 Hi, everyone. It's my pleasure to introduce the organizer and moderator of this debate, Professor Bill Cross, who is in the middle here. Professor Bill Cross is the Honorable Dick and Ruth Bell Chair for the Study of Canadian Parliamentary Democracy in the Department of Political Science at Carleton University. In 2015, 2016, he was the president of the Canadian Political Science Association. Since 2000, he has served as the director of the Canadian Democratic Audit. And in 2004, 2005, he was director of research for the New Brunswick Commission on Legislative Democracy. He will be moderating the debate. And in a moment, I'll turn it over to him to introduce the two debaters. So please welcome my esteemed colleague, Professor Bill Cross. Thanks very much, Fiona. It's my great pleasure to welcome everyone to this afternoon's great debate. Reform of Canada's electoral system has long been a topic of debate. Almost a century ago, in 1919, the Liberal Party at its first-ever National Leadership Convention voted in favor of the principle of reforming Canada's electoral system to one of proportional representation. More recently, five provinces from across the country, led by governments of different stripes, have engaged in processes aimed at reforming their electoral systems. These include British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. Of course, none of these efforts have resulted in a move away from the single-member plurality system. And of course, this has been a hot topic at the national level over the course of the past year or so. Prior to the 2015 election, the Liberal Party, again in convention, endorsed the alternative vote method. And Justin Trudeau, then famously pledged, we are committed to ensuring that 2015 will be the last federal election conducted under the first pass of the post system. We will convene an all-party parliamentary committee to review a wide variety of reforms. This committee will deliver its recommendations to parliament. And within 18 months of forming government, we will introduce legislation to enact electoral reform. Well, we all know what has happened since. While many countries around the world use forms of PR, the single-member plurality system remains sticky in the Canadian case. Nonetheless, we can expect the issue to remain on the public policy agenda, supported by groups such as an invigorated fair vote Canada and thousands of other Canadians who engaged in public consultations conducted during the past year. And the new Democrats have also pledged a campaign on the issue in the next federal election. So while the current round of reform consideration seems to have come to a close, history suggests it will rise once again. Thus, while we had expected to convene this debate in a somewhat different context, it is nonetheless still timely for us to consider the relative merits of our current electoral system and the strength of the argument for reform. To do so, we're very pleased to have two academics who will debate whether we should keep our current electoral system or reform to a method of proportional representation. To defend the status quo, we have Dr. Stanley Weiner, sitting here to my left. Dr. Weiner is the Canada Research Chair in Public Policy in the School of Public Policy and Administration and the Department of Economics here at Carleton. His work concerns the structure and evolution of fiscal systems in mature democracies and more recently addresses the meaning, measurement, and consequences for public policy of electoral competitiveness. Dr. Weiner is also a Carleton alumnus, having been one of the very first graduates of the Combined Honors Program in Mathematics and Economics. To argue in favor of reform, and particularly in favor of the mixed-member plurality system, we have Dr. David McGrane. David is an Associate Professor of Political Science at St. Thomas Moore College at the University of Saskatchewan. His research interests include social democracy, Canadian political theory, political marketing, and elections. David too is a Carleton graduate, having received his PhD from our Department of Political Science in 2007. In terms of format, each speaker will have up to 15 minutes to make their principal case, after which they will each have three minutes for a short rebuttal. We'll then have a question-and-answer period, and finally, each of the speakers will have a chance to make their closing argument. At the end of the debate, we'll ask for a show of hands to see how many support the status quo and how many are in favor of reform. So we'll get the debate underway by turning the floor over to Dr. Weiner. Thank you, Bill. Everybody hear me? Few people have bothered to defend the majoritarian winner-take-all character of our current electoral system, in which the party with the largest number of seats, each one with a plurality at the constituency level is granted a franchise to govern by itself for a maximum term. I'm gonna explain why this system, which has worked reasonably well for 150 years, deserves to be maintained. This does not mean that I reject any kind of electoral reform, nor must you do so in order to agree with the argument I will present. I'm happy later to discuss matters such as specific voting rules for constituencies elections, including the alternative vote, campaign finance, the participation of public sector unions in electoral contests, general participation rates, fixed election terms, and so on. But these matters are not the critical issue we must confront. One defense of our majoritarian system that has been offered over the past year, and that you may have heard, is that our winner-take-all system makes it difficult for dangerous people or ideas to gain formal representation in the legislature when compared to the essential alternative, which is some form of proportional representation. This may be so, but it too is not the critical issue that we have to deal with, nor do I think it is the most important matter when thinking about the maintenance of civil liberty, which depends on the countervailing system of institutions that constrain governments and other special interests from interfering too deeply in our private lives. The critical and most difficult issue before us in this debate is how to deal with the leap of faith required in going from representative government, on the one hand, to good government on the other. By good government, I mean a sustainable democratic system that contributes substantially to our social and economic well-being. Whether we choose to err on the side of principles of responsibility if we stay with our existing majoritarian system, or to err on the side of principles of representation if we adopt proportional representation in some form, we must make a well-considered leap of faith in judging which system best promotes good government in this sense. This leap is analogous to the one that was an essential ingredient in the 1988 election, fought between political parties opposing and promoting free or trade with the United States. How are these fundamentally different principles supposed to work in choosing a legislature? In the proportional vision, an election is a means of obtaining a representative legislature that mirrors organized opinions in the country by assigning seats to parties more or less in proportion to their share of the national vote. The majoritarian vision is radically different, an election is not a means of producing a representative legislature, though it may in fact do so in an electoral equilibrium or outcome. It is in the first instance a means for voters to impose a government on the legislature and to give the government the means to act decisively during the life of the legislature. Each government obtains and uses its franchise for a limited period and then is reevaluated to see if the franchise should be renewed or given to another party. This is what we mean by responsible government, a government able to act decisively and which can as a result be clearly held responsible for its actions. How do these principles actually work out? What is clear is the effect of either system on the equilibrium number of parties in parliament, which is well short of what we wanna know about how good government is best nurtured. The majoritarian system we have now leads to a smaller number of parties while proportionality will lead to a larger number. Usually government under PR is a coalition of smaller parties that is produced after the general election, sometimes long after. It took 541 days to form a government in Belgium after the 2010 election there. And the reason is that one party will rarely have a majority of seats and the formation of the government will depend on negotiation among parties represented in the legislature. Note that unlike PR where the formation of government is handed over to the parties after the vote, under majoritarianism voters are directly responsible for electing a government and as a result, usually vote for national parties regardless of local candidate, which is part of its greater emphasis on accountability. The trade off here and I stress that every electoral system necessarily involves trade offs is that national votes and seats in parliament are not proportional. The most difficult part of the assessment we have to make concerns what happens after the legislature is chosen, not before. Here we have to rely on arguments about how things evolve in the long run, that is about what public policies are adopted and about how these government actions affect our lives over many years. If you think that's hard to deal with, you're right. If you think it doesn't matter and we can make a choice between electoral systems without going into such deep waters, I beg to differ. Maintaining a system of self-government that actually improves the way we and our children live is the central problem. Under PR, good government in this important sense is made subservient to balanced party representation in the legislature in the hope that in the long run the two will be the same. In the majoritarian vision, good government is made subservient to the election of a government and can act decisively and accountably over its term with the hope that in the long run the two will be the same. PR systems by design produce representation in the legislature in accordance with each party's percentage of the votes more or less. If a portrait of society in the legislature that reflects voting by party is what you want, regardless of how this works out in the end, there is no better alternative. But a judgment on this basis alone would be short-sighted. How can we go further? Consider this. In any democratic system, it is essential that parties face the prospect of losing office, that they do lose from time to time and that they also face the prospect of returning to office. The prospect of losing office induces the parties to cater to all sorts of voters by never moving too far towards their own party's most preferred choices at the great expense of various minority interests. They do this because risk averse voters do not like to be jerked around from left to right and then vice versa when partisan control changes. We all spend a lot of money to buy insurance against bad things happening for essentially the same reason. As a result, we see substantial continuity in major policies across adjacent governments. In other words, the prospect of alternation in office forces majorities to consider the interests of various minorities, even if they are not well organized, provided that the parties also see some prospect of returning to office if they are defeated. Herein lies an important reason for the majoritarian winner-take-all system to have a stronger claim to our attention. Because of the plurality rule at the local level and because of the incentive that voters have to desert candidates and parties that are likely to be defeated, a small change in popular vote for a party can have large and even devastating consequences for the total number of seats the party wins, depending on how its popular vote is distributed across electoral districts. Remember the conservative incumbent government that dropped from 169 to two seats for a seat share of 0.6% in the 1993 election, when their popular vote dropped from 43% but only to 16%. In contrast, in a PR system, a small change in vote shares leads only to a small change in seat shares, allowing losing parties to remain in a governing coalition. Thus the disproportionality in votes and seats by party that proponents of PR often point to as a primary defect of the existing system is, from the majoritarian point of view, an essential strength, helping to create and maintain the turnover that is a source of reasonably efficient and harmonious public policy. If I have time later, I can show you that indexes of disproportionality peaked when Diefenbaker threw out the liberals after 27 years in 1957, 58, when Moroni again defeated the liberals in 1984 after 20 years of liberal governments, when the liberals under Kretchen destroyed the conservative party for a decade in 1993, and when Harper won a clear majority of seats in 2011. There is a second related and important advantage of the majoritarian vision. While the majoritarian system by its nature creates conditions conducive to turnover, neither electoral vision contains any absolute guarantee as to the goodness of the government that emerges over the longer run. How could they? The philosopher Carl Proper took up the question of what sort of system we ought to adopt in the absence of such a guarantee, and in view of the fundamental difficulty of agreeing on what good government means. He concluded that the best political system is the one that is better at avoiding situations in which a really bad government does too much harm. From this point of view, we could say that the best electoral system is the one that allows a bad government to be replaced most easily. Which of the electoral systems we are considering is better in this sense? Without doubt, it's the majoritarian one. Obviously, we won't always or even usually agree on what bad means in this context, but in choosing between systems, we can agree to build in a bias against renewing the franchise of a government about which a sizable group of citizens is substantially displeased. Rather than adopt a system that is more robust to such opposition. Canada's had the same winner-take-all system since its founding in 1867, and the country has developed into one of the better places on earth to live. This is not only because we're endowed with natural resources. There are several countries with similar endowments that are worse places to live. Of course, these facts do not tell us what the counterfactual under PR would have been like. Maybe Canada would have been heaven on earth. But if you want to proceed cautiously when important, hard-to-reverse decisions are involved, these facts are not irrelevant. Finally, I return to the main issue, which is conceptual as much as empirical. Choosing between proportional and majoritarian electoral systems requires us either to err on the side of principles of representation or to err on the side of principles of responsibility. Both choices necessarily involve a leap of faith as to what system best promotes good government. PR produces a representative legislature by design, but this does not guarantee good government. Majoritarianism is a sensible way of encouraging good government, and is also a sensible way of protecting ourselves against bad ones. There is no compelling reason to destroy a majoritarian parliamentary system which has the characteristics I have outlined, and which, as a consequence, is likely to serve us reasonably well in the future. It's great to be here. As Bill mentioned, I'm a former graduate here, and I spent five years, I guess, would have been doing my PhD here at the Low Building, and it's great to be back to see some of my old professors. I gotta watch out now to name them. I've just called them old professors. But it's really great to be back, and it makes me think when I'm thinking a bit about this topic, a bit about my own life when it comes to politics. I remember my very first election, actually. It was 1997, a while ago now. I was living in Moosja at the time, Moosja, Saskatchewan, and I had just turned 18, and I had long, long flowing blonde hair at the time. I looked great. And I went out from my local NDP candidate, and I worked hard, right? And I knocked on doors. I remember the feeling of excitement that I had, right? The feeling of excitement that I had. When I would go knock on doors, I'd meet people. I pushed forward, and at that time, that riding was a real toss-up between the NDP and the Reform Party, and even the Liberal Party was a bit competitive at the time. And we worked our butts off, and I remember electioning how ultimately I was so excited when my candidate actually went to win. And then, by just the way my life sort of went, I remained in NDP, but I ended up being in Shikutimi, Quebec to learn French in the 2000 election just three years afterwards as my second election as a voter. And at the time, the NDP was not very strong in Shikutimi. If I remember correctly, the person who was running for the NDP to actually didn't even live there. And I, with my broken French, kind of knocked on a couple doors, and I tried to handle a couple pamphlets, but I just remembered my utter despair as a young person going from an election that caused so much excitement for me in 1997 to election 2000, where my party didn't have a chance, it really didn't make a difference what I was doing. And I think often when we look at these electoral systems, we don't always look at them from the point of view of the voter, from the point of view of the activist, right? The point of view of that young man with long flowing golden hair, it was I dyed my hair blonde at the time, right? We don't look at it like that. And so I'm gonna go over sort of just three reasons why I think we should move to some sort of form of proportional representation, hopefully MMP, mixed member of proportional representation, and then end off a bit to discuss the type of political system that I think could generate that type of excitement that I'm talking about. So the first problem I think with the first pass the post system is that it generates what I would call false majorities. In fact, since 1921, if you just talk, just look at the federal level now, there's only been three times since 1921 that you've actually seen of a government, federal government get more than 50% of the vote. And actually 1984, already got just 50% of the vote, more than the progressive conservatives. Frankly, what's been happening, particularly in the last three decades, is you've been getting these majority governments, right? With around 40% of Canadians voting for them. So let's get this straight. 60% of Canadians say they don't want that government, and that's exactly the government they get, right? There's something I think fundamentally wrong, and even against the whole principle of democracy in some senses, right? The majority of people vote against that government, yet that's the government that gets 100% of the power, right? So majority of people vote against the government that gets 100% of the power. The first pass the post system over and over and over again creates these false majorities. And you have to wonder from the voter's point of view, what's that telling them, right? What's that telling them about politics? About how effective they are as a voter, right? They get together 60% of the Canadians, they say we don't want this government, and that's exactly the government that gets 100% of the power. So the problem of false majorities, I think is a big problem, and one that we have to address. I think that's the first problem with the first pass the post system, and that's something that a more proportional system would address. The second problem with the first pass the post system is sort of a twin problem, and I alluded to already. The idea of a wasted vote and a strategic vote. Let's just tell you a story about it in terms of wasted votes. In the last federal election, in 2015, I'm a professor, obviously, and I teach political studies. And I had this young woman in my class who had been very articulate in class, and her name was Sarah, and she came up to me after the class was over, and she said, oh, Professor McGrane. I live in this warm room, which is outside of Saskatoon, and warm in the way that the writing is made up. That writing, like really, you could literally, you could literally run a potted plant in that writing, and for the conservatives in it, that potted plant would win, right? I mean, it's that type of writing. And so she looked at me and she said, you know, I'm kind of more environmentalist, I'm kind of a green voter, right? I'm thinking maybe I'm voting for the ADP, but she said, I'm not sure if I'm actually, you know, even gonna vote, right? And she said, tell me, tell me, Professor McGrane, do you think that actually there's any chance that anybody but the conservatives could win that writing? So I just, I talked to her all semester about how you gotta get engaged, I get active, right? You know, so what do I do? Do I lie to her and say like, oh, well, you never do know, right? Oh, there's all sorts of weird things that happen in politics, right? So as a professor, almost I was caught in this situation, I almost had to lie to her, right? But then I didn't want to lie, and so I was like, I mumbled something around, that was, you never do know, but yeah, probably looking at that vote history and that writing, it's a strong chance that the conservatives are really gonna win that writing. She said, okay, I'm not gonna vote then, and she walked away. So you see the problem of wasted voting, right? Of wasted votes. Also, I remember being a professor being on TV a bit, we had a panel on this sort of media and academics, I would have people during the 2015 election coming up to me and wanting to talk about the election. Do you think that any of them asked me about policy? Anything? No, not one of them asked me about policy. Not one. That I could have helped them with. I could have said, oh yes, this is the difference between the economic policy of the Liberals and the NDP. None of them asked me that. They all came up with this desperation in their eyes, right? Saying, please, tell me, which party do you think is going to be able to beat the conservatives in Saskatoon University, right? And that's all they wanted to talk about. They wanted me to try to predict the future for them. And again, I was in this tough position, so I don't know about the future, right? I could help them with policy, but I didn't know anything about the future. And so you think about a voting system that actually is torturing people, right? These people are tortured, they look in their eyes, they're actually tortured, and they're trying to figure out who should I vote for in order to get this outcome, right? We have a very perverse political system, a very perverse electoral system that tortures its voters like that. So, you know, not to be too dramatic here, but I think I'm gonna be slightly dramatic. I really regard wasted voting and strategic voting as a cancer on Canadian democracy. I think it's doing horrible things to the way that people conceive of democracy, to the way that Canadians think about politics. And finally, just the last reason why I think that first passed the post system is not a good system, is that it creates disincentives to inter-party cooperation, right? It's a winner-take-all system, and a winner-take-all system, but there's no reason for the parties to cooperate. I remember talking to my aunt, Aunt Marie the other day, and she's like, oh, I don't vote anymore, because I'm just disgusted. That was her exact term. I'm disgusted with politics, right? I'm disgusted with all this fighting. Why can't they just get along, right? I think Canadians have an expectation that their politicians get along, right? And the whole thing about the first passable system is it creates these false majorities where you have one majority, one party that gets 40% of the vote, they get all the power, and then you get the other party whose only way to power is try to get 40% of the vote. They have no reason ever to cooperate with each other, right? In a more proportional system, I think you'd have more incentives for cooperation. So just to sum up, why would I be in favor of reform? Well, I think the first passable system has some very, very, very important and grave problems that it's creating for Canadian democracy. It creates false majorities where 60% of the Canadians say we don't want that government, that's exactly the government that gets 100% of the power. It creates strategic voting where Canadians are tortured and trying to figure out the future in order to figure out how to vote. Wasted votes where Canadians feel like their vote doesn't matter. And finally, it creates all these disincentives to cooperation between parties, which, ah, shit, I think that's what Canadians want. They want their politicians to cooperate with each other. So we have a system, right? As political scientists, we study systems. We have a system that's built up to do all these negative things to our democracy. And I think we should really change it, right? And you know what? It might be a bit controversial now, but think about back in 1942 when Carlton was created, right? There's lots of things that were sort of weird that we're doing now that were probably controversial at the time. People in 1942 didn't wear seat belts, for instance, right? They're like, I don't want to wear a seat belt. That's crazy talk. Why do you wear a seat belt, right? But after a while, we figured out that a better system to get around in cars would be wearing seat belts. This is almost like that in some ways, right? We are, we have a system out there that thinks better called proportional representation. It's gonna correct some of the problems of our democracy. So let's move towards it, right? Let's give it a chance. And in fact, most countries do it already. And we see that it works well in a variety of countries. So my argument would be to give it a chance and let's see what happens. And I do think that really what would happen is that people get excited again in both politics, that Canadians would feel a lot better as they go to the voting booth. And we're gonna have a more exciting, more inspiring form of politics that is gonna create more and more excitement. So thank you very much. Each of our speakers now has three minutes for a rebuttal, Dan. You have to make a choice about what system you wish to implement. And from that perspective, what's called, from the majoritarian perspective, there's no such thing as a false majority. That's a pejorative term that makes sense only if you start from the point of view that the PR system is the one you wanna have. There's in fact a much more important problem that we have to deal with at the local constituency level in terms of our voting rule. And that is that people who are voting for someone can do that quite easily, but people who are voting against someone are disadvantaged because you only have one vote. Now, there are other, as I said, I'm not against any form of electoral reform. There are other methods of voting at the local level that are consistent with the majoritarian system, such as alternative voting, approval voting, and other methods that place people voting for someone and people voting against someone on the same footing. But the idea of a false majority is a pejorative term that makes sense only if you start from the point of view that a PR system is the best system. But that is the issue to be decided. A wasted vote, every vote in a sense is wasted because no one's vote in a country of 35 million people has much effect. If you don't vote, nothing is gonna change. So every vote is wasted. Why do people vote in the first place? They vote so far as we can tell out of a sense of civic duty and people will continue to vote out of a sense of civic duty, whatever the system we have is. So wasted votes in terms of wasted majorities, again, is a pejorative term that makes sense only if you start from the point of view that the PR system is the best system. But that's the issue to be decided. Disincentives for inter-party competition? The most competition, the best outcome that we're gonna get out of an electoral system is one that produces the most competition, the most electoral competition. And my basic argument is that the pejoritarian system in some form produces more competition and also allows us to protect itself against bad outcome. And finally, about participation by young people. There has been a decline in participation rates. It's a secular decline that's been going on for decades. It is not due, as far as I can tell, to the choice of the electoral system. Moving to PR will at most, if anything, so far as we can tell, increase participation rates very marginally. That's the best evidence that I can find on that issue. There is a question as to why participation rates are declining. We can talk about that. I think it has to do with very fundamental things in society, such as the advent of television and more recently social media. But we can discuss that. I don't think that moving to a system of PR is gonna fix that in any way. David? I'm not gonna take very long. I think we wanna get some more discussion going on here. Just in terms, Dr. Wan talked a bit about instability. And that proposed representation would cause instability is the example of Belgium, for instance. I guess a couple of things on that. Number one, instability is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it creates excitement. I mean, one of the most exciting things we ever had recently in Canadian politics was in 2008 when the governor general, who was she gonna choose? You remember that with Harper and the coalition crisis? It actually generated a lot of excitement. So it's exciting, but it's also, I think, the necessary messiness of democracy. Democracy is not always stable, right? Like that. And you're gonna have differences of ideas. And in coalitions, yeah, you're gonna have sorts of differences of ideas. I think that's actually the kind of compromise that it's gonna happen that does happen in these countries that have coalition governments is the essence of democracy and that kind of dialogue. And in terms of how that kind of dialogue works right now in Canada, we saw, with ironically electoral reform, exactly there was a lot of dialogue about it supposedly and then just woke up one morning and said, okay, well, actually we're not gonna go ahead with it. That's maybe a bit of exaggeration, a bit of flippant, but it seemed to me that we did a lot of work and a lot of sort of consultation around that. And then also it's not gonna happen anymore. So I think that in a more PR system you're gonna have more coalition building. You're gonna have that sort of essence of democracy which is compromised. In terms of whether PR is gonna create good government. You know, and I guess I maybe do agree with you somewhere on this Dr. Weiner, it's good government. What's gonna create good government? That's a hard question, right? I think good government is gonna probably be created by good politicians, good political culture, right, those types of things. And there's lots of PR countries that have very good government, right? And there's some PR countries that have very bad government. Some first pass, the post-country countries though, I think that you could probably say the same thing now. So I'm not sure that good government is really what's so important as much as it is the way that Canadians feel, as I said, when they vote and the excitement that they had that they think you can agenda. So I think I'll leave it there because I think we probably have a lot of questions and some more debate to go. So I look forward to talking with you further. Thank you, David. We will have now a question period. You can see on the sides that you can enter your questions online through the slido.com, but not everyone has access to this technology, so we'll also take some from the floor. I'm going to take the moderator's prerogative and ask one question to each of our panelists. They were forewarned that I would do so, but not of what the question would be. I'm gonna start with you, Dr. Weiner. You talked about trade-offs and the necessity of sort of making trade-offs on the selection of any electoral system. I wonder if one of those trade-offs in the current Canadian system is that we value geographic representation over other types of representation. And many advocates of electoral reform, and particularly methods of proportional representation, point to the underrepresentation of women in our legislatures and the tendency for PR systems to better reflect the social demographics of the society. So I wonder if you can address that. If you want to alter the nature of participation in the electoral system, there are many ways to do this other than changing the whole electoral system. Just as participation in universities by different groups has altered over the decades, participation in businesses at higher levels has altered over the decades, this evolves with education, with the ability of people to have the time to participate. But changing the electoral system is a very awkward and gross in the sense of awkward way of doing this, of addressing this problem. Whether you have higher participation in the PR systems of other countries is due to the nature of the electoral system, is a very difficult question to figure out. We don't know that that's true. There are all sorts of reasons, as I pointed out, why participation rates for different groups vary across countries. We don't get to make controlled experiments with our electoral system. And so we have to make these kinds of choices on conceptual basis as well as unempirical. Thank you. David, Stan talked about the fact that our country's 150 years old, and I think we would all agree one of the best places on earth to live. We're fortunate as Canadians. And in no small part, one might argue, this is because of the electoral system and the politics and governing principles that we have. A move to any method of proportional representation, including MMP, would be, to some extent, a leap into the unknown and the Canadian context. If we think about that, you talked about what some of the challenges with our current system are, what would be one of the things we'd have to be worried about or cognizant about and thinking about switching to a system of PR? First, I think that the argument about, oh, 150 years works so well for 150 years, right? I think it can be better though. I mean, just because something's worked very well for a long, long time doesn't mean it can't continually be improved, right? Apple didn't stop at the very first Mac that kept on improving it. So I think that's important to note. In terms of things we have to be wary about, and I'm actually interested in Dr. Weiner, one of the, it's one of your opponents, one of the stronger arguments I thought you were gonna make against me was the thing about the fringe parties, right? And about the cane maker parties within parliaments. Sometimes you might get times when you have a coalition government, it's very close, and there ends up being one party that might be some of a fringe party that could indeed end up being the cane maker of that parliament. And so that would be maybe something that you'd wanna watch out for, but I think there's a way to, my opinion would be a way to sort of negate that possibility is you'd make sure that the threshold by which parties get seats is high enough that you're not gonna maybe get a real, real fringe party becoming a cane maker. So if you make it even eight, nine, 10% of the popular vote, that way you make sure that you avoid those sort of problems, those problematic problems. But if there's a party that only has a couple, if they had 10% of the vote, to what center they actually fringe then, right? If they were to actually fringe, it might deserve to be the cane maker. Great, thank you. We'll take the first question from online. It says, Trump, Harper, won majorities by targeting a small group of voters. Do parties still have an incentive to move towards the centrist voter in majoritarian systems? Dan? Of course they do. The reason is that people do not like big changes and parties who fear being thrown out and who have also the prospect of returning if they are thrown out have to cater to this kind of voter. This is the fundamental reason why parties are centrist. It's because people value that. And any system will have that kind of a property in general. Some systems are better than others. Majoritarianism because it creates incentives for turnover because it makes turnover more possible is one that is likely to produce more centrist outcomes in my view. Now this is very difficult to study because in part what we see is the outcome of an electoral system and people not being stupid will condition their vote on the kind of electoral system that you see. So when you try and compare party platforms to people's observed preferences, you never know whether you're in fact simply conditioning your outcome on the actual system that exists or whether you're getting at some kind of bedrock correspondence between bedrock preferences and what actually happened. Very difficult thing to figure out. Conceptually however I think the argument is pretty good that majoritarianism induces more competition and competition is good for us or for citizens. David. I mean I think that you can sell centrist parties under PR there's no banning of centrist parties under PR you can have centrist parties under PR and if there's a large group of centrist voters then those centrist parties will do well. So I'm not sure that this sort of idea that somehow the center will disappear or have no centrist parties left is really a viable one. And also the idea that somehow first pass the post is gonna prevent you from ever getting extreme parties in the power is I think also a fallacy right. And I think I guess he was gonna get mentioned it's mentioned Trump sooner or later we have to mention him right. He gets to mention every political conversation these days but you know Trump was elected under a first pass the post system and some would consider him to be extreme politician. Right so yeah I'm not sure that this is necessarily a prime consideration to be having is there a center or not or how much centrist voters are gonna represent. This should really be a prime consideration that we should be making when we talk with electoral systems. I think we already talked about whether they actually reflect the will of the people. And I'm very unconvinced that our first pass the post system actually reflects the will of the people. Thank you. We will now take a question from the floor. I will just ask so that you keep it in the form of a question and not so much of a comment. We'll start here. The question of whether outcomes are different under PR than under majoritarianism is a really interesting one. There's been quite a bit of research on this. I don't think we know very much about it. I think we could predict that governments would be somewhat bigger if we adopted PR. We might get somewhat more redistribution. There's research that suggests both of these things but these are not large effects and of course we can't eat the oil so we're always gonna sell it. However, over the decades, the question is what kinds of policies are going to emerge from the electoral system that we live with? And there we have to make a conceptual leap and make a guess about what's gonna happen. That's a difficult thing to do and so I've argued that on balance it's better to stay with some form of majoritarianism. We didn't choose the system. We were bequeathed it by the colonial power but we were lucky and others have not been so fortunate. David. I'm a big Star Trek fan, right? What's Star Trek? Go bully. So no, I think part of this is, in terms of the outcome, right? Elcomes could be slightly different because I think more parties are gonna have a say in what those policy outcomes are gonna be, right? So that's gonna do two things. I think that will give parties that generally never have a say like the Greens, the NDP or these types of parties will have a bit of a say where they never had before so that could change policy outcomes. Also, I think that you'll probably have policies that become a bit more of the product of a compromise amongst various ideological factions within the House of Commons which frankly is probably a good thing. So I think you're gonna find more compromise and you're gonna find more dialogue leading up to that compromise, right? Which I think is also a good thing and that's gonna probably come out a bit more in the open than it is now, right? Because now there's supposedly debates amongst the different cabinet ministers about where to go but that's all secretive. I think in a coalition government you'll have a bit more public negotiation, so to speak which I don't think will be a bad thing for democracy. Thank you. Our next online question. I have another one. Is there an argument for making voting compulsory? Dan? Well, I hope to study this issue in experiments with students like those here. If you tax people, if they don't vote, we're gonna have more voters, okay? That's, especially if the fine is substantial. This we can predict. The question is whether that's a good thing or not. And there is some evidence that the people who I saw paper from Austria where they imposed voting turns out that the extra people voting were mostly uncommitted, uninformed, and uninformed. And so the issue is whether we want people who don't take the time to become informed and make the small effort to go out to vote, whether we want to force them to vote in some way or induce them in some way. I think it's very unclear that we want to do so. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Yeah, so we'll just pick up on that a bit. I guess a couple of things. I mean, number one, one of the greatest things about democracy is the egalitarianism of it all, right? That, you know, and I have a buddy, have a buddy I go drink with periodically, right? And we don't talk a lot about politics, but whenever he does, he's like, you know what the great thing is, Dave? You know, is that I know nothing about politics. And you study politics all of your life and we have exactly the same power when it comes to democracy, right? And to voting. I'm like, yeah, you know, you're kind of right on that. And so I think that's a good thing about democracy. So I wouldn't be too worried with the compulsory voting to have, you know, my buddy who frankly doesn't pay a lot of attention to politics, not a lot about, you know, a lot of other things, doesn't pay a lot of attention to politics. I'm too worried about having him vote because he is a pretty smart guy, a pretty interesting guy, he deserves to say. You know, in terms of sort of the compulsory voting, right? I think it comes down to whether we see voting as a right or as a duty. There's two different things going on here. I think it's probably a philosophical argument, really. And I've often thought that voting is a bit more of a duty, right? It's something that you should do, just like you should pay your taxes, just like you shouldn't speed all these other things. And so if indeed, if we conceive of voting as a duty, then there's no real reason why it shouldn't be compulsory. So now how this sort of fits in with the PR system or not, I think you could have compulsory voting under a first pass post system or a PR system. Great. I think there are things to do before we move to compulsory voting. One obvious thing would be to have the election on a weekend when people don't have to take time off from work, which causes all sorts of problems for people who have particular kinds of jobs. Secondly, we can make it into a festive occasion. And why not? I mean, it's a time for a celebration in a sense. So I think we can do, make very modest changes to see if that would improve me. Fundamentally though, I think the issue is a matter of civic education. I think people, we need to bring back civics classes in schools. I know that sounds terrible to students. Oh God, we're gonna get into a boring class and they're gonna try and convince us to be a good citizen and so on. Well, this is important and there's lots of interesting stuff you can study in a civics class. Come to my graduate class. Okay, we'll take another question from the floor, Caroline. David, we'll let you start with this one. I think it's how you set up your PR system. I think it's important here. The model I would favor would be the Scottish model, for instance, where they have, the list seats that they have are actually constrained by the district, by a region. So for instance, I think in a place like Canada, I'm thinking about my home province, Saskatchewan, what you'd probably do is you'd maintain the 14 seats that you already have there that are first past the post and then for post representation system. But then you would also have the list seats being just for Saskatchewan as a whole. So that would mean as a person living in Saskatoon, for instance, I'd not only have my local MP, who I still maintain that connection with, but also have a group of about maybe nine or 10 MPs from just Saskatchewan itself, elected from the entire province. In fact, I kind of got double local representation, right? And so if I'm mad about whatever I'm mad about, I can call the first MP, who's my local MP, and say, I'm mad about, I got holes on my road and I want Justin Trudeau to fix the holes in my road or whatever. But then I can also call up my Saskatchewan MP that's elected from all of Saskatchewan as well. So you're given actually I think more options for local representation in that type of model. So I'm not a big fan of those PR models where it's like the Israeli model where it's like, okay, you just elect somebody from the, it's a pure PR model, you select somebody from the entire country. I think that does probably take away from local representation. But I think in a country like Canada, we can find all sorts of exciting ways to maintain that sense of local representation for constituents while having a more proportional system that avoids the problems of wasted votes, false majorities and strategic voting. Well, that question raises all sorts of interesting issues. And one of them has to do with the trade-off that's necessarily made whenever you choose between electoral systems. So for example, and recalling that I said I wasn't against any kind of electoral reform at all, you can alter the method of representation at the local level. For example, you can conceive of a system where we have two members per district, which would be slightly larger, let's say double the size that they are now, say 150,000 per person on average, where these two members are elected by some form of proportional representation using one of the formulas that would apply in that case. You can do that. And we can still have majoritarianism in principle at the parliamentary level. The problem though is how sensitive is that system then, that reform system to a small change in the popular vote if you wanna get rid of the government? Because one of the virtues of the current majoritarian system we have is that a small swing in popular vote can devastate the government and they're all gone. This doesn't happen in a PR system where the list gets longer or shorter and the same people stay there forever. So there's a trade-off. You have to make a trade-off between these various properties. And so if we do alter the voting system at the local level to go for, which would be quite radical, this two member by PR at the local level, which still retains a connection between the local member and the voter in the local area, the local district, then we have to worry about the sensitivity of that system to a change in popular vote in the country's whole. And nobody really knows how that would work out. People happen, generally speaking, studied the sensitivity of alternative methods like this to a change in popular vote. So again, we'd be into this leap of faith and we'd have to guess at what would happen. Okay, we're gonna take another of the online questions and I'm gonna jump down to the second from the bottom there. What is the link between declining levels of citizen-trusting government in Canada's current system? Perhaps this is one explanation of declining voter turnout. David? That's a really good question. Who asked that? That's the problem with this anonymous one. You can't actually go find the person we asked and tell them to answer it. You know, yeah, it's tough, right? And I'm not sure that you get, PR comes in and the next day, everybody trusts the government and we live in some sort of utopia where everybody participates, right? I guess what my argument is when it comes to these types of things is that I think PR is one of the things you could do in order to increase voter participation. I do agree you could have, you could vote at malls and you could have voting at movie theaters, right, all that kind of stuff. I think that's a good idea too. But on top of that, PR is something you could do and there was one of the first things at the time I ever sat foot here at Carleton was a panel in the Duke were doing a study of non-voters and they said, I can't remember exactly, I think it was in 2003, I think they said around 6%, it wasn't gonna be like a pressure one or $40, it wasn't gonna be a massive increase but I think it will have somewhat of an increase. And the same thing with this, I think that PR will help it out a little bit. It's not the entire answer to declining trust, but the fact that the matter that if you have a government that does better reflect the actual will of the people, unlike what we have now, I think it will help somewhat with declining trust in government. A really difficult question. We have to keep in mind that participation rates have been falling for a long time and indexes of trust in government are not very old. We don't know much about how people trusted the government in the 19th century. I suspect not very much, but I don't know. And so there's a great deal of uncertainty about what the relationship is between the electoral system and whatever you might refer to as trust in government by itself, a very difficult concept to get a hold of. How could we increase participation? Oh, not by changing the first thing to do is not to change the electoral system. The first thing to do is to deal with it at the level of education, I think. I know that sounds banal, the kind of thing that everybody always says, the kind of thing your parents tell you, but I think it's probably true that we need to change the way we educate people about citizenship. I think it also has something to do with the changing nature of the media. There's some very interesting work by a person called Genskau about what happened in the US when a television was introduced in different places at different times. And he found that participation rates declined along with the introduction of the differential introduction of television because people didn't read newspapers which were full of political news and so on. Now, with the introduction of social media, we're into a different world and that's really hard to figure out. Is that going to threaten democracy as some people have claimed or not or improve it? I don't know. I think it's a big question. Whatever the solution, I doubt it has to do with altering the electoral system. Can you take one more question from the floor in the back? I've been working on that for five years so I can tell you a lot about that but you can certainly create indexes of competitiveness. I'm doing this for Canada and India, both of which have essentially the same kind of electoral system. And these indexes do change over time. There are quite a lot of fluctuations in the degree of competitiveness. But I'll just remind you of what I said in passing in my opening remarks that whenever we had a big change in government, we observed this, we certainly observe a change in the degree of competitiveness of the system. And what would happen under PR is not so clear. It's very difficult to define or measure competitiveness under PR because you have coalitions. So you need to know what would happen if one party wasn't part of the coalition or part of another coalition and so on. And it's difficult to get a universal measure. So we can, however, I think, make a judgment that a majoritarian system is more competitive in general than a form of proportional representation. And that doesn't mean necessarily that you'd want to stay with majoritarianism. I certainly would for that reason. But if you don't want to stay with it, then there is another trade-off that you have to reckon with, which is what do you get for giving up the competitiveness? I guess I'd be interested in talking about index of cooperation, right? And you could look at things like how many parties actually have ministers in governments, right? That just never happens in Canada. But in all sorts of other places, you have a cabinet made up of seven different parties, right? So you could look at how many parties support the bills, how many bills get multi-party support. I think that'd be a good way to look at it. In terms of competition, what I find interesting with the PR systems is you create a lot of competition by having more viable parties. Generally speaking, you're gonna have more viable parties in a PR system running. So you're gonna be able to get more ideas out in the marketplace, ideas particularly during the election, and getting more people elected. So I think both in terms of creating a healthy competition, during the election, the PR systems are a bit better, and also creating more inter-party cooperation after the elections, PR systems are a bit better. Hey, we've come to the time in our program for where it's time for the final arguments. So we'll begin with Professor Weiner. Okay, well, I'm just, I'm going to summarize my argument. The issue is conceptual as much as empirical. You have to either err on the side of principles of representation or err on the side of principles of responsibility. Both choices involve a leap of faith. You have to make a judgment about what system best promotes good government. We're not just interested in the mechanism by which we choose a government. We're interested in, and we should, we have to be interested in, the outcome in terms of the way we live and the way our children live of the choices we make about the way we collectively run the life of the country. PR produces a representative legislature by design, and I should also add that cooperation among parties that explicitly occurs under PR also occurs under majoritarianism, because the parties are themselves coalitions formed before the election. With a left wing and a right wing and an environmental ring and a wing that is pro-oil and so on. So under PR, the coalitions that occur occur after the election. Under majoritarianism, you also get coalitions of groups and these coalitions are formed as political parties before the election. So PR produces a representative legislature by design, but it doesn't produce, it doesn't guarantee good government. Majoritarianism is a sensible way of encouraging good government and a sensible way of protecting ourselves against bad ones, both, because we never know what's gonna happen. There's no compelling reasons, so far as I can see, to destroy our majoritarian system, which has the characteristics I have spoken about and which as a consequence of those characteristics are at least likely to serve us well into the future. Thank you, Professor McGrane. No, I think what we've seen today is that it is a tough issue, right? And it does involve a lot of trade-offs. That's unquestionable. But I guess for me, what does it all really come down to, like at the end of the day, I think it comes down to me at the end of the day to democracy, right? And I strongly believe that you're gonna have an enhanced democracy in Canada moving to some sort of PR system. You're gonna have an enhanced democracy because the will of the people will be better represented. You're not gonna have these 6% of the people voting against the government and then that exact government they vote against is 100% of the power. I think you're gonna get people feeling that their vote matters. They're gonna feel effective, right? That they actually are changing things when they're going out and voting. I think you're gonna have a better representation of all the different groups and ideas in society. You're gonna have a lot more smaller parties, getting more seats, which I think is good. But that marketplace of ideas, you're gonna have a lot more cooperation afterwards, which I think is good because democracy is a dialogue. So I think at the end of the day, what we're talking about here is one way, not the only way, but one way that we could attempt to improve democracy and make democracy better for every Canadian. And I think it's definitely worth a try. Thanks. Thank you, David. So as promised at the outset, we'll take a show of hands, a straw poll, if you will. We'll begin with those who are in favor of a majoritarian system as advocated by Dr. Weiner. Okay. And those in favor of moving to some system of proportional representation. Well, as the Prime Minister said, there's not unanimity on the question. We have supporters on both sides. That leads it to us to just thank our two panelists for a really interesting discussion. Thank you.