here. But you mentioned the Chrétien reforms, where every vote to a political party was worth an amount of money. I can't remember how much.

Maria Cvetkova: I think it was $2 a vote. Something like that.

Bryan Evans: $2 a vote and that made it very transparent, and actually very simple. You compare that to reforms that have been made in Ontario recently, which have increased the value of individual donations, I think up to $5,000. That means that a small number of people who contribute the maximum can end up in the aggregate, contributing a huge amount of money to one party. So a small number of people contributing a large amount of money. Whereas, the Chrétien era reforms of $2 a vote, well was pretty simple.

Maria Cvetkova: Yes, for example, any third or fourth party here in Canada is, in my opinion, a little bit disadvantaged because, A, they don't have as large of a member base as the two mainstream parties. But also because a lot of their member base is made up of people who aren't exactly wealthy in the sense of the term.

Bryan Evans: No. Again it'd be a great anthropology Ph.D. dissertation centered around voting and donations that one could do in terms of networking and how a small number of people can be given an amount of money to then, in turn, donate. Like every family member can be given an amount of money and then each family member can make a donation. So there are all kinds of ways to game that one, compared to $2 a vote, which is pretty simple. Two million votes, four million dollars, there you go, all paid for by the state and very transparent as opposed to having a thousand dollar-a-plate dinners and what have you.

Connor Fraser: Brian, when we talk about financing for political parties, can we talk about the role of government here? Is there a clear case for how this creates public value by providing a baseline support to political parties, as opposed to a free for all system? How would we justify or counter the argument that the conservatives made when they got rid of it?

Bryan Evans: Well, it comes down to what you want. Again, we began talking about politics and people who turn their nose up at politics, which if you're a living human being, you can't ignore it. You may not like it, but you can't get away from it. We're all shaped by it and affected by it one way or another. Here's the situation where if we have greater equity, maybe not equality, but equity between the financing of different political parties. The two large parties, again, and then a number of middle to small parties, NDP Green, Bloc in particular, who may not have the kind of social networks, corporate networks that allow them to acquire large amounts of money very quickly to fund the campaign.

If we think that there's a connection between election outcomes and financing, then we have to think, well, having huge disparities between the ability to finance a party, an election campaign will lead to unequal, maybe even unfair outcomes. It may not, there have been studies done which show that the correlation between money and outcomes is actually kind of weak. But on the other hand, if the notion is just let's have a degree of fairness, then you can make a compelling argument that there should be a different way of financing elections where each party is maybe not equal, but more or less able to operate on the same playing field, more or less.

I look to Germany where they have very interesting model where each party will get a block of funding based on their popular vote. That will include funding for a think tank. So each major political party, which is represented in the German parliament, they're provided a block of funding to have a think tank. I've attended one in Berlin, where they hold conferences, bring in people from all over on a particular topic. They publish a magazine, even having a publishing house, publishing books, and research reports, and that kind of thing.

It's a very deep form of political engagement at that level and then all of that helps to inform public opinion. Is it ideal? No, but nothing's ideal. But I think it provides something of a model that we could benefit from in Canada where, we all know, why don't we face it? Our political parties are pretty thin and to a large degree, they're not much more than marketing agencies.

Maria Cvetkova: That's a funny way of putting it. I actually want to shift gears for a second and talk for a few minutes about election cycles. Obviously, the Canadian case is different than the American. But in the American case, for example, well in Canada too, you have the four-year election cycle. But it seems as if as soon as a general election is over, you're automatically thinking in terms of midterms or in terms of the next election. And A, do you think that the four-year cycle causes somewhat of voter fatigue and people are getting tired of voting every four years? And do you think that somehow translates into the way administrations or governments are kind of operating day to day?

Bryan Evans: Oh, very much. I've been lucky or unlucky to have had a variegated career, which included working at the political end way back in time. I can assure you that even here, the morning after an election and you've won, you're immediately thinking or people around you're immediately thinking winning in four years. And we are hurt by that short-term thinking because many of the issues that we confront today and always have confronted require longer-term thinking.

There are moments historically when you're able to get beyond the two-year, four-year cycle, but they're rare. Even in my time in government, we did not think long-term. I worked in a policy function and it was not. I briefly worked on a project on the future of work and the need to change the labor market regulatory regime, which went nowhere because it's too far out and too many unknowns. So it's very transactional, reactive approach we have to politics, and therefore to the public policy function of politics, which comes right out of the political domain. It means that we're not served well collectively.

Today we just had the climate change report table, which they've been talking about that since 1992. Here we are and it's not because of the ICTP, but rather the governments have been unable, unwilling to move on that agenda in a really meaningful way. But you're totally correct. It's a real problem. What can be done about it? I'm not entirely sure.

Maria Cvetkova: Nobody really knows. Yes, like Connor said earlier, it's really just a trade-off between things like legitimacy and transparency. Also, on the other side, actually progressing policy in a long-term fashion instead of being stuck in this short-term mindset.

Bryan Evans: Yes, that’s very true.

Maria Cvetkova: I'm looking at the time now. I think that pretty much wraps it up for us today, Brian. We're about to call on our second guest shortly. But I just wanted to say thank you so much for joining us on the show. It was really nice to hear your thoughts and I hope our Beyond the Headlines listeners got some good information out of it.

Bryan Evans: Thank you very much for inviting me. I really enjoyed the chat.

Maria Cvetkova: All right. Thanks so much, Brian. Well, we'll see you again later. All right. Take care. Once again, Beyond the Headlines, that was Dr. Brian Evans, who joined us for a discussion on Canada's democratic institutions and what role they play in determining social outcomes. Thanks for tuning in. Next, next up, we're going to have Mr. Réal Lavergne talking to us about whether Canada has a democratic deficit. Does Canada have a democratic deficit? Tune in on the next half and we'll find out.

Connor Fraser: Réal is our second guest. He has been engaged in the movement for election reform with Fair Vote Canada since his retirement as a civil servant in 2013 and was past President of the organization from 2016 to 2021. He is now President of the Ottawa Chapter. Réal has been involved in every Fair Vote Canada campaign for electoral reform from 2014 onwards. As a former academic and civil servant, Réal spent most of his career in the area of international development as a researcher, academic, and senior policy analyst, and he holds a Ph.D. in Political Economy from the University of Toronto.

He joins us for a conversation about our electoral system and proportional representation. Thanks so much for being with us. How are you?

Réal Lavergne: I'm fine, really happy to be here. Thank you.

Connor Fraser: I'll kick it off with a question. Your organization is called Fair Vote Canada, why do you feel that our current system of voting is unfair?

Réal Lavergne: Well, what do we mean by fairness when it comes to voting? We're talking about equal rights for citizens and voters. Meaning to say that every vote should be equally meaningful and effective no matter where you live or who you vote for and that's patently not the case under the current system. You can see it every time we have an election. There's this ritual after the election where people look at how the results actually failed to match how people voted. One can go to any election and give examples but I'd like to give an example from the last Ontario election.

Maria Cvetkova: Oh, that was right what I was going to ask you.

Réal Lavergne: Yes, that was one of the most egregious ones and you had a similar, very egregious result in Quebec. But since we're in Ontario, what was really egregious? There's two things. One was the way that the seat count came out for the Ontario Liberal Party versus the NDP. The Liberals actually got more votes than the NDP in 2022. They got more votes and yet they ended up with eight seats, the NDP ended up with 31. That makes no sense whatsoever. Either party under a proportional system should have won about 30 seats and here the Liberals didn't even get official party status.

So the nonsense of that is very obvious and the flip side of that is what happened with the Conservatives. Conservatives got about 41 percent of the vote, just under 41 percent. But they ended up with over two-thirds of all the seats. Why that's the flip side is that that's what's called a winner's bonus. The bigger party under a first-past-the-post system typically gets way more than its share of the seats, in this case, a 50 percent bonus. And what happens in our system is we end up with what we call false majority. Basically a party, in this case, with 41 percent of the vote, has the power to do what it wants for the next four years.

That makes no sense in a representative democracy and it's patently unfair. Later on, we'll talk about the fact that it's not just unfair, it actually also leads to bad government.

But that’s a different topic.

Maria Cvetkova: When it comes to electoral reform, the Liberals campaigned on this in the last two election cycles. But why do we always see promises about electoral reform, but never actually any action?

Réal Lavergne: The promises usually come from a party which is down and out at the time. If you look at the Liberals in early 2015, remember, they were in third place and the NDP was the official opposition. So they were looking more seriously at proportional representation or any other system that would treat them better in the future. And that promise came out that 2015 would be the last election under first-past-the-post in Canada and that promise was repeated over and over again.

When we think of broken promises today, everybody thinks about the Justin Trudeau broken promise on electoral reform. That's what comes to mind. But the fact is that the failure to get electoral reform in Canada goes back 100 years. It goes back to William Lyon Mackenzie King in 1919 and 1926. And then there's a whole series of efforts in Quebec that start in 1979 with René Lévesque and ended basically last year under Legault. You've got four different governments that promised electoral reform twice, the Parti Québécois, once the Liberals, and once the CAQ.

In every case, they backed out on their promise. Now, what's happening here? Is it the leaders themselves? Not necessarily. René Lévesque was true to his promise. He didn't back down himself as a leader, but they lose their caucus. Because caucus members that have been elected under first-past-the-post, they look okay. Well, you're going to change this system. What are my chances of getting reelected? And of course, if you change the system, the results are going to be different. So some of them see that they would lose their seats.

In every one of those cases, four different cases in Quebec, three different parties. It was the loss of caucus that led to the failure of the electoral reform and the broken promises in those cases. That's basically the story.

Maria Cvetkova: Would you say part of the problem is attributed to the way Canada's federal system is structured itself, as in multiple veto points, these federal-provincial relations? If you could remind me, for something like electoral reform to happen, would it require unanimous consent across all provinces?

Réal Lavergne: No. This would be done by the federal government, and I don't think that's the issue at all. Proportional representation has been attempted at the provincial level as well, notably in Quebec, but also in Ontario, British Columbia, Prince Edward Island. Right now they're discussing it in Yukon. You can't blame that on federalism. The issue has to do with the fact that we have basically a two-party system in terms of the two parties that alternate in power. Of course, we have the NDP and the Greens, and the People's Party of Canada on the side, but they're not normally part of government in Canada.

So you've got that two-party system and each party wants to have its turn at the trough, and therefore they tend to be resistant to electoral reform, and that's the case across the board. We need to find a way to get beyond that. We did get electoral reform in Europe in the early 20th century, but that was a different world. It was a period of time when the working class was winning the suffrage and then later on women as well. But mainly it was the working class winning the suffrage, and this completely upset the political balance in those countries to the point that they were looking for solutions and often proportional representation was the solution.

But we in Canada, the UK, and the U.S., the three countries that currently use the first-past-the-post, the big ones in the OECD, we missed the boat at that time. Now the politics are different. So what we need to be looking at today is okay we have a political issue in terms of getting rid of first-past-the-post, bringing in a proportional system or electoral reform more generally in any sort of a way. How do we get past that? That's the big question that we face. We don't have the same history as the European countries.

Connor Fraser: Réal, we're talking about proportional representation, and just for completeness for our listeners, can you give us a brief overview of what proportional representation is and what your proposed model would look like for Canada?

Réal Lavergne: Sure. I think I'd like to deal with that by going to the basics. What is it about our system, our current system that's different, and then what is it fundamentally that has to change if you want it to be proportional? Fundamentally, what's particular to our system is what's called single-member districts. We elect our delegates, our representatives, one at a time. What that means is that the bigger parties tend to win most or all of the seats in a particular region or area, leading to what I described earlier, this winner's bonus. That is a systematic aspect of our system and the equivalent of that is that smaller parties always get less than their share.

The problem is the single-member district and the way to resolve that. It's been done in different ways in Europe and elsewhere. You have to have what's called multi-member districts. When I explain proportional representation here in Ottawa, where I live, I always say to people, imagine if we were to take the existing seven ridings in the Ottawa region, whether it's provincial or federal, it's basically the same seven ridings. Take those seven ridings and elect people to those seven ridings together in one group, in a multi-member district, a seven-member district. Then if let's say, the Liberals won three-sevenths of the vote, well, they would get three seats and if the NDP won one-seventh of the vote, they would get one seat, and so on like that.

You can see under that kind of system that you'd end up with a relatively proportional system and also that every vote now would actually count. So if you vote Green, you have a chance of electing a Green representative. If you vote NDP, you have a chance of helping an NDP representative to win. That's the trick. You have to move away from single-member to multi-member and there are different ways to do that.

Fair Vote Canada does not particularly advocate one formula over another. What we're arguing today is that that would be something we would like to hear from the Citizens Assembly. On what citizens themselves would like to see based on the democratic values that they bring to the table.

Connor Fraser: Thank you. There's a number of things I want to pick your brain on, but perhaps we could move on and just talk about what does the research on proportional representation tell us? Because we have first-past-the-post right now, it's okay, it's kind of an equilibrium, and then your group, Fair Vote Canada is proposing proportional representation. But I think for our listeners, it would be useful to hear why this would be a better system. So what does the research on proportional representation tell us about things like voter engagement, trust in the political process, how this impacts better outcomes in terms of inequality, that kind of thing?

Réal Lavergne: That's a really good question and I find that when this issue is being discussed in the media, there tends to be a lot of ignorance of the fact that over 80 percent of OECD countries already use proportional representation. There's a huge base of information to draw from, but I guess our reporters and analysts in the media, they don't take the time to study that research. I would like to point out, though, for your listeners that there's a document called “A Look at the Evidence”. If you just Google those words, you'll be able to find it. It's Fair Vote Canada's ongoing review of the research literature, the comparative research literature on different kinds of systems.

I would certainly strongly recommend that. What that does is it looks at a base of literature that compares results in first-past-the-post and majoritarian countries with more proportional countries. What's really interesting about that, you have two categories of results. One is the nature of the politics in the country, and the other one is the quality of the policies that emerge. On basically every indicator in both of those categories, what you observe is superior performance on the part of countries with proportional representation.

So with regards to the politics, what you find is more women being elected, more minorities. You've got higher voter turnout by quite a substantial degree. You do have higher trust in political institutions. You've got less partisanship, more consensus-based decision-making. So that's all the quality of the politics.

Then in terms of policy, one of the things that your previous guest was talking about was the lack of attention to long-term issues, that it's all about the election cycle. I would say in Canada, it's not even about the election cycle, it's about wedge issues, like Chinese interference. That's a wedge issue of today. In 2019 it was the hijab was the big issue, probably changed the result of the election.

It's the short-term wedge issues, hyper-partisanship, and all that. That means that the policy agenda on longer-term issues isn't given the attention that it deserves. What we observe in countries with proportional representation is they pay a lot more attention. So on climate change, it's really the proportional representation countries that lead the pack. On social equality, economic equality, it's proportional representation countries that lead the pack. Strangely enough, you might be surprised, not only do they do better on equality, they also do better on economic growth, economic stability, and fiscal prudence.

It's really right across the board. The research is unambiguous in that result. It's not just about fairness, it's also about results.

Connor Fraser: That's an interesting interplay that you talked about where proportional representation countries have more of a long-term policy focus or their politicians are incentivized to focus on the longer-term issues like climate change, inequality, whereas in Canada and other first-past-the-post countries, it's a very short-term focus wedge issues like the hijab, the Chinese interference, the gun registry.

Réal Lavergne: Yes, that’s another good example. The reason is that under our system, a small change in voter preferences is what you're after. So if you're in a swing riding, you're looking to swing three or four voters away from one of the major parties to the other. Similarly for the election as a whole, you know that if you can get from 33 percent of the vote to 39 percent, you go from being opposition to having all the power for the next four years based on those four or five or six percentage points. Whereas in a proportional country, if your share of the vote goes up three or four percent, the number of seats you're going to have is going to go up three or four percent as well. So those parties tend to think much more long-term as a result of that.

Connor Fraser: Réal, I wanted to also pick your brain about other methods of democratic election. We're obviously talking about proportional representation, first-past-the-post, but there are other systems out there like alternative vote, for example, which is sort of a ranked ballot model. How do you feel about that? Why is your organization proposing a proportional representation as opposed to something like alternative vote?

Réal Lavergne: Well, we need to go back to the fundamental distinction that I was making earlier. Our current system works on the basis of single-member districts. Proportional representation works on the basis of multi-member districts. When you're looking at ranked ballots, you can apply those ranked ballots in single-member districts or you can apply it in multi-member districts. Both possibilities exist.

If you do it in a single-member district model, I call that a bandaid approach to using ranked ballots. It's also called the alternative vote, but I think it's more fun to call it a bandaid approach. If you apply it at a multi-member level, you end up with a system like the one they have in Ireland, for example. They use ranked ballots, but they do it in multi-member districts and as a result, you get proportional results.

So if you only applied in single-member districts, you retain some of the fundamental problems of first-past-the-post. You're still electing one at a time. You're still going to have probably a winner's bonus. In fact, it might even be even larger and you're liable, as they've done in Australia, which is the only OECD country to use that model. You're liable to end up with a very rigid two-party system in which smaller parties find it almost impossible to win seats. It does solve some problems. I'm not going to say that everything's bad about using ranked ballots. I think a proportional-ranked ballot system would be terrific.

But the band-aid approach is not one that experts recommend. When they had the public consultations under the Special Committee on Electoral Reform in 2016, there were virtually no experts that called for this alternative vote approach that our prime minister favored at the time. Justin Trudeau himself said he would never propose it because he would be accused of partisan self-interest in calling for such a system and he thought it was a political non-starter.

Maria Cvetkova: I want to shift gears for a second and talk about Citizens' Assemblies. What's going on with Citizens' Assemblies? Where do they fit into this picture here?

Réal Lavergne: I was talking earlier about how in Europe they brought in proportional representation at the turn of the 20th century. Under very particular political conditions, we missed the boat and we need to find another way. Because what we're seeing is that when we leave it entirely to politicians, I call it the promise and betray model. We've gone through promise and betray too many times. In fact, we've gone through it so many times that I don't think any politicians even want to promise it anymore. With the exception, perhaps, of the NDP in Ontario. But by and large, they're very nervous about promising proportional representation anymore.

What we need to do at this stage is we need for everyone to acknowledge that politicians left to their own devices are in a conflict of interest. They're elected under one system and they're being called upon to change that system. That is a conflict of interest. When I speak to people at the door and any acquaintance about this, they understand this right away. It's not hard to understand, but we need to acknowledge it explicitly and our politicians need to acknowledge it explicitly.

When you do that, you have to say, okay, what's the alternative? Politicians are still the ones who we’re going to have to vote in electoral reform. We can't do without them. But there is an intermediate step that we could take, and that's to find a way to get citizens' input that is very carefully reasoned, based on the evidence, in consultation with experts, bringing people in from different kinds of partisan perspectives. But people who don't have a vested interest in the outcome. Let them make their recommendations and commit in advance to, at the very least, take those recommendations very seriously.

I think if that's done, not just by one party, but at least more than one party. The Citizens' Assembly would be called by a parliamentary committee, let's say, they would put together the mandate. That gives it a very high level of legitimacy. Then it has to be convened in a way that is independent. It has to be organized by an independent organization that has been chosen in a multi-party way. You can't have one party leading by itself on this, that would not be democratic.

The mandate itself has to be broad. If the Citizens' Assembly decides they want the status quo because it's changing, it's just not worth the trouble, they should have the right to say that. If they want to, and here I won't use my band-aid terminology anymore, if they want to call for the alternative vote as the best we can actually do right now, for whatever reason, they should be allowed to do that. They should have that option. If they want to choose one type of proportional system over another or they want to propose a couple of options, they should be able to do that, too.

I'm adding something new here that not many people have mentioned in the past. I think they should have the option also of proposing an incremental approach. Because if they come out with some proposal that is ambitious and exciting and all the rest of it, but we can't get the support of the political parties to do it because it's too radical. Then maybe it's just not going to happen. So it'd be interesting for the Citizens' Assembly itself to think about political feasibility. How do we get this thing through? How do we get it started? Once you've got it started, what could you do to make sure that improvements are ongoing over time?

That's an interesting thing that we observe in countries with proportional representation. They're often revisiting, it's happening right now in New Zealand, for example. They revisit the system. Wales is doing it right now as well. Germany is doing it right now. They're looking at their system. They're saying, how can we do better? So once you get started, I think it's possible if you put in a proper process to ensure that it continues getting better. We don't have to go to 100 percent pure proportional representation in one goal, if that's politically not feasible.

Maria Cvetkova: That's interesting. I never thought about it that way in an incremental approach as opposed to kind of a full-sweep electoral change. Since we are talking about low voter turnout and all, I wanted to pick your brain and ask you what you think about mandatory voting. Because I know Australia adopted that, I don't know when, but they did at some point. I want to get your thoughts on that.

Réal Lavergne: There are some countries with proportional representation that use compulsory voting as well. These are countries that have like 80 percent turnout. For Fair Vote Canada, we see the priority as being to give people a reason to vote. I think that's job one, no matter how you look at this. Whether you make it compulsory or not might not matter so much if you actually give them a reason to vote. I'll give my own personal example. I live in Ottawa-Vanier. Ottawa-Vanier has gone liberal since the Federation.

I like to tell people if I vote for one of the opposition parties, I might as well not vote. Because they're not going to win anyway. We know that ahead of time. But you know what's really ironic is that even if I vote liberal, my vote doesn't count for anything because the liberals are going to win anyway. So why should I vote? It's not surprising that the voter turnout tends to be a little bit higher in swing right. It tends to be lowest in safe ridings like Ottawa-Vanier or some of those ridings in Alberta that are safe conservative seats.

The fact is that most people right now don't really have a good reason to vote. I've done the calculations, in the last election it was about 70 percent. 70 percent of voters did not really have a good reason to vote. So that's the first thing to fix. With a proportional system, people will have a reason to vote, unless they're voting for some really small fringe party that has not a chance of winning a seat. Now, if I'm in Ottawa-Vanier and I vote liberal, well, sure, we're still going to have a liberal candidate, but my vote will count somewhere else because it's a larger district. Right.

Now, no matter who I vote for under this example that I gave earlier, my vote is likely to count. I can vote NDP, I can vote conservative, I can vote Green, and have a chance that my vote is going to help somebody get elected.

Connor Fraser: That makes sense and I like your framing of it in that people should vote because they feel like their vote counts, not because they are being forced to vote under threat of a penalty of some sort. But Réal, we're coming up to the last minute of our time together. We have to wrap up and get ready for the next show. In the last 30 seconds, is there anything that you want to share with our listeners, a final thought about proportional representation and your work with Fair Vote Canada?

Réal Lavergne: I'd like to encourage people to learn more about Citizens’ Assemblies. They can go on the Fair Vote Canada’s site and do a search on ‘Citizens’ Assemblies’. They'll find some material that way or just go online. I really think it's the way of the future. There's a lot happening right now. There's serious discussions in Yukon. There's a private members bill that has been prepared federally. Even in the upcoming federal liberal convention, there's actually a resolution on the floor. So we're starting to get some momentum. I'd like that to continue.

Connor Fraser: That makes sense and thank you so much for joining us on the show. It's been a pleasure to talk to you.

Réal Lavergne: My pleasure. Bye bye.

Maria Cvetkova: Bye Réal. Once again, that was Réal Lavergne who joined us for a discussion on Canada's democratic deficits. Thanks for tuning in listeners at Beyond the Headlines. That wraps up our show for this week. We were joined today by Dr. Brian Evans from TMU and Réal Lavergne from Fair Vote Canada. Many thanks to them for coming on to the show to discuss low voter turnout and its relationship to democratic institutions. Today's show was produced by myself, Maria Cvetkova, and alongside my co-producer, Connor Fraser.